Frankfurt Counter Examples, Begging the Question, and Open Theism

Victor Reppert has been blogging on Frankfurt counter examples recently. Many claim that Frankfurt counter examples beg the question against libertarianism. This is because these examples assume a prior tell sign that the Frankfurt controller can use to know for certain how an agent will act (and we'll leave aside Frankfurt cases that do not assume this, such as Mele or Bergmann's, for example). No controller could know for certain how an agent will act because there is no tell sign that always guarantees a specific action to result. If there were, then we'd have determinism. This move is known as the Kane-Widerker response to Frankfurt (aka the indeterminist worlds objection).

But what if we leave out the "tell sign" and claim that the controller "just knows." That is, he has infallible foreknowledge of how Frankfurt-type subjects will act. More specifically, he knows propositions like this: S will do A unless I were to intervene and prevent S from A-ing.

So, we might have a situation like this (inspired by David Widerker in "A problem for the Eternity Solution," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1991):

Consider a scenario where Smith wants to murder Jones at t5. Suppose God, however, has different plans for Jones than for him to die at t5. So God reveals to Jones at t3 that Smith will try to shoot him at t5. Suppose further that Smith has LFW at t4. If so, Smith is free at t4 to refrain from trying to kill Jones at t5. But, since God is infallible, Smith cannot refrain. Is Smith responsible for his attempted assassination?

In this case, there are no "tell signs" and so the worry over question begging is gone. This puts Frankfurt counter examples right back into the game and the libertarian must deal with them. There doesn't seem to be anything about this Frankfurt counter example that begs the question and so we have a case where PAP isn't necessary for moral responsibility.

It turns out that there's a way to bring question begging back into the picture--the way of Open Theism. Here's what David Widerker has to say about the controller being omniscient:

"Examining now the previous examples from this point of view, it is not at all clear to me that they describe situations in which Jones can be said to be acting on his own. Since in them God is assumed to be infallible, the fact D(B) occurs at T is entailed (in the broadly logical sense) by the prior act of God's believing at T' that D(B) occurs at T (T' is metaphysically necessitated or metaphysically determined by the belief of God. Now, if a libertarian rejects as an instance of an agent's acting on his own a scenario in which an agent's decision is nomically necessitated by a temporally prior fact (or a conjunction of such facts), why wouldn't he reject the one in which the decision is metaphysically necessitated by a prior event? What, in my opinion, is crucial to the libertarian's conception of free decision is that such a decision is not necessitated or determined in any way by any antecedent fact. . . . Now, one may object that metaphysical necessitation is not nomic necessitation. But why should this difference be relevant? If a decision is rendered unfree by the fact that its occurrence at T is entailed by the conjunction of some temporally prior facts together with the laws of nature, then why would it not be rendered unfree if its occurring at T is entailed by God's prior belief that it will occur at T? If the critic still thinks that there is a difference between the two cases, it is incumbent upon him to explain why." (Widerker, Responsibility and Frankfurt Examples, Oxford Handbook of Freewill, 328, emphasis original).

Interestingly enough, in Robert Kane's review of Linda Zagzebski's book on foreknowledge problem (Mind, December 1991), he has this to say,

I have reservations about some of her arguments against [the solution to the freedom/foreknowledge problem], but on the whole I think the case against the three traditional solutions to the freedom-foreknowledge dilemma is strong. My critical comments will therefore be directed at two of the alternative solutions to the dilemma which she presents.

The first is an attempt to combine some Boethian insights of Aquinas with those of the Ockhamists-a Thomistic Ockhamism, as she calls it. Its difficulty is that it relies on the controversial doctrine of divine simplicity. Following Aquinas, she says "there is no distinction in God's knowledge between his knowledge of one fact and ... of another, since both are contained in the same simple vision of his own essence" (p. 89). Yet "in his simple ... intuition of his own essence, God knows secondarily everything else" which is "reflected" in the divine essence. To explain this, she introduces the analogy of directly viewing a young man's face and at the same time indirectly seeing the features of the man's mother reflected in his features. All God's knowledge is combined in one vision of the divine essence, and all other things are reflected in that vision as the mother's face in that of her son. It would follow that God's state of knowledge at t, that I will do S at t2 is numerically the same state as God would have been in had I not done S at t2, though that single divine state would have indirectly "reflected" different contingent states depending on what I actually did. Thus, God's foreknowledge would not rule out my doing otherwise. One problem with this inventive solution is that such foreknowledge, if it were consistent with either outcome, would seem to be merely knowledge of future possibilities, not of actualities. If it were more than that-if it were a "reflection" of my actually doing S at t2 rather than not, or vice versa-then it is not clear how I could have done otherwise. And if it did not reflect either outcome until t2, it would not be foreknowledge.

We see that the proponents of the Kane-Widerker objection seem to think that the Frankfurt controller could not "just know" what libertarian free agents will do.

So, yes, there is a way out against the beefed-up Frankfurt controller, a controller on epistemic steroids, and that way lies Open Theism. The up side is that it can be said that Frankfurt counter examples beg the question. The downside is that this way out is not available to classical Christian theists. They must find another way out besides the indeterminist worlds objection.