Why compatibilism and materialism are incompatible

 As I see it, materialism has three components. One is the causal close of the physical. The second is the mechanism of the physical, that there are no mental states in the supervenience base. Causation occurs without purpose at the basic level. The thrd is the supervenience of all other states on the physical. The second is the tripper for materialist who wants to be a compatibilist. An action caused by a desire is not mechanistically caused. The brain state that is the desire might cause the brain state that begins the action, but not because of the content of the desire. Think of this. Suppose an opera singer were to tell someone 'Look at that glass window. I will tell it to shatter, and it will listen to me and shatter. She sings 'Shatter now" and it shatters. But the shattering has nothing to do with the content of the words she sings. Hence compatibilist free will, which requires causation by desire, is impossible on materialism.

In what sense are we responsible for our actions?

An interesting aspect of the free will controversy has to do with the kind of moral responsibility that is at stake. Is it the kind of moral responsibility that can justify retribution, or maybe even eternal retribution? Or is it something else, such as knowing who to motivate through reward or punishment. I first encountered the free will problem in the context of debates of Calvinism. Calvinists and their opponents agree concerning the sense in which we are responsible for our actions--if someone goes to hell because of sin, they deserve to go to hell because of sin. So, in that context, you have to ask whether being predestined by God to, say, commit murder renders you still responsible, sub specie aeternitatis, for committing that murder. And it seemed to me that if determinism were true, and circumstances, (such as a divine eternal decree) rendered it impossible for me to do otherwise from commit a murder, I am not responsible for that murder, but that whoever issued that eternal decree, as the ultimate source of my action, would be.

Consider the fact that "the devil made me do it" is considered an almost comic example of a lame excuse. The reason we are usually given for this is the idea that the devil tempts us, but we have the free will to resist the devil, in which case the devil will flee. This seems to assume that we have libertarian free will. No one made you do anything.

Later, when I wrote my master's thesis on free will, I realized that many compatibilists were secularists, and who were not ascribing responsibility to agents in the same sense that Christians were. They were asking questions, perhaps, of the utility of punishment in ascribing moral responsibility. And here, I thought, their "compatibilist" position was at least consistent. They weren't saying that people were responsible for their actions in some "last judgment" sense, they were saying that we need to know who to motivate and how when we punish, and that the question of ultimate moral responsibility need not be asked.

However, weakening the sense of moral responsibility can have some potentially dangerous consequences that Lewis notes in his famous essay on the humanitarian theory of punishment. What happens if we say that what someone deserves doesn't matter, and what we must do is simply do what will protect society, deter crime, or rehabilitate the criminal. Will this give us the license to reform criminals any way we see fit, regardless of their freedom and dignity? Do we have the right to brainwash people into not committing crimes? Do we have the right to "fix" people we might think will commit crimes for the benefit of society? Does the abandonment of free will lead to fundamental changes in who we think we are?

This is related to the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment."

Compatibilism, the devil, and Jeffrey Dahmer

 

Free will, along with the existence of God and perhaps the mind-body problem, is one of the philosophical issues that is of great interest to a lot of people. One idea that offends many of us would be the idea that someone should be treated differently, or even punished, because of the color of their skin. Martin Luther King’s dream was that his children would one day be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Judging someone by the content of their character is not arbitrary in the way that judging someone by the color of their skin is. But why?

            Well, because arguably, our character is, to a large extent, a product of the choices we make. We do not choose our race, but we do choose our actions. Thus, we treat bank robbers differently than we treat non-bank robbers, and that’s not discrimination, because people chose to rob a bank, but did not choose to be white or black.

            Or did we? A well-known African-American comic from my youth, Flip Wilson, used to have a character who frequently used a punch line, “The devil made me do it.” A country song entitled “Speak of the Devil” includes the following lyrics:

Speak of the devil
He took me out again last night
He got me drunk and he got me in a fight

He was chasing women
I was just there for the ride
Speak of the devil
He took me out again last night

            I won’t here attempt to adjudicate the question of whether or not there is a devil. But I would ask why this might be perceived by its intended audience as a lame excuse, even if people in the audience believe that the devil is real. Those who believe in the devil normally think that while the devil can tempt you to do something, he ordinarily does not make you do it. You could, and should, have chosen to resist. The devil may highlight in your mind the attractiveness of wrongdoing, but he cannot by his temptations guarantee that you will do the wrong thing.

            But we can imagine the devil doing a great deal more than just tempt. Suppose the devil were to literally cause your body to engage in numerous acts that you believe to be evil, while your mind watched helplessly in horror, unable to prevent your body from committing a series of horrible crimes. If that were true, then surely you would not be responsible for those crimes, it would really be the devil.

            But now suppose that what the devil does is something different. He finds an eight year old boy, Little Jeff, and alters his brain chemistry in such a way that it guarantees that  he will grow up to be notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey forms the desire to commit the horrible murders he committed, and those desires cause him to commit those murders. The devil made him do it, in that the devil’s actions guaranteed that he form the desires and commit the murders. But there was not Real Jeffery inside thinking that he was being driven against his will to commit crimes. So if this is true, who is responsible for the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer? The devil, Jeffrey, or both?

Soft Determinism: The key difference

The key difference between soft determinism and the other views is the definition of freedom. For them, freedom means being able to carry out your will. But, you will is just as strictly determined on soft determinism as it is on hard determinism. The question is, if your will is determined by past causes, but you can carry out your will, do you have an excuse if you act wrongly. You did what you wanted to do, but, given the past, you could not have done otherwise from what you did.

 

Paul Ree's Classic Statement of Hard Determinism

Entitled "Determinism and the Illusion of Moral Responsibility."

A redated post.

Some Notes on Ronald Nash's Discussion of Free Will in Life's Ultimate Questions

This is in response to an inquiry from a student. 

This is where I have a lot of problems with Nash's presentation. I actually think that Nash's use of the term uninfluenced will makes some assumptions that I would be inclined to deny. Nash is a Calvinist, and I'm not a Calvinist, so we don't see eye to eye on free will.

Let's go back to that Adam and Eve story for a minute, to help illustrate the issue. Whether we take this story literally or not does not affect its value to illustrate a point. Suppose God were to place Adam and Eve in the Garden, but he didn't allow the serpent to get anywhere near the place. In fact, he created Adam in such a way that he always wanted to obey God. Given the state of Adam's desires, it really wouldn't matter whether that nasty serpent showed up or not. Adam and Eve wouldn't want to do anything that was disobedient toward God, and would simply tell that snake to go to hell if he suggested that to them that they disobey and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The way Adam and Eve are put together, on this scenario, they cannot so much as desire to violate the law that God has laid down. Hence, they decline the invitation to sin, and get to remain in the garden forever. All the ills of human history, the wars, the plagues, the massacres, and all the sins, from the Holocaust down to me losing my temper yesterday, don't take place. Nobody goes to hell.  God makes sure that Adam and Eve always want to do what is right, and he makes sure that he always has the opportunity to do what is right. In fact, God could not only have done this for Adam and Eve, he could have done this for Lucifer as well, in which case Lucifer would never have fallen.

If you talk to atheists, particularly those who have studied the free will problem, they will often tell you that that is precisely what God should have done. God could have created the world in such a way that everyone does what is right, and if God were a loving God, he would have done exactly that. Not only would we have avoided sinning, it turns out that one of the major philosophical definitions of what it is to have a free will is satisfied. "The liberty of spontaneity (the kind of free will a compatibilist thinks we have)...explains human freedom as the ability to do what the person wants to do." (Nash, p.328). Many people are taught to think that the reason why God permitted Adam and Eve to fall is because he had to give them free will in order to make it possible for them to be truly obedient, but in order to open that possibility, he also had to open the possibility that Adam and Eve disobey. But if God were to give Adam and Eve compatibilist free will, he could have allowed them to be free while at the same time guaranteeing that they would never sin. He didn't have to risk the fall of Adam and Eve, or the fall of Lucifer. So, if all we have is compatibilist free will, then we are going to need some other explanation for why God permitted Adam to sin. And theological Calvinists think that there is some other explanation. There are two explanations that I have heard. One is that God receives more glory if he predestines some people to disobey him, so that he can exercise his righteous wrath against unrepentant sin, as well as providing the saved a sense of what they were saved from. What is more, we can't be expected to understand why God does what he does, so even if those explanations don't wash (and they certainly don't for me), there is perhaps some unknown reason why God permitted (in fact, caused), the Fall of Man.

But, some people would ask whether this is real free will. If an outside agent, in the last analysis, is pulling the strings, can we be really said to have a free will? Some people have argued that we can't have real free will unless, given the past, we could have done otherwise from what we did. This is the incompatibilist, or libertarian, conception of free will. Nash refers to this as the uninfluenced will, but it is actually the libertarian conception of free will. It does not seem uninfluenced to me, on the contrary; it seems perfectly possible to be influenced by something that does not ultimately determine the will. Thus, I can be influenced by someone who wants me to marry Joan, but I might marry Susan instead, ultimately making a choice that could have gone the other way. I don't think it fair to describe an undetermined will as an uninfluenced will.  Nash makes the argument that we always act on our strongest desire, but as the philosopher William Hasker has pointed out, "strongest" turns out to just mean "the desire we acted upon," in which case "we always act on our strongest desire" just turns out to mean "We always act on the desire we act on," which is hardly news to anyone. Many people in science, based on quantum mechanics, believe that some events occur even though sufficient causes for them have not taken place (though, or course, there have to be necessary conditions), yet they nevertheless occur.

This is a massive debate in philosophy, and I am just scratching the surface of it here.

Determinism and the case of Jamie Bulger

HT: Sarah Kramer.

Is there a universal, common-sense, belief in free will?

What the argument doesn't mention, of course, is whether this belief in free will can be construed in compatibilist terms. I don't think it captures the underlying intuition, myself.

Just so you know, I am not claiming that this disproves Calvinism.

Frankfurt, the Devil, and Tiger Woods

First, we have to come up with an account of responsiblity that accounts for all the times when we absolve people of responsiblity on the grounds that they couldn't help it. On the face of things, every time we tell a teacher we have good reason not to be penalized for turning a paper in late, we are appealing to the principle of alternate possibilities. So before I start worrying about Frankfurt cases, I want to know what the opponent of PAP's story is on normal, everyday cases. Why does it suffice to say that I couldn't attend class because I was in the hospital and couldn't get out in time to attend? Why don't we say "That's still your fault. Just because you couldn't have attended class because you were in the hospital doesn't mean that you are free of responsiblity for showing up for class?" When people make excuses for failure to perform, we may in fact think that they aren't telling is the truth, or, at least, the whole story. But if Flip Wilson's Geraldine is right that the devil made her buy the dress, then we'd have to say she's not responsible. Otherwise, she wouldn't be even bothering to use that as an excuse. I'd like to tell the compatiblist "You explain our ordinary excuse-making and excuse evaluating practices, before I have to explain what is supposed to be happening in Frankfurt cases." I'm not saying this can't be done; I am saying we need to deal with normal cases before we deal with Frankfurt cases.




Second, I take it that one critical element of a responsible choice is deliberation. It at least has to be possible for the agent to deliberate. Indeed there is a class of actions which are rightly criticized because the agent didn't deliberate before acting, so there is a kind of sub-choice as to whether or not to deliberate. The Murder 1/ Murder 2 distinction suggests that we don't accord the highest level of moral responsibility in the absence of deliberation.



Which brings us to our Frankfurt cases. Let's say the Devil is our controller. Tiger, a married man, is being tempted to commit adultery with a cocktail waitress named Jaimee. As it happens, the Devil intends to make Tiger commit adultery unless he chooses freely to do so. He deliberates on the possibility of committing adultery, and then what? The moment he starts to take the possibility of not committing adultery seriously in the course of his deliberations, the Devil steps in and makes him do it? But the deliberation and serious consideration of the alternative is what might have been required to make him responsible in the first place, or at least fully responsible. So in order stay in keeping with the concept of responsibility embedded in the murder 1-2 distinction, the Devil can't step in until his adulterous action is fully premeditated. So that means the Devil can only step in and make him do it once he begins the process of choosing to refrain from the adultery. But if that has happened, he has already performed an alternative act of will. PAP holds, and the counterexample folds.



Which means, that if Tiger ever figures out about what the Devil was doing, he can't say "The Devil made me do it" unless he starts to refuse, and is then forced to commit adultery even though he was beginning to choose not to commit adultery. If he commits adultery without Satanic assistance, he is responsible because he could have made an alternative choice. The fact that the Devil would have forced the opposite action doesn't meant the choice wasn't possible. If the Devil is an all-determining deity, then we can all say "The Devil Made Me Do It." Ditto for the Calvinistic God.

The Blatchford Controversy Archive

This is the archive of the Chesterton-Blatchford controversy. It doesn't look to me as if he ran into compatibilism in that controversy.

Some notes from Hasker of Frankfurt counterexamples

 Another redated post.

Bill Hasker sent me some clarifying comments on Frankfurt counterexamples.

WH: First, I think agent-causation is the key issue in the Frankfurt cases; what one is ultimately responsible for is agent-causing one’s own action (or attempted action, etc. . . .), or failing to do so. The issue of responsibility for consequences of one’s action is certainly complex, as the discussion shows, and I haven’t worked out a detailed position on it. The second point is, I may have “softened” my view insofar as I no longer think it’s possible to give a simple taxonomy of Frankfurt cases and dispose of them once for all. (John Martin Fischer has persuaded me that my criticism of him concerning “flicker of freedom” defenses is inaccurate and unfair.) “Of the making of Frankfurt cases there is no end, and many refutations make for weariness of the flesh!” Seriously, if one wants to engage these cases, they have to be taken one at a time. But I haven’t yet seen one that can’t be answered. Either the intuition that the agent is still responsible is shaky, or there is something in the example concerning which there was an alternative possibility. And then Fischer, et al., will say that the alternative isn’t sufficiently “robust” to ground responsibility – and that is probably where the argument reaches an impasse. At least, that’s the way I tend to see it at present.

What my master's thesis was about

Back in 1984, I wrote a master's thesis under Dr. Michael White at Arizona State University entitled "Moral Theories and Free Will."

I defended the claim that on the assumption that what we are utilitarians looking for ways to modify behavior, compatibilism makes some sense. Even if determinism is true, we might want to cause people to act in certain ways, and we might want to figure out who brought about an action, so that we can change a pattern of behavior. Thus, punishing criminals for various utilitarian reasons makes sense even if determinism is true.


However, if we are retributive deontologists, then compatibilism makes no sense. If we are not trying to modify behavior, but are asking whether someone is really to blame for what they did, then compatibilism doesn't make sense. The ultimate causes of our actions are beyond our control, and we are not responsible for those causes.

If you read many compatibilists, such as Moritz Schlick, and J. J. C. Smart (these were two that I mentioned in my thesis), you find that they have a concept of responsibility that is quite different from the concept of responsibility that is involved when we say that a person deserves to be punished in hell (or even in prison) for what he or she has done.

Reason's debt to Freedom? Why I'm skeptical

Aristophanes wrote: I have a question for Professor Reppert. Does anyone know where to direct it? It pertains to the argument Lewis gives against Naturalism in Miracles. Lewis's argument seems to me to be that determinism gives us a defeater for reason. Can anyone point out where to direct questions for Professor Reppert's attention?



Well, it depends on the kind of determinism. If it is determinism from a non-rational source, then this is a problem. On the other hand I have no choice about whether or not to believe that 2 + 2 = 4 or not. If I am rightly situated with respect to that truth, then I don't choose whether or not to accept it or not.




Although there have been papers like Warner Wick's "Truth's Debt to Freedom," that is not the way that I would be especially inclined to pursue.

Mind 1964 LXXIII(292):527-537 (1964).

Freedom, Determinism, and Naturalism

A redated post.

C. S. Lewis wrote:

Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, action “on its own” is a privilege reserved for “the whole show” which he calls Nature.

The reason Lewis seems to be offering for saying that the Naturalist must deny free will doesn’t seem to mainly be that if Naturalism were true, determinism would be true, but he seems rather to be saying that free will involves a kind of independent agency on the part of persons that would be proscribed given naturalism.

In a footnote, John Beversluis replies as follows:

Some contemporary naturalists, for example, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Jaegwon Kim, and Keith Parsons, reject determinism not only on the level of microparticles but generally and argue that naturalism is compatible with believing that human beings have free will.

I am not sure about these philosophers, and what kind of free will these people believe in. Students of the free will question know that there are two conceptions of free will: a conception compatible with determinism, and a concept that is incompatible with determinism. Daniel Dennett wrote an entire book, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, which is well known as a classic defense of the compatibilism.

Eventually, I would like to consider the question of whether a thoroughgoing naturalism is compatible with the incompatibilist or libertarian conception of free will. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want to concede, for the sake of argument, that compatibilism is true, and I will try to show that it is far from clear that a thoroughgoing naturalism is really compatible with free will.

Compatibilist theories of free will trade on the idea that even if determinism is true, the proximate cause of an action can be one’s desire to perform the action. A compatibilist or soft determinist will say emphasize the fact that if you did something, if it is free in the compatibilist sense, you did what you wanted to do. If, say, you robbed the local Bank of America branch, it is not likely to be true that you wanted to be a law-abiding citizen, but the fickle finger of fate grabbed you by the scruff of the neck and made you commit a crime. No, you robbed the bank because, in the words of Willie Sutton, “That’s where the money is."

But notice what is implied in these kinds of theories. First, in order for this theory to be true, desires have to exist. There are naturalistic theories of mind, eliminativist theories, according to which desires are the posits of “folk psychology” and do not in fact exist. Now eliminativists do maintain that a matured neuroscience will replace the terms of folk psychology with successors, but will can the compatibilist theory be fitted in with a successor? Have eliminativists even addressed this issue?

But suppose we accept the existence of desires. In order for the compatibilist theories to work, the desires have to be causally efficacious. It must be the case that my desire for X can cause my action in pursuit of X. But, of course, naturalistic theories of mind, given their commitment to the causal closure of the physical, inevitably face the specter of epiphenomenalism. That is, even if it is thought that beliefs and desires exist on the hypothesis of naturalism, (which, as I have indicated in a previous post, typically involves a commitment to a causally closed mental-free realm and the bottom of everything), how can it be that my desire can cause anything? In other words, in order for a naturalist to even accept a compatibilist theory of free will, they must solve the problem of mental causation. William Hasker and I have argued that naturalists cannot solve the problem of mental causation, and if I have been right in my discussions here, they cannot consistently even believe in compatibilist free will, much less incompatibilist or libertarian free will.

Coercion

What is coercion? In simple cases of coercion, one wants to do x, but through threat of force (a gun to the head), or maybe through the presence of a computer hooked up to one's brain, one does y instead.

But is there another type of coercion, in which another person uses motives that may be in place in order to bring it about that that person does what is contrary to their own best interests?

I saw a show (one of the 60 Minutes clones, can't remember which) in which an FBI agent or Lebanese was running a sting operation where he posed as an Al-Queda operative, got some teenagers to sign up for terrorist activity in exchange for money, and then had them arrested. The young kids agreed that they had been seduced by their own greed. But were they still coerced in some significant sense, because they were persuaded to act against their own best interests? Were they truly free even in the compatibilist sense?

C. S. Lewis on why God created us with libertarian free will

He doesn't use the phrase, of course.

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.A world of automata-of creatures that worked like machines-would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is that happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other…And for that they must be free.”
(Mere Christianity, 47-48)

Dennett on Compatibilist Free Will

I wonder if he would agree with Dawkins' claim that blaming people for their actions is as silly as beating up Basil's car.

Let's stop beating Basil's car: Richard Dawkins on moral responsibility

A redated post.

Ilion linked to this little piece of Dawkiana, in which Our Hero maintains that holding a person morally responsible for their actions is absurd as Basil Fawlty beating his car for not starting. No namby-pamby soft determinism for Dawkins! I guess Dennett's Elbow Room didn't convince him. (Oh well, it didn't convince me either). Of course, that means that the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials (duck-scales from which are, I'm told, preserved in the Salem City Museum), the Great Wars of Religion, and the 9/11 attacks are really no one's fault. It's no one's fault if you don't believe in evolution, or if you invade Iraq without sufficient reason. In fact, it isn't your fault if you have Dawkins burned at the stake. This is sounding better all the time.

Dawkins on agency: Fawlty philosophy

Can Richard Dawkins truly claim credit for his brilliant book, The God Delusion? If he is right, it's a silly as Basil Fawlty blaming his car for not starting.

A redated post.

Should incompatibilists be libertarians

This is to be found in Hasker's book Metaphysics.

1. If determinism is true, then human beings are not responsible for their actions.
2. But it is clear that human beings are responsible for their actions.
3. Therefore determinism is false.

1. If determinism is true, then human beings are not responsible for their actions.
2. But is is clear that we ought to believe that human beings are responsible for their actions.
3. Therefore, we ought to believe that determinism is false.

Let us assume that a person is persuaded that incompatibilism is true. If that is so, then do we accept, in the absence of overwhelming evidence that determinism is true, that it is false.

Love Potion #9: A Problem For Compatibilists?

I am redating this post because it is getting still getting some active discussion, and has been visited by Dave Baggett, a co-editor of Harry Potter and Philosophy and C. S. Lewis as a Philosopher.

How would a compatibilist analyze the case of an effective love potion, which the Hasker passage appeals to in his reference to Harry Potter? In the case of Voldemort's mother Merope, she cast a spell on Tom Riddle, Sr., causing him to love her, only to become frustrated by the fact that the love produced by the potion was compelled. So she stopped using the spell, and he dumped her.

What accounts for the frustration and disappointment with a love compelled by the one being loved?