Freedom from Necessity

The Metaphysical Basis of Responsibility

Bernard Berofsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138702196
• eBook ISBN: 9781351785327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book, first published in 1987, is about the classic free will problem, construed in terms of the implications of moral responsibility. The principal thesis is that the core issue is metaphysical: can scientific laws postulate objectively necessary connections between an action and its causal antecedents? The author concludes they cannot, and that, therefore, free will and determinism can be reconciled.

1

Introduction

No philosophical problem is more deserving of the title ‘the free will problem’ than that concerning the assessment of the claim that a deterministic world, i.e., one governed completely by universal scientific law, has no room for agents with dignity sufficient to justify attributions of moral responsibility to them.

Nozick and others would prefer that dignity be pried apart from moral responsibility so that we may judge the unique worth or value of human beings, if any, under determinism without regard for tangential questions about praise and blame, punishment and reward.¹

I have no quarrel with this point of view except to note that the partition may be too facile. Although questions about the assignment of praise and blame rest in part on policy considerations and utilitarian concerns which have nothing to do with the worth of the object of these prospective practices, there may be a notion of being morally responsible not reducible to such pragmatic notions. Chapter 2, which addresses logical questions concerning the concept of moral responsibility, also includes a development of this nonpragmatic point of view. Pace Bradley there are accounts of responsibility other than liability to punishment.² Our account there will also permit the incompatibilist, i.e., a person sympathetic with the view that moral responsibility presupposes that the world is not a deterministic system, at least to state his case against those impressed by deeply ingrained practices which include moral assessments drawn without regard for metaphysical positions or assumptions that agents control the conditions of these assessments.

We shall also extend the term ‘incompatibilist’ in a perfectly natural way to one who applies his reasoning to a particular case by concluding that an agent is not morally responsible for an action in the event that that particular action is determined.

It is a psychological mystery to me why so few writers on this subject note the significance of this extension. Although it is virtually a truism that an incompatibilist draws an important conclusion about some determined action regardless of the truth or falsity of the general thesis of determinism, many philosophers regard the free will problem as having been deprived of its motivation once determinism is surrendered. This response is as viable as a refusal to see the danger in an arsenic-laced apple because not all the apples in the basket are laced with arsenic.

The point, embarrassingly obvious, needs to be made to undermine the illicit inferences from antideterministic premises. The appeal to quantum mechanics, the resurgence of theories with a statistical basis, the promulgation of philosophies of science of a conventionalist or instrumentalist character, the insistence upon randomness as a ubiquitous category in nature, the detachment of determination from causation, when heaped upon the more traditional objections, promote disarray in the determinist camp.³ Now it may well be that some (not all) of these concerns about the general metaphysical thesis affect the notion of a (particular) deterministic account so adversely that the incompatibilist cannot even advance his argument for individual cases in a prima facie plausible way. I shall nonetheless attempt, in chapter 9, to salvage an interesting notion of ‘deterministic account’ so that the particularized version of the incompatibilist case can at least be submitted for scrutiny.

The specification of the intermediate stages of the incompatibilist’s inference is the concern of chapters 3 and 4. How, in other words, does determinism destroy moral responsibility, where the latter is characterized in chapter 2 as the appropriateness of including the state of affairs (for which the agent is morally responsible) in a moral appraisal of the person?

An examination of Frankfurt’s view that unavoidability is not the middle term we seek leads, in chapters 3 and 4, to a distinct account of the conditions of moral responsibility. I argue that a more plausible account acknowledges the relevance of volitional matters such as effort, whose exertion or omission in the particular context may well be ignored in a moral review of the sort urged by Frankfurt, in which we are restricted to the facets of character which play an explanatory role.

The blameworthiness of an agent, we there argue, is not based directly upon the defectiveness of his character even when his action is due to a defective trait, but rather upon a defect of will. He is guilty because he failed to take steps to inhibit the manifestation of his character. The conception of responsibility which emerges coheres with an overall ethic of intention which accounts for our moral intuitions in a variety of cases.

Yet even if we are right to fault one who has failed to exert sufficient effort, we still want to know why the incompatibilist withdraws such judgments when he suspects determination. Frankfurt’s case of a morally responsible agent whose action is, unbeknownst to the agent, rendered unavoidable by a powerful being (the so-called ‘counterfactual intervener’) who would, but need not, intervene to force the agent to do what he anyway does on his own, shows that unavoidability per se does not absolve the agent and motivates the search for an alternative basis for exemption. Since there are serious objections to compulsion and related notions, we turn in chapter 6, after an attempt in chapter 5 to define relevant concepts like addiction, compulsion, and impotence, to the idea of power. Although we there push the analysis of power in terms of the classical compatibilist model of (possible) action from (possible) desire as far as we can take it, we founder on the challenge to rebut the incompatibilist conviction that the presence of any empirically sufficient condition of an action renders the agent incapable of acting otherwise. The pursuit of the controversy, conceived as an issue about power, is unproductive then because we are left with a clash of intuitions about the implications on power of determination.

Against this background, the concept of necessity appears to have some advantage insofar as the case of the counterfactual intervener tells less clearly against necessity than it did against unavoidability. The idea of Fischer and others that actual sequence causation (the explanation of the action, typically in terms of the agent’s desires), but not alternate sequence causation (the presence of the powerful being whose intervention is not actual and, therefore, not a part of the sequence leading to the action), is potentially worrisome is rendered more precise in terms of a clarification of the difference between necessitating and insuring an outcome. Since necessitation is a stronger notion, the incompatibilist can cite it as the disturbing feature of determination. Anyway, the core picture to which he is wedded is indeed one of sequences necessitating, in a compulsive-like way subsequent sequences and it is this picture which generates the rest of his conceptual repertoire: unavoidability, impotence, inevitability, predictability (a weaker idea, to be sure). A metaphysical commitment to real necessity becomes then the focus of the discussion. Thus, by the end of chapter 6, we have narrowed the controversy to one over necessity and are now required to confront directly the essentially metaphysical character of the free will controversy. A central contention of this work is that this path is the most fruitful one a compatibilist can take. By extracting from the incompatibilist the admission that he posits necessitation wherever science finds determination, the compatibilist may challenge and undermine that point of view.

If the compatibilist is talking about necessity, we must attempt to render his argument coherent when it is cast in this way. That goal is pursued in chapter 7, in which the outlines of a system of contingent necessity are presented so that the incompatibilist can possess a congenial mode of presentation, immune from the charges of modal confusion. A competing account, in which contingent necessity is displaced by unalterability (by choice) is rejected, once again narrowing the dispute to one over necessity.

The fruitfulness of the strategy proposed in this book is borne out in chapters 8 and 9 by the rejection of the necessitarian metaphysic upon which incompatibilism rests. I there elaborate a metaphysical vision which philosophers either love or hate (usually the latter), but which represents a stance on an issue of fundamental significance. My specific goal in those chapters is the defense of an antinecessitarian or regularity metaphysic, according to which reconstruction of scientific results – laws and theories – need not incorporate a modal framework. As I have indicated, this issue is not just interesting in its own metaphysical right, but constitutes the core issue in the free will controversy. We should note also that the position defended there is clearly different from the various antideterminist points of view taken in recent years. Simply put, antinecessitarianism does not require the ultimacy of statistical laws or the objectivity of randomness or the literal falsity of scientific laws. The regularity theory does not oppose determinism, but rather regards theories, including deterministic ones, as formulable without the aid of modal operators.

If we have been successful, the metaphysical underpinnings of the incompatibilist’s case will be withdrawn so that he is no longer able to exempt agents from moral responsibility for actions just because a deterministic account of those actions has been provided. The burden then falls upon the victor to provide some account of the conditions it is appropriate to withhold ascriptions of moral responsibility. Thus, doubts concerning the responsibility of the agent of a heinous action who failed to exert maximal effort to prevent the action, when not based on relevant ignorance, must be grounded on worries that this failure is not free in a sense of ‘free’ detached from necessitarian implications. chapter 5 had addressed specific forms of unfreedom: addiction, compulsion, impotence. In chapter 10, the project of characterizing forms of (un)freedom, now to be carried out within a compatibilist framework, is resumed.

A more limited goal, to wit, the characterization of a quintessential condition of ‘full’ freedom, autonomy, is set by specifying an optimal context, i.e., an agent who is neither an addict nor a compulsive nor an impotent nor one under coercion setting out without qualms to perform an action, to see if any feature is missing which would permit him to disclaim responsibility by repudiating the action as not ‘his’. No plausible account of autonomy is found to fulfill this condition. The most plausible rendering of autonomy, in terms of the degree of cognitive, affective, and volitional independence permits deeply disturbed persons who are clearly not responsible to be counted as autonomous, whereas an agent whose will is heteronomous may be judged morally responsible for his action if he retains the power to refrain from acting on that will, a power, we must recall, he is not automatically denied under determinism. We do nonetheless review a variety of proposals concerning conditions of mitigation of responsibility by reflection upon will or character and its etiology and conclude that the central idea involved on the level of action also explains our responses to a variety of types of cases better than competing accounts. Here, too, we must discover whether or not the person, if he is able, took steps to change. The upshot is that no general philosophical constraint on moral responsibility need be added to the ones already specified, ones whose applicability to the real world requires entry into the untidy, context-bound, value-laden practical arena in which these judgments are made and assessed.

Finally, we consider various scenarios regarding the future development of psychology to discover which, if any, are antithetical to the concept of moral responsibility as we have characterized it.

2

The concept of moral responsibility

SENSES OF RESPONSIBILITY

We wish first to capture the sense of responsibility at stake in the controversy between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Perhaps it is just the relation of authorship between an agent in his action. But only a special libertarian construal of that relation would permit an inference from ‘Jones is the author of act A’ to ‘Jones is responsible for act A’. The adoption at this stage of the libertarian construal of authorship as the analysis of responsibility would, however, beg the question against the compatibilist. Libertarians characterize authorship in such a way as to render it a contrary to ordinary determination by events of conditions. Thus, an action of Jones which is determined – and the ordinary sense of determination is the one intended by determinists – is, by definition, an action not authored by Jones. The identification of authorship with responsibility would then force the incompatibilist conclusion. The compatibilist is surely entitled to a wedge which would permit him to state his case.

An agent’s performance may be deficient or substandard in one way or another. But there are many possible explanations of the deficiency, e.g., the absence of the relevant ability that would excuse the person and make it unjust or inappropriate to blame him. ‘Imputations of fault’¹ are built into certain descriptions of actions, e.g., cheating, lying, and conning. These are the charges (Hart called them ‘defeasible’²) that can be defeated by invoking an appropriate excuse or justification. If the charge is not defeated, the person is to blame for his performance.

Feinberg analyzes this blaming component in terms of the notion of registrability; i.e., it is proper to place this performance on a record which reveals what sort of person the agent is in a respect that interests others.³ Some records are written, e.g., fielding averages, and some are not, e.g., a person’s reputation. Since we may distinguish the registrability of an action from the propriety of an overt blaming performance, there is then a difference between a person being to blame and a person being deserving of blame.

Whether or not this distinction of Feinberg’s is too fine, there is a sense in which, for the incompatibilist, it is not fine enough. If an incompatibilist exempts a liar from moral responsibility on the grounds that his act of lying was determined, he would not deny the propriety of registering this performance. The performance may be indicative of the person’s character in a respect that interests other. Yet, says the incompatibilist, he is not to blame. Registrability, then, is not in this context the interpretation of moral responsibility.

Do we have the right to suppose that the incompatibilist has a coherent notion of moral responsibility? Registrability as the potential analysans of responsibility is closely related to an idea that has often been defended, e.g., by Hume in the eighteenth⁴ and Brandt⁵ and Dahl⁶ in this century. Brandt says that a person is morally blameworthy on account of some action if and only if the action is due t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The concept of moral responsibility
• 3 Causal and moral responsibility
• 4 Intention and moral responsibility
• 5 Addiction
• 6 Power
• 7 Contingent necessity
• 8 Laws as necessary truths
• 9 The regularity theory of laws
• 10 Autonomy
• 11 Responsibility and psychological theory
• Notes
• Index