Identity, responsibility, and indeterminism

Open theism is a limiting case of certain kindred notions, viz. indeterminism, incompatibilism.

Open theism begins with the popular, commonsense assumption that responsibility is contingent on the freedom to do otherwise.

And, on one interpretation, the freedom to do otherwise implies that the future is “open” or indeterminate.

Let’s briefly examine some implications of this claim.

1.In what sense, on a libertarian view, is the future indeterminate?

The future cannot be entirely open. For among other things, in order for a free agent to choose otherwise, he needs to be in a position to effect his choice.

Maybe I’m tempted to rob a bank. I must be free to either acquiesce to that temptation or resist it.

Now, robbing a bank, or refraining from bank-robbery, is a physical act. I must do certain things to rob a bank, and do other things—or, if you prefer, refrain from doing the same things—in order to either rob a bank or not rob a bank.

And this, in turn, presumes at least an element of physical determinism or cause and effect.

If I’m free to rob a bank, then I must be able to will certain actions, and have my resolution carried out via a physical medium. I must be able to act on a material medium in order to enact my wish.

Perhaps one might try to distinguish between the freedom to rob a bank and the freedom to choose to rob a bank.

Maybe I could freely choose to rob a bank, but find myself unable to realize my choice. But if I were systematically unable to implement my choices, then I think a libertarian would deny that I was truly free.

So the freedom of choice must include, at least some of the time, freedom of opportunity.

We can see this even more clearly in the negative. For me to be free to refrain from robbing the bank, I must be free not to go to the bank, not to carry a gun, not to drive a getaway car. I must be free to deist from certain physical actions by taking alternative actions.

2.In that event, while the future is partly indeterminate, due to the contribution of free agents, the future is partly determinate, due to a system of cause and effect.

And, of course, while some physical effects are the result of human agency, most physical effects are not.

This, of itself, creates an odd amalgam of determinism and indeterminism. How can the same future be partly open and partly closed? How does the same future come together and come to be a partial result of physical determinates while other “parts” are to be penciled in at the last moment by the indeterministic choice of the free agent?

Do we have one future or two futures which somehow coalesce? On partial future that is predetermined by the satisfaction of certain necessary and sufficient conditions, but which remains in a state of unreality until it is realized by the creative contribution of free agents?

How can something be partly, potentially realized by physical determinates, yet fail to obtain? How can it be contingent on something unspecified until the last moment?

In that event, we lack physical determinism, for the cause/effect relation is made to be merely necessary rather than sufficient.

3.But things get worse. Suppose the libertarian is a physicalist. In that case, the human agent is a material organism, subject to the laws of physics. Wouldn’t his choice be result of a chemical reaction (brain chemistry) in conjunction with an external stimulus?

If physical determinism is even partly true, and the agent is, himself, a physical unit, however complex, then in what sense is he free to do otherwise?

4. What is the future? Does he choose his future?

On libertarian assumptions, the future is, in part, the sum total of the collective choices of all the free agents who contribute to the realization of the future by their individual decisions and actions.

So is there one open future, or many? Does an individual agent control his own future? Or is there a common future, which is the net effect of all agents, past and present?

The agent is, himself, a product of past agents, such as his parents. He wouldn’t have a future without them.

And his environment is partly the result of physical determinism, and partly the result of other free agents whose past choices add to or subtract from the present set of choices.

His opportunities are not opportunities which, for the most part, he has created for himself. Rather, he can choose from the available options resulting from the choices made by others before him and around him. Predecessors and contemporaries.

What is his future? Suppose he lives to be 90. At birth, his future is the next 90 years.

But does he choose that future? Or is it, to a great extent, chosen for for? Year after year, other agents make other decisions which impinge on his decisions, shaping his environment.

So how do all these individually open futures fuse into one open future? Which comes first? How do they coexist? How does a libertarian escape the specter of circular causation?

5. Apropos (4), obsession with the freedom to do otherwise can make us overlook another tradition condition of responsibility, which is personal identity.

To be guilty of a past crime, I must be the agent who committed that crime. I must be the same agent, between then and now.

But what does it mean to be the same individual if the future is partly and perennially open, from one moment to the next?

For an agent is, in part, the product of other agents—since the future is whatever all of us make it to be. The future is the reality of what is to be. The agent is an artifact of that reality. As much a creature of the future as he is a co-creator thereof.

So the human agent is partly the product of physical determinism, and partly the product of a corporate, indeterministic process. In that respect, in what sense is the agent his own person, if he is partly the product of a corporate process? And in what further sense is he the same person if he is, in part, the product of an indeterministic process?

A libertarian philosophy artificially isolates the individual agent: the same agent has the freedom to do otherwise. The actor remains the same, but the actions might have been otherwise.

But in a consistently libertarian scheme, the future, inclusive of the agent, is the outcome, at any given moment, of all the past and present choices of all the other agents.

So it’s not simply a case in which the same agent is the subject of the freedom to do otherwise. He is also the object of the freedom to do otherwise. He can always be other than what he was, a moment ago.

For if open theism is true, then reality takes on a highly participatory aspect, rather like idealism or quantum mechanics (on one interpretation). We make reality, and we are made by reality.

If the future is truly open, then there can be no relation between past and future. The future could be A or B or C or D…

All those possibility are equally viable until one is actualized. Prior to that moment, the future could have forked off in any number of opposing directions.

Given this radical discontinuity between past and future, there can be no basis for personal identity, in which case there can be no basis for personal responsibility.

Libertarian morality is only plausible by arbitrarily freezing some variables in place while leaving other variables up-in-the-air.

But if taken to its logical extreme, everything is a free variable in a libertarian scheme. No persistence through time.

Or, if there is, then it takes the form of physical determinism, which tugs in the opposite direction.

Hence, a libertarian philosophy is an unstable compromise between an impersonal determinism and the dissolution of personal identity. And that, in turn, undercuts a leading rationale for open theism.