Free Will

An Introduction

H. Beebee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230232921
• eBook ISBN: 9781137316066
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

This comprehensive introductory guide includes discussion of the major contemporary positions on compatibilism and incompatibilism, and of the central arguments that are a focus of the current debate, including the Consequence Argument, manipulation arguments, and Frankfurt's famous argument against the 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities.

1

Free Will: The Basics

1.1 Introduction

Are we morally responsible for what we do? Ordinarily, we take it for granted that we are. You might feel guilty about forgetting your mother’s birthday, or declining a friend’s party invitation when you knew they really wanted you to go. If your mother forgets your birthday, or your friend declines your invitation, you might resent them for it, and you might (or might not) forgive them later; whereas, if a friend does something kind for you, you might be grateful to them. These emotional responses are central to our lives, and they are part and parcel of our conception of ourselves and others as bearers of moral responsibility. If we were to think that we are not really morally responsible for what we and others do, it would be inappropriate to feel guilty when we harm others, or resentful or grateful when other people do things that harm or benefit us.

So, what are the conditions under which someone is truly morally responsible for what they do? That’s a big question, and this book focuses on just one aspect of it, namely freedom of the will. Our starting point is that one requirement that must be satisfied if someone is to be morally responsible for a given act, such as doing a favour for a friend, is that one perform the act freely.

It’s easy to see why acting freely looks like a plausible requirement on moral responsibility. Imagine, for example, that it turns out that the reason your friend declined your invitation was that she was coerced into doing it: some deranged enemy of yours, hell-bent on ensuring that your party is a failure, had made it clear that if she were to accept, there would be terrible repercussions for her and all her family. In that case, it would certainly be inappropriate for you to resent her for declining the invitation, and it would be inappropriate because she didn’t decline freely. We might put this in other words by saying that she didn’t really have a choice about whether to decline.

Another kind of situation that seems to remove or diminish moral responsibility concerns one’s mental state at the time of the action. Consider ‘crimes of passion’, where the perpetrator is so overwhelmed by their emotional state – anger, say – that they lose their ability to control their actions. A woman who has been subjected to domestic abuse over a long period of time finally cracks and – without premeditation – stabs her husband to death. Or perhaps she discovers him in the throes of passion with another woman, and – again without premeditation – kills them both. Such cases are legal and moral minefields, but insofar as we take the perpetrators of such acts to lack or have a lower degree of responsibility for their action, we do so because we judge that they were not fully in control of what they were doing. And, again, we might put this by saying that they were not acting freely, or of their own free will.

A third kind of case concerns the personal history of the person whose action we’re evaluating. Imagine that your car is stolen. You very much resent the perpetrator of this crime – let’s call her Carly. When Carly is apprehended, however, you discover a lot of facts about her life history. She was born into a family of car thieves, was taught to break into cars at a very young age and was expected to assist her parents in their nightly car-thieving rounds, and was generally lacking in any kind of moral education: she was praised for doing some things (stealing cars, for example) and punished for others, but was never taught or encouraged to think about the reasons why some acts are apparently praiseworthy and others merit punishment. Having learned all of this, you might take the view that Carly is not really morally responsible for stealing your car after all: it is really her parents who are to blame for having raised her in the way they did. Carly is disposed to steal cars without even considering whether doing so is right or wrong, but this aspect of her character is one that she was not responsible for forming: it is a result of her upbringing, and she had no control over how that went.

This third kind of case might start to make you feel a little uncomfortable, because, of course, we are all the product of a certain kind of upbringing. Most of us are not brought up to be car thieves – indeed, unlike Carly, we may have been brought up to think carefully about the difference between right and wrong. But that we have that kind of character is just as much a product of our upbringing as Carly’s character is a product of her upbringing; and – you might start to worry – we are therefore no more morally responsible for our behaviour than Carly is. After all, we had no more choice over who our parents are than she did. Moreover, we are at the mercy not only of the upbringing our parents subjected us to, but also the genes that they endowed us with; and it is entirely possible that many aspects of our character are also influenced by our genetic make-up. And, of course, the same point applies to our parents, too. We might be inclined to blame Carly’s parents, rather than Carly, for her car-stealing habit, but they, in turn, were the products of their own upbringing and genetic make-up every bit as much as Carly was. And again, the same point applies to our own parents as well.

The question all of this raises is: Where, if anywhere, does the buck stop – and, if it stops anywhere, why does it stop just there? Here’s one way you might try to answer that question. Thinking about Carly, you might say: Well, whether or not Carly is morally responsible for stealing my car depends on whether her upbringing and so on determined her to steal the car, or whether instead she still had a choice about whether to steal it or not. Perhaps her upbringing strongly disposed her towards a life of crime, but perhaps, nonetheless, she was able to do otherwise than steal the car. After all, presumably earlier that evening she was sitting down thinking about what she was going to do later on, and after thinking about it, she decided that she would go out car-stealing. But – we might suppose – she didn’t have to make that decision. She could have decided to stay at home instead, or go to the cinema, or do whatever else she was considering doing. In that case, she really is morally responsible for stealing your car. If, on the other hand, her upbringing and so on really did determine that there was only one decision she could make in the circumstances – viz, to go out car-stealing – then she isn’t morally responsible for it.

This brings us to what is sometimes known as ‘the problem of free will’ (although, as we shall see, there is more than one problem of free will), namely, the problem of the apparent incompatibility of free will with determinism. The basic idea here is that if someone is determined to behave in the way that they do – if Carly, for example, is determined to steal your car by her upbringing, current circumstances and other factors – then it would appear that they do not act freely, since there is nothing else they could have done. In other words, they could not have done otherwise than what they actually did (in Carly’s case, stealing your car). If being fully determined to behave in a certain way by one’s upbringing (or whatever) deprives one of the ability to do otherwise, and if being able to do otherwise is required for acting freely, then being so determined is incompatible with acting freely. And, finally, if acting freely is required for being morally responsible for that act, then being determined to act is incompatible with moral responsibility.

The argument just rehearsed is known as the ‘Consequence Argument’, and we’ll come back to it in §1.4. Philosophers tend to fall into two broad camps when it comes to the Consequence Argument. Some are in fundamental sympathy with it: they think that determinism and free will just can’t be compatible. Such philosophers are known, unsurprisingly, as incompatibilists. Other philosophers, on the other hand, think there is something fishy about the Consequence Argument. They think that determinism and free will don’t need to be at odds with one another. For obvious reasons, these philosophers are known as compatibilists. (Actually, this is oversimplifying the situation. Some incompatibilists are motivated not by the Consequence Argument but by other arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. We’ll come back to these other arguments in §1.5.)

The Consequence Argument gets its intuitive pull from the thought that acting freely requires, to use Daniel Dennett’s apt phrase, ‘elbow room’. If I freely decide whether to steal a car or go to my friend’s party, surely I could have made a different decision: the decision not to steal the car, say, or the decision to go to the party after all. And the claim is that determinism rules such alternative possibilities out; hence, if determinism is true, we never act freely.

We might, however, ask from the outset whether this kind of ‘elbow room’ really is required. Consider Wally, who finds a wallet lying in the street. He knows that there is a police station around the corner, and, without even considering the option of taking the wallet himself or pocketing the cash it contains, he hands it in to the police station. That’s just the kind of person he is: he’s the kind of person who doesn’t steal other people’s money, even when that money has been left carelessly lying around in the street – not ever. (Well, perhaps he would consider taking – or even actually take – the money if he were flat broke and needed the money to buy drugs to save his ailing grandmother, or some such. But let’s assume that this is not the situation that Wally is in right now.) In other words, given Wally’s character, taking the money simply isn’t a possibility that is open to him: it’s not something he could do. Now, do we want to say that Wally is praiseworthy for handing in the wallet? Many compatibilist philosophers (myself included) – those who think that free will and determinism are compatible with one another – say ‘yes’. No matter if his upstanding character is entirely determined by the moral education he underwent as a child; he was brought up to do the right thing, and here he is, doing the right thing, and for the right reasons. If, instead, we were to take the view that Wally is only morally responsible – and so only praiseworthy – for having handed in the wallet if he was not fully determined by his upbringing, via the formation of his character, to do that, then we would have to say that he is not praiseworthy for handing in the wallet. Poor Wally! If only his parents hadn’t done such a good job, and had instead left him with some slight inclination to keep the wallet for himself, he’d have deserved a pat on the back for handing in the wallet. As it is, he’s just doing what he was determined to do – no pat on the back for him.

You might be inclined to respond to this case by saying that – despite the fact that I’ve tried to rule this out in the way I set it up – Wally could have taken the money for himself, assuming that he is a normal, thoughtful and reflective person (which he is): he was entirely capable of acting out of character on this particular occasion. In that case, here ’s an exercise for you. Try and think of something you really could not do. (It doesn’t have to be something you couldn’t do in any circumstances – just something you couldn’t do in particular, e.g. normal, circumstances.) It might be, for example, throwing a kitten off a motorway bridge, pushing a total stranger in front of a bus, unleashing a torrent of expletives at your granny, ... you get the picture. Now ask yourself whether you are morally responsible for refraining from doing whatever it was you just thought of.

If your answer is ‘No, I am not morally responsible for refraining from swearing at my granny’ (or whatever), then it looks as though you are strongly committed to the ‘could have done otherwise’ condition being a requirement for moral responsibility. But this commitment may be hard to sustain. Consider, for example, the rather unfortunate dilemma it creates for anyone who is a parent. Parents typically want their children to grow up to be the kinds of people who don’t push people under buses or swear at their grannies. On the other hand, they typically (though admittedly probably not many parents think about this explicitly) also want their children to grow up to be bearers of moral responsibility: people who are the legitimate targets of ‘reactive attitudes’ such as gratitude and resentment. (Probably they would prefer it if there were a lot more gratitude than resentment.) Given your answer to the above question, that’s a lot to ask. In line with the first desire just described, we have to bring our children up so that they are strongly disposed not to swear at their granny or push people under buses. However, we also have to make sure that there is still some possibility, on any given occasion, that they will do the wrong thing – otherwise, we will fail to satisfy our second desire, that they grow up to be morally responsible agents. That’s a tough call: satisfy the first desire, and you run the risk that you’ve gone too far and deprived your child of moral responsibility. Satisfy the second desire, on the other hand, and you run the serious risk of your child occasionally behaving in unspeakable ways. After all, if you think you really could push someone under the bus when the opportunity arises – which, probably, it frequently does – or, at any given moment, call up your granny and give her an earful of verbal abuse, how come you never, ever actually do those things? It doesn’t look like you can consistently say both that you could do them and that there is no risk whatsoever that you will.

Of course, this might not convince you that we can be morally responsible without having the ability to do otherwise. If so, you will still not be convinced that Wally really is morally responsible (and indeed praiseworthy) for handing in the wallet even though he genuinely could not have done otherwise. The question of whether acting freely requires the ability to do otherwise is one that I’ll be discussing in a lot more detail later on.

For now, though, let’s return to our question about buck-stopping. Earlier I raised the worry that, supposing that we don’t hold Carly responsible for stealing your car, Carly’s situation and ours are not relevantly different. You might have a different character to Carly’s, thanks to a different upbringing; in particular, you were brought up to pay attention whether your actions are right or wrong, and to act accordingly (though, of course, most of us don’t always succeed in doing so). But you are just as much a product of your upbringing as Carly is a product of hers, and so if Carly is not responsible for her car-stealing because she is not responsible for having the character she has, then perhaps you are also not responsible for what you do, whether it is treating your friends well or badly or remembering your mother’s birthday – since, like Carly, you are not responsible for having the character you have.

The worry here, then, is not so much that our decisions and actions might be determined by our characters and are unfree for that reason (this is a worry you will have if you think that Wally deserves no credit for returning the wallet), but that our character itself might be determined by things that we never had any control over – our upbringing and our genetic inheritance, say. We might (and some philosophers do) take the view that the fact that Wally’s character rendered him unable to do otherwise at the time does not, in itself, entail that he did not act freely; rather, his action is unfree just if he had no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Free Will: The Basics
• 2 What Does Acting Freely Require? Some Compatibilist Views
• 3 Compatibilism and the Consequence Argument
• 4 Compatibilism, Sourcehood, and Manipulation Arguments
• 5 What Does Acting Freely Require? Some Incompatibilist Views
• 6 Frankfurts Nefarious Neurosurgeon
• 7 Other Issues
• Bibliography
• Index