Do We Have Free Will?

A Debate

Robert H Kane, Carolina Sartorio, Robert Kane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367258337
• eBook ISBN: 9781000449457
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In this little but profound volume, Robert Kane and Carolina Sartorio debate a perennial question: Do We Have Free Will?

Kane introduces and defends libertarianism about free will: free will is incompatible with determinism; we are free; we are not determined. Sartorio introduces and defends compatibilism about free will: free will is compatible with determinism; we can be free even while our actions are determined through and through. Simplifying tricky terminology and complicated concepts for readers new to the debate, the authors also cover the latest developments on a controversial topic that gets us entangled in questions about blameworthiness and responsibility, coercion and control, and much more.

Each author first presents their own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies. Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists. Short, lively and accessible, the debate showcases diverse and cutting-edge work on free will. As per Saul Smilansky's foreword, Kane and Sartorio, "present the readers with two things at once: an introduction to the traditional free will problem; and a demonstration of what a great yet very much alive and relevant philosophical problem is like."

Key Features:

• Covers major concepts, views and arguments about free will in an engaging format
• Accessible style and pedagogical features for students and general readers
• Cutting-edge contributions by preeminent scholars on free will.

Opening Statements

Chapter 1
The Problem of Free Will

A Libertarian Perspective

Robert Kane

DOI: 10.4324/9781003212171-2

Contents

• Introduction: An Ancient Problem with Modern Significance
• 1. Modern Debates and Views
• 2. The Compatibility Question: Alternative Possibilities and Ultimate Responsibility
• 3. Self-forming Actions
• 4. Freedom of Action and Freedom of Will: AP and UR
• 5. Plurality Conditions and Plural Voluntary Control
• 6. Will-Setting and Self-formation
• 7. The Compatibility Question Revisited: Free Will and Moral Responsibility
• 8. Fair Opportunity to Avoid Wrongdoing: Hart and Others
• 9. Reactive Attitudes, Criminal Trials and Transference of Responsibility
• 10. Transference of Responsibility and Compatibility Questions
• 11. Two Dimensions of Responsibility
• 12. Compatibilist Responses (I): Conditional Analyses
• 13. Compatibilist Responses (II): Frankfurt-Style Examples
• 14. The Intelligibility Question
• 15. Indeterminism: Empirical and Philosophical Questions
• 16. Initial Pieces: Self-formation, Efforts, Willpower, Volitional Streams
• 17. Indeterminism and Responsibility
• 18. Initial Questions and Objections: Indeterminism and Chance
• 19. Further Questions and Objections: Phenomenology and Rationality
• 20. Micro vs. Macro Control
• 21. Control and Responsibility
• 22. Agency, Complexity, Disappearing Agents
• 23. Regress Objections: Responsibility and Character Development
• 24. The Explanatory Luck Objection: Authors, Stories, Value Experiments and Liberum Arbitrium
• 25. Contrastive Explanations: Concluding Remarks on Huck Finn and Other Literary Figures

Introduction: An Ancient Problem with Modern Significance

“There is a disputation that will continue till mankind is raised from the dead, between the necessitarians and the partisans of free will”.

These are the words of 13th-century Sufi Muslim poet and philosopher Jalalu’ddin Rumi. The problem of free will and necessity or determinism of which he speaks has arisen in history whenever humans have reached a higher stage of self-consciousness about how profoundly the world may influence their behavior in ways unknown to them and they do not control. The rise of doctrines of determinism or necessity in the history of ideas is an indication that this higher stage of self-consciousness has been reached. People have wondered at various times whether their actions might be determined by Fate or by God; by the laws of physics or the laws of logic; by evolution, genes or environment, unconscious motives, upbringing, psychological or social conditioning or, with the latest scientific threats from the neurosciences, by the activity of the neurons of their brains of which they are not conscious.

There is a core idea running through all of these historical doctrines of determinism or necessity, whether they are religious, secular or scientific, that shows why many people have felt that they are a threat to free will. This core idea may be stated as follows:

Determinism: given the past at any time and the laws governing the universe, there is only one possible future. Whatever happens is therefore inevitable, it cannot but occur, given the past and laws.

Free Will, by contrast, implies (i) an open future, with multiple possible paths into the future, and that (ii) it is sometimes “up to us” which of these possible paths we will take.

Such a picture of an open future that free will seems to require is often illustrated by an image made famous in a short story of the well-known South American writer, Jorge Luis Borges. It is the image of a “garden of forking paths” illustrated in Figure 1.1. At each juncture there are forking paths into the future. If we believe that our choices about which of these paths we will take at such times are free choices, we must believe that both options are “open” to us while we are deliberating. We could choose different paths into the future at various points in our lives, and it would be “up to us” and no one and nothing else which of these paths will be taken.

Figure 1.1 A Garden of Forking Paths

I believe that such a picture of different possible paths into the future, at least at some times in our lives, is essential to our understanding of free will. Such a picture is also important, we might even say, to what it means to be a person and to live a human life. Yet determinism, if true, would seem to threaten this picture, because it implies that there really is, at all times, only one possible path into the future, not many. We may believe there are multiple paths available to us, but in reality, if determinism is true, only one of them would be possible.

1. Modern Debates and Views

Like Rumi and many other thinkers of the past, I had always believed that there was some kind of conflict lurking here that was very deep and could not be easily dismissed by facile arguments. Yet I was also aware that many philosophers and scientists, especially in the modern era, have argued that doctrines of determinism pose no real threat to free will, or at least to any free will “worth wanting”. These thinkers are usually called compatibilists.

Compatibilists about free will believe that free will is compatible with determinism, so that we can have all of the free will that is possible and worth wanting, even if determinism should be universally true.

Even in a determined world, these compatibilists argue, we would want to distinguish persons who are free from such things as physical restraint, addiction or neurosis, coercion, compulsion, covert control by others or political oppression, from persons who are not free from these things, and we could affirm that these freedoms might exist and would be preferable to their opposites even in a determined world. In addition, these modern compatibilists commonly argue that requiring that free actions must be un determined would not do anything to enhance our freedom but rather would reduce our freedom to mere chance or luck or mystery.

In modern debates about free will, compatibilist views of these kinds are opposed by

Incompatibilists: those who deny that every kind of freedom “worth wanting” is compatible with determinism.

I will be defending such an incompatibilist view in this debate. Though many kinds of freedom may be compatible with determinism, as the preceding paragraph suggests, I believe that there is one important kind of freedom—traditionally called the “freedom of the will”—that is also worth wanting but is not compatible with determinism.

Freedom of will of this incompatibilist kind satisfies the two conditions mentioned earlier that seem to be threatened by determinism; that is, (i) at least at some points in our lives we face a genuinely open future, with forking paths into that future, either of which we may choose, and (ii) at these crucial times, it is “up to us”, and no one and nothing else, which of these possible paths into the future will be taken. We determine our future at such times and the kinds of persons we will become. Those who believe that there is an important kind of freedom of will that we can possess satisfying these conditions that is not compatible with determinism are usually called libertarians about free will in contemporary debates (from the Latin liber meaning “free”). ¹

1. Libertarianism about free will should not be confused with political and economic doctrines of libertarianism. Libertarians about free will can, and do, hold differing views on political and economic matters.

Libertarians about free will believe that there is an important kind of freedom of will that we can possess that is incompatible with determinism and satisfies the following conditions: (i) at some points in our lives we face a genuinely open future, with forking paths into that future, either of which we may choose, and (ii) at these crucial times, it is “up to us”, and no one and nothing else, which of these possible paths into the future will be chosen.

I will be defending such a libertarian and incompatibilist view of free will in this debate. Many thinkers believe that a free will of the kind libertarians defend—a free will that is not compatible with determinism—is not even possible or intelligible. It is not a kind of freedom, they argue, we could have. This worry has a long history and is related to an ancient dilemma: If free will is not compatible with determinism, it does not seem to be compatible with indeterminism either. Arguments have been made since the time of the ancient Stoics that undetermined events would occur spontaneously and hence could not be controlled by agents in the way that free and responsible actions would require.

If, for example, a choice occurred by virtue of some undetermined quantum events in one’s brain, it would seem to be a fluke or accident rather than a responsible choice. Undetermined events occurring in brains or bodies, it is commonly argued, would not seem to enhance our freedom and control over, and hence responsibility for, actions but rather to diminish freedom, control and responsibility. Arguments such as these and many others have led to often-repeated charges throughout history that undetermined choices or actions, such as a libertarian free will would require, would be “arbitrary”, “random”, “irrational”, “uncontrolled”, “mere matters of luck” or “chance” and hence could not be free and responsible actions at all.

In response, libertarians about free will throughout history have often appealed to special and unusual forms of agency or causation to explain undetermined free actions, and their opponents have cried magic or mystery. Indeterminism might provide “causal gaps” in nature, libertarians frequently reasoned, but that was only a negative condition for free will. Some special form of agency or causation was needed that went beyond familiar modes of causation in the natural order to “fill” those causal gaps in nature left by indeterminism. And thus we had historical appeals to “extra factors,” such as noumenal selves outside space and time (e.g., Immanuel Kant), or immaterial minds (e.g., Rene Descartes) or uncaused causes, nonevent agent causes or prime movers unmoved that might account for an otherwise undetermined free will.

Tempting ways to think, to be sure. But such traditional ways of thinking have also prompted charges by compatibilists and free will skeptics and many other modern critics of libertarian free will. These critics argue that one cannot make sense of an undetermined free will without appealing to magical or mysterious forms of agency that have no place in the modern scientific picture of the world and of human beings.

Friedrich Nietzsche summed up this prevailing modern skepticism in his inimitable prose when he said that such a traditional notion of freedom of the will that would underwrite an ultimate responsibility for our actions and require that one somehow be an undetermined “cause of oneself” was “the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far” by the human mind (1989, §17.8).

I agree that a traditional idea of free will that would require its being incompatible with determinism is likely to appear utterly mysterious and unintelligible in a modern context unless we learn to think about it in new ways. Hence my long struggle in attempting to defend and make sense of such an idea of free will without reducing it to mere chance, on the one hand, or to mystery, on the other. Yet the struggle seemed worth the effort. For, like many another issue of modernity, the question is whether something of this traditional idea of free will in what Nietzsche called “the superlative metaphysical sense” can be retrieved from the dissolving acids of modern science and secular learning. Or would it become, along with other aspects of our self-image, yet another victim of the “disenchantments” of modernity?

Yet I came to realize that any retrieval of this idea of free will that would require its being incompatible with determinism would be no simple matter, if it were possible at all. Such a retrieval would require answering not one question but a whole host of questions. And it would require rethinking the relations of many different and related notions: agency, choice, mind, action, selfhood, will, control, responsibility, power and many others. ² I will be addressing many of these questions and topics here, beginning with the following central question in contemporary debates about free will.

2. I have addressed these issues in Kane (1985, 1996, 2005, 2011c, 2014), among other writings.

2. The Compatibility Question: Alternative Possibilities and Ultimate Responsibility

Why might one believe that there is an important kind of free will worth wanting that is not compatible with determinism? The first step in answering this question is recognizing that, as this so-called Compatibility Question is usually formulated in many modern discussions of free will—“Is freedom compatible or incompatible with determinism?”—the question is too simple. For, as noted in the previous section, there are many meanings of “freedom” (as one would expect from such a much-disputed and debated term), and many of these meanings are compatible with determinism. Even in a determined world, as noted, we would want to distinguish persons who are free from such things as physical restraint, addiction, coercion and political oppression from persons not free from these things. And we should acknowledge that these freedoms are signifi-cant (“worth wanting”)—having them would be preferable to their opposites—even in a determined world.

Those of us who are libertarians about free will (who believe in a free will that is incompatible with determinism) should, I contend, concede this point to compatibilists: Many freedoms worth wanting are compatible with determinism.

What libertarians about free will should insist upon is that there is at least one kind of freedom that is also worth wanting and is not compatible with determinism. This further freedom is Freedom of Will, which I define as: “the power to be the ultimate source and sustainer to some degree of one’s own ends or purposes.”

To understand what this notion of free will amounts to, return to the two features mentioned earlier that have historically led persons to believe that free will is threatened by determinism. We believe we have free will wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Opening Statements
• First Round of Replies
• Second Round of Replies
• Further Readings
• Glossary
• References
• Index