Materialism and determinism

If we are simply material beings, aren't our actions determined by the laws of  physics? Particles in the brain are governed by the laws of physics, and if this is so, doesn't that mean that the brain is determined by the laws of physics? 

An exposition of Anscombe's Causality and Determination

A famous Anscombe essay.

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.

Secularism, desert, and moral responsibility

I think there is a profound problem in the discussion of freedom and moral responsibility because I think the idea of desert fits in well with a religious world view like Christianity, and is in fairly serious danger from a secular perspective, which is something worth noticing when you read Lewis's essay on the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.

But even if Desert drops off the table, if you have a serial killer running around killing people, you want him to stop doing it, you want to deter others from doing the same, and if perchance it is possible to make him a productive member of society, you want to see that happen, too. You also don't want angry people in the community. You have a batch of utilitarian considerations that will probably result in our doing, in many cases, the same things to the person that would have been done if you thought the person was really morally responsible. It's not like we would say "Sorry to see you're killing people, but it isn't your fault, so I guess we've got to leave you alone."

Chesterton wrote: The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment.

But, so is saying "Go and sin no more." It may modify the "sinner's" behavior. But as a revelation of some truth about the sinner, I think Chesterton is right. Real sin, real blameworthiness, requires being something more than a biological machine.

In a consistent secular world-view, following that view down the path of materialism/naturalism, I think the whole idea of desert can't be sustained. But there can and will be a lot of conduct on our part that looks and sounds like we're holding people morally responsible. But on close examination, the heart of moral responsibility, an assessment of desert, drops out of the picture.

The link is to some quotes on Chesterton and materialism. 

Do determinists cheat more?

At least according to this study. HT: Tom Gilson.

I suppose a really good study would break it down between soft determinists and hard determinists. Maybe it's just the hard determinists that are skewing the curve.

Why I considered determinism unnatural

What did I have in mind when I said that determinism is an unnatural belief? . Looking at what I was trying to say when I said it, it looks to me as if I wasn't thinking about naive student attitudes toward free will, but simply the fact that in the course of decision-making there are different possibilities that are open to us, one of which we select. Further, it does seem that we consider both choices that we make to be genuine possibilities. But if determinism is true, then the alternative possibility wasn't a real possibility after all. What we did was determined. It's hard to imagine making a difficult decision and asking "Hmmm. What was I predestined to do in this situation?"

I was thinking about the idea we seem to presume that there are possible futures depending on how we act, that become more or less likely depending on what we do. If God has predestined everything, and is determined to do so based on his own nature, then it looks as if there are no possible worlds except alpha.

There does seem to be an at least an illusion of free will when we deliberate and decide. It could be just that, an illusion.

Is Determinism an Unnatural Belief?

Steve Hays has argued against my claim that determinism is an unnatural belief by appealing to a poll of professional philosophers. I replied as follows:

You go to professional philosophers to determine whether determinism is a natural belief? People who have had naturalistic determinism pounded into their brains from day one in grad school? You're kidding, aren't you.


Most of these people think there is no libertarian free will, because they think the mind is the brain, and since physical particles can't have libertarian free will, neither can we.

J. P. Moreland has an essay in Philosophy and Theology (1997) entitled "Naturalism and Libertarian Agency" in which he argues, quite successfully in my view, that libertarian agency simply doesn't fit at all well with a naturalistic world view.

The kind of compatibilism most philosophers they espouse is the kind espoused by people like Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room (MIT, 1984). That is, it's compatible with holding people responsible for their actions in a way that is aimed at modifying their behavior. I find out who's responsible for the action so that I can decide whose behavior I need to correct., or reinforce as the case might be. The kind of a free will that might justify eternal punishment is, on Dennett's view, not a variety of free will worth wanting.

The idea that we are, in some absolute sense, guilty before God for the things we have done, and liable to everlasting punishment for such misdeeds even though our actions are determined, ultimately, by divine choice, is a thesis that people like Dennett would find simply horrifying and barbaric.

You have to reconcile determinism with a very strong form of moral responsibility that most secular compatibilists would reject. You might want to try polling those philosophers on whether they accept the idea of retribution, period, much less eternal retribution.

As for Christian philosophers, well, I've seen discussions of foreknowledge and free will in which the Calvinistic alternative was not even considered. It was pretty much the Molinists and some other libertarians against the open theists.

The hoi polloi, as Vytautas would call them (including introductory philosophy students), invariably accept libertarian free will. They have to be exposed either to naturalism or to Calvinism before they will even consider the idea that our actions are all determined.

I think belief in free will comes naturally to us, while soft determinism seems really bizarre when most people first hear about it. I remember explaining it to a chess friend of mine who said "Didn't you just contradict yourself?" Of course, compatibilism might be true for all that. But most compatibilists are compatibilists because they don't want to bail out of moral responsibility, but can't accept libertarianism in virtue of their overall philosophical commitment to naturalism.

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.

Religious and non-religious determinism

The best way to look at determinism is to see it as the view that everything is inevitable. This can be looked at from a religious perspective, and a non-religious perspective. From a religious perspective, this is the doctrine of predestination. Before the foundation of the world, God decrees everything that is going to happen, from the Fall of Lucifer, to the Fall of Adam, to the death of Christ, to the fall of the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Columbine murders, the 9/11 attacks, and the election of first Bush and then Obama. All of this was predestined by God.

If this were true, would you say that everything was God's fault, or could wrong actions also be blamed on the humans who performed them? If compatibilism is true, then it can be our fault, even if determinism is true. If incompatibilism is true, then we would have to have something called contra-causal freedom (we could have done otherwise from what we did under the exact circumstances) in order to be truly responsible for our actions.

If we take non-religious determinism, then there's no God to cause everything, but we are simply collocations of atoms doing what the laws governing those atoms guarantee we will do. What this would mean would be that if we knew the position of all the particles in the universe on January 1, AD 1500 at midnight, you could know that Hitler would massacre the Jews, that Obama and Biden would run against McCain and Palin and win in 2008, and that the Cardinals would get to the Super Bowl and lost narrowly to the Steelers. Again, we can ask if anything would really be anyone's fault if that were true, since we would be pawns, not of God, but of nature.

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.

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?

Reply to Clayton on Frankfurt

Clayton wrote:

I take it that the idea is something like this. There are cases where an agent A will X either in virtue of an intention or in virtue of a backup plan that will force A to X. In some of these very cases where the agent A's in virtue of the intention, we judge that A is responsible _even though had the intention not led to the X-ing something else would have_. The intuition that these subjects are responsible under these conditions (not the conditions where the agent does not intend to X but is forced to X by an outside agent) is supposed to be trouble for PAP.

The intuition that these subjects are responsible under these conditions (not the conditions where the agent does not intend to X but is forced to X by an outside agent) is supposed to be trouble for PAP.

It seems to me that what I am getting at is that in the case of determinism, alternative possibilities are ruled out be the presence of sufficient antecedent causes. So it could be argued that PAP is an attempt to get at what incompatibilist see as a problem with attributing moral responsibility in cases of causal determination. Further, the very thing that tempts us to say that the person is responsible is that causal determination is missing in these cases. God doesn't in fact cause you to show up for lunch, you emphasize that when I try to deny responsibility in those cases. At the end of the day, I may have to doctor PAP to deal with the cases and to capture the essence of the incompatibilist intuition.

Suppose my version of PAP is:

1) I am not responsible for my actions if causal antecedents prevent me from doing otherwise.

That principle is immune to Frankfurtian attack.

Kevin Timpe's critique of Frankfurt libertarianism

Timpe is a critic of use of Frankfurt counterexamples both by libertarians and by compatibilists. Of special interest is the fact that he points out, that in the Frankfurt cases there has to be a forking path. One path in which the controller does nothing (the actual case) and one in which the controller stops a process from going further. John Martin Fischer says that this is just a "flicker" of freedom and doesn't play a sufficient role in grounding moral responsibility. Why?

Do Frankfurt Counterexamples Presuppose Materialism?

According to this paper, they do.

Attacking Frankfurt Counterexamples with a Bludgeon

On Frankfurt counterexamples, I think I'd like to present Clayton's counterexample to one of the anti-compatibilist arguments I presented. In this case, I would like to ask "Why shouldn't I just apply PAP and just render a verdict of "not responsible" in all Frankfurt cases? Frankfurt cases go like this:

1) In case A, there were no alternate possibilities.
2) In case a, S was morally responsible.
3) Therefore, PAP is false.

While you could just as easily argue.

1) In case A there were no alternative possibilities.
2) PAP is true.
3) Therefore, S is not morally responsible.

Does freedom evolve?

In spite of admiration for Dan Dennett's analysis of freedom in his book Freedom Evolves, Michael Shermer draws the correct bottom line from a consistent philosophical naturalism. We think we're free because we are ignorant of what causally determines our actions. HT: Ed Babinski.

On Frankfurt counterexamples

I must say I don't understand the fuss about Frankfurt's counterexamples, or why people are able to keep this argument alive. It really looks to me like a patient etherized on a table with feeding tubes, breathing equipment, artificial heart stimulators, etc. Look, don't these examples all founder on a failure to distinguish between choosing freely and carrying out the choice effectively. In the cases given, isn't it the case that you could have chosen otherwise. You have what is ex hypothesi a libertarian free choice. Of course, if you had chosen otherwise, unbeknownst to you, you would have been prevented from carrying out the choice. But the choice was free.

24 years ago I completed my master's thesis at Arizona State University. There, I argued that there conceptions of moral responsibility that were essentially utilitarian in nature, which indicated where one could supply a motive of deterrence or protection of society, could indeed be compatible with determinism. In other words, so long as we are asking "who is it practical to blame" as opposed to "who really deserves to be blamed," compatibilism seems to have some plausibility. When we get to the idea of a purely retributive punishment, an absolute just deserts for someone, compatibilism breaks down. It is in the last analysis unfair to punish (or reward) someone for the inevitable results of past causes.

Defining causes and determinism: Does God cause sin?

Here is Hasker's definition of determinism:

Determinism: For every event which happens, there are previous events and circumstances which are its sufficient conditions or causes, so that, given those previous events and circumstances, it is impossible that the event should not occur.

Is there something wrong with this definition? After all, Bill Hasker is one of those nasty open theists, who clearly can't be trusted. But the upshot of this definition would be that the decrees of God cause people to do what they do. You cannot have a deterministic world in which God decrees X and not-X occurs. Saying "God's decree doesn't cause people to sin" is just plain ludicrous.

Determinism has its own website!

A Series on Freedom and Determinsm

This is a redated post.

My class in ethics will be covering the free will problem next week, so I am doing a series of posts on it. This is just to introduce a couple of the central concepts:

I’m somewhat frustrated with the textbook’s (Thiroux's) treatment of the freedom and determinism question, so I am going to present some of my own ideas on the subject. Well, for the most part I’m going to be following the chapter of William Hasker’s book Metaphysics: Constructing a World-View (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1983) ch. 2.

First of all, what kind of freedom is involved in the freedom and determinism problem? The answer has to be the kind of freedom that is necessary for moral responsibility. The idea of moral responsibility implies that we can deserve something bad for doing something bad, and deserve something good for doing something good. For example, it is a commonplace idea, which seems to make sense, that one should not be blamed for the color of one’s skin, and that it is unjust to give advantages to one person over another simply on the basis of race. What underlies this conviction? Is it not the fact that persons do not choose their race; that one happens to be black, or white, or red, or yellow, and that it’s impossible that one’s race could be either merited or demerited.

What at least appears to threaten this conviction is the thesis of determinism. I think that because the concept of causation is not as clear as it might be, the textbook's definition of determinism as the thesis of universal causation is inadequate. For example, we often say that smoking causes cancer, but it does not necessitate cancer. Smokers do sometimes live cancer-free lives. Hasker provides some more clarification when he defines determinism as follows:

Determinism: For every event which happens, there are previous events and circumstances which are its sufficient conditions or causes, so that, given those previous events and circumstances, it is impossible that the event should not occur.

On the other hand, for Hasker, libertarianism is the thesis that:

Libertarianism: some human actions are chosen and performed by the agent without there being any sufficient condition or cause of the action prior to the action itself. (Thanks, Dennis for the correction).

Now the notion of a cause being sufficient is very important here. It is a necessary condition for me to buy your car that you offer it for sale. But your offering it for sale is not sufficient cause of my buying the car; I may choose not to buy it.