Four Views on Free Will

"I suppose I’m cheating here because I’m squeezing four books into one. However, I would particularly recommend this book to readers, as the four authors of this book — Robert Kane, John Fischer, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas — are all significant figures in the contemporary field and have mapped out distinct and influential positions. The reader can quickly get a sense of the general lie of the land and some of the basic available options. Just to sketch them quickly: Kane is a libertarian, which is to say he’s an incompatibilist who thinks that for us to be free and responsible determinism cannot be true. For this we need an alternative metaphysical framework that accounts for the sort of freedom required for responsibility, which involves more than mere indeterminism. Fischer is a semi-compatibilist. He thinks determinism doesn’t threaten responsibility, but it does threaten free will understood in terms of open alternatives. Fischer argues that we have a rational self-control that involves what he calls ‘reasons responsiveness.’ That ability serves as a foundation for moral responsibility, but falls short of full, metaphysical freedom. Although we don’t have genuine open alternative possibilities, we don’t need them, Fischer argues, for moral responsibility. In several respects this view resembles Dennett’s general strategy, except that Fischer doesn’t buy into the freedom part of it. Rational self-control allows us to recognize reasons and respond to them in a more or less reliable and consistent way, and that’s all that responsibility requires. Pereboom is a hard incompatibilist, or what he sometimes calls an ‘optimistic sceptic.’ According to this view, while we are not free or morally responsible this is not that depressing. We can save most of what we actually care about, including our interpersonal relations, through some form of moral assessment that doesn’t rely on strong moral responsibility. We can, moreover, live lives that are still meaningful and personally satisfying. The supposition that scepticism does not imply pessimism is the main thrust of Pereboom’s line. Vargas calls his position ‘revisionism.’ Roughly what he says is that we should make a basic distinction between what he calls the ‘diagnostic’ understanding of freedom and responsibility — what we ordinarily think freedom and responsibility is — and a ‘prescriptive’ understanding. In our ordinary life, we may well have incompatibilist natural intuitions, and while we may not be able to save those, we can revise our conceptions of freedom and responsibility so that we still retain a suitably robust account that serves all the things we usually care about. Although this is revisionary it’s not radical scepticism. Vargas wants to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater and stops short of unqualified, extreme scepticism. The position we should come back to for a moment is Kane’s. There’s a standard objection to classical libertarianism which is that it relies on ‘spooky metaphysics,’ postulating ghostly agents in some way intervening in the natural order. What makes Kane’s libertarianism interesting is that he argues that libertarians can avoid this and give a naturalistic account of the possibility of moral freedom. The idea here is that what’s caused doesn’t have to be necessitated. Agents can be free as long as there are crucial points in their lives when they are capable of making what Kane calls ‘self-forming’ decisions or actions. What that requires is that free and responsible agents have more than one reason that they can act on in the very same circumstances, and that in those very same circumstances, either reason could move them to act. Whichever way they act, however, they act for a reason. While it is not determined it is still not capricious. In these circumstances, Kane claims, free agents have genuine alternatives and are the ultimate sources of their conduct and character. Lurking behind Kane’s model there is something like Kant’s picture of duty struggling with desire at crucial moments of choice. Kane gives an example of a businesswoman who is running to a meeting. Somebody needs help, but she’s got to get to the meeting. Roughly, duty = help, desire = get to the meeting on time. In the exact same conditions, at that particular moment, either reason could move her to act. Kane builds up his model and makes it more complex by suggesting that there are extra things going on — mental items called ‘efforts‘ — and he suggests that we can simultaneously make an effort in both directions. You could, on this account, replay the tape several times and you’d get different outcomes. Despite its interest, I find the model somewhat suspect. What’s crucial to Kane is that we have a plurality of reasons available to us, what he calls ‘plural voluntary control.’ But there are often cases where you may not have any alternative at all. There may be no other reason that comes up, but you still fully embrace the reason you acted on. It seems to be one that is genuinely yours, and you’re responsive to the reason that’s available to you when you’re moved by it. But for Kane, when it comes to self-forming actions that are fundamental to the possibility of moral responsibility and genuine free will, there must be occasions when we have, as he presents it, 50-50 options. This model may become very odd. What if you had a 99 versus 1 option? Suppose you have a reason that’s a very weak reason, but in the same circumstances there’s just the chance you might act on it. It seems to me that Kane and those who take a similar line are committed to the view that this would be enough to give you genuine alternative possibilities, even although the probabilities aren’t 50-50. As you know, that view can be rejected as a kind of metaphysical, necessitarian prejudice. The claim is that, in fact, when we look at what science tells us about quantum phenomena and the indeterministic order of things, especially now, in the 21st century, we shouldn’t endorse that picture. What we need is a probabilistic conception of causation rather than a necessitarian one. It’s exactly that wedge that Kane uses as the metaphysical or ontological foundation of this alternative picture. He also uses computing analogies, and suggests that you can have parallel processing systems where the outcome isn’t always the same. The system can be in a seemingly identical state, but different outcomes will issue from it. Same inputs, different outputs. Yes and in relation to Kane’s model, the big question is, has he really gotten rid of the problem of luck or chanciness? This is sometimes presented in terms of the contrastive question. If you have an agent who in given circumstances performs their duty, say helps, but another time, in identical circumstances, does not, the obvious question you want to ask is, why did they help in the first case but not in the other? According to this model, however, there is no further answer or explanation to be given for this variation. But then it looks like it’s just luck and the agent lacks adequate control over what they actually do in these specific circumstances. Although you may be in control in the sense you act on one reason or another, and what you do is intentional and done for a reason, the crucial problem remains that you’re not in control of why you act for one available reason rather than another. I don’t want to be unfair to Kane, because he does try to deal with this concern, but in my view this remains a serious problem for his theory. The sort of problem he faces here is just another version of the same problem that compatibilists face, that there are limits to control."