Libertarians and others
Chisholm, Holbach and Frankfurt
Roderick Chisholm
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A foundationalist
(remember?).
Also an enthusiastic
defender of the
primacy of ‘raw’
experience in
epistemology.
Also a libertarian.
Human freedom and the self
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The Dilemma: Both determinism and
indeterminism rule out responsibility.
The main idea: Humans can, as free agents,
initiate new ‘causal chains’.
The question: What is it about the self that
makes this new causal chain attributable to
the self, in a way that justifies blame or praise
for the action that initiates the new chain of
causes?
Following along with Chisholm
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Conditions for responsibility:
‘Wholly up to’ the agent.
2.
Could have done otherwise.
3.
What you’re responsible for is the result of (brought
about by) some act of yours.
4.
That act must be in your power to perform or not to
perform.
4 implies that the act isn’t determined by any event that isn’t
also within your control– including your desires and
beliefs.
1.
Overcome
Consider a dam, caused to fail by a flood: It
simply had to fail, in the circumstances.
Similarly,
“If the flood of desire caused the weak-willed
man to give in, then he, too, had to do just
what it was that he did do and he was no more
responsible than was the dam for the results
that followed”
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The flip side
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Good character, if it causes you to do good
things (i.e. leaves you no option but to do
them), prevents you from being responsible
for doing those good things!
(Reid): Cato’s ‘constitution’ is “no more the
work of Cato than his existence.”
The implication for theism (via Aquinas): If
every movement… “proceeds from God as
the prime mover,” then God is the only agent!
The compatibilist move
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The key premise: ‘Could have done otherwise’ =
‘would have done otherwise, had s/he chosen to’
This is consistent with determinism.
But Chisholm claims that the second phrase could be
true even when in fact the first phrases is false, that
is, it can be true that I would have done otherwise
than I did, in some case, even though, in the
circumstances, I could not do otherwise.
So Chisholm rejects the compatibilist’s premise.
Making a case against compatibilism
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If you’d chosen otherwise, you would have done
something different.
But in fact you couldn’t choose otherwise (for
example, your character or beliefs, which aren’t
under your control at the time of the choice, caused
you to choose as you did).
Then you are caught up in causal chains that include
these features of yourself, and given these causes,
you really couldn’t do otherwise.
Choosing to choose?
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There’s a regress in the air here.
A real choice (a free choice) seems to require (see
the earlier definition) control over all the factors that
‘cause’ that choice.
And this includes beliefs, desires and character.
So you must control these things, and whatever
causes them, and so on, if they cause you to choose
as you do.
That’s a lot of control!
Between determinism and
indeterminism
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If there’s no cause of an action, it seems
‘fortuitous or capricious’, and responsibility is
out.
If there is a cause, it seems that (even if, had
the agent chosen otherwise, s/he would have
done otherwise) in fact s/he couldn’t have
chosen otherwise (the choice is causally
determined, after all), and, again,
responsibility is out.
Is there an alternative?
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We need an event that contributes to the agent’s act,
but that isn’t caused by another event.
Instead, it’s caused by the agent herself.
Usually, we speak of events as caused by other
events:
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the occurrence of a cold night caused the water in the bird
bath to freeze
The sudden creation of a super-critical mass caused the
nuclear device to explode.
But what is an agent, and how does it cause events?
Transuent and Immanent
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Transuent causation links events or states of affairs
together.
Immanent causation links an event or state of affairs
to an agent who ‘brings it about’.
Chisholm says we can trace back, following the
physiological transuent causes.
But at some point (in the brain?) we come to an
event or state of affairs that is caused by the agent,
and not by some other event or state of affairs.
Making happen vs. doing
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To do something requires some awareness
(intentionality) concerning what you’re doing.
But to make something happen doesn’t– we
make all kinds of things happen without being
aware of them (or concerned about them).
But what is immanent causation
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What do we mean when we say an agent
caused an event (rather than an event causing
it)?
How do we distinguish A’s causing an event
in this way, from the event merely happening
(spontaneously)?
Suarez: “the action is in reality nothing but
the effect as it flows from the agent” HUH?
The mystery of causation (again)
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For Chisholm, it’s not any harder (or stranger)
to explain agent causation than it is to explain
ordinary ‘transuent’ causation.
But even on a strictly Humean account of
causation, what we say when we say that
event A caused event B is that events of the Atype are always followed by B-type events.
Nothing this informative emerges from the
claim that an agent A ‘caused’ some event.
Hume vs. Reid
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Chisholm cites Reid against Hume, suggesting that
our awareness of our ability, as agents, to bring
things about is the basis for our grasp of transuent
causation.
But Hume actually argues against this view: we
aren’t, he said, conscious of our ‘power’ to do
things. If we were, we wouldn’t be surprised by a
sudden paralysis—a stroke victim would
immediately realize that she couldn’t move her (say)
left leg. Only experience teaches us what we can (or
can’t) do…
Small Gods
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If Chisholm is right, then, “each of us, when
we act, is a prime mover unmoved.”
“No set of statements about a man’s desires,
beliefs, and stimulus situation at any time
implies any statement telling us what the man
will try, set out, or undertake to do at that
time.”
Note how empty this is of any predictive
power…
Can desires ‘incline without
necessitating’?
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Chisholm’s public official:
Can resist soliciting a bribe.
 Cannot resist accepting a bribe (if it’s presented
in the right way).
For Chisholm, this is the kind of case where we
would say his motive (the desire for the bribe)
inclines but doesn’t necessitate, since he doesn’t
try to make the bribe come his way, but if it does
come his way, he can’t resist.
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Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789)
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One of the Encyclopedistsa French enlightenment
group led by Diderot and
D’Alembert.
A hard determinist: He
believed in a deterministic
physics, and believed that
this was incompatible with
responsibility.
The view
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We are complicated mechanism.
Our will is determined by our desires, beliefs
and circumstances.
It is altered only by stronger, intervening
desires etc.
This is hidden from us by our own
complexity, which makes prediction very
difficult.
Harry Frankfurt (1929- )
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Emeritus Professor at
Princeton.
A compatibilist, with a
complex view of the
conditions of freedom
(including abilities to
evaluate and motivate
change in our lower-order
preferences).
Wrote On Bullshit (2005)
Alternative Possibilities
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The Principle: We are morally responsible for doing
X only if we could have done something else.
Frankfurt identifies a problem with this principle.
Circumstances can cut off alternatives for us without
interfering with our ordinary choice-making
processes.
In such cases, we are morally responsible even
though we could not do anything else.
Constraint without coercion
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I’m in a room, the door is open, and it seems
I’m entirely free to stay.
But in fact, the door will close and lock if I
attempt to leave.
But I don’t attempt to leave.
Am I responsible for staying in the room?
Or, having decided to stay already, I’m told
I’ll be killed if I leave.
The hidden intervenor
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Black and Jones.
Black will ensure Jones does X if Jones
doesn’t choose to do X himself.
But Jones does do X by his own choice.
Still Jones had no alternative to doing X.
What explains Jones’ doing X here? The
constraints (Black’s arrangements) don’t; his
choice does. So (says F) he’s responsible.
The alternative principle
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“A person is not morally responsible for what
he has done if he did it only because he could
not have done otherwise.”
The problem of attribution
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When we say that someone is responsible for
something they’ve done, we are committed to there
being some connection between them as agents, and
the action they’ve performed.
Chisholm is concerned about this when he says that
neither determinism nor indeterminism will do:
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Determinism puts what I do out of my control (we can
trace it all back to things that I’m clearly not responsible
for)
And indeterminism also puts it out of my control– one or
another of the possibilities results, but I don’t choose.
But…
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Chisholm’s appeal to transcendent, ‘agent’
causation seems like a cheat.
Chisholm says that the agent begins a new
causal chain, rather than that something
merely happened spontaneously and without
being causally determined.
But it does not explain how we’re supposed to
tell the difference. In fact, it doesn’t explain
what the difference is at all.
The problem of the link
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What we need to know here is both something
metaphysical and something empirical.
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First, we need to know about how an agent comes
to make a choice and how that process is different
from mere ‘coin flip’ indeterminism.
Second, we need to know how we can tell the
difference between these things. (And the
difference had better be obvious, since we seem
to make this distinction very naturally and very
easily in practice.)
Why these requirements?
1. Without a story that somehow links the agent
to the choice in an explanatory way, the
attribution of the choice to the agent (and the
consequent assignment of responsibility to
her) is utterly opaque.
By ‘links in an explanatory way’ I mean
that something about the agent should explain
why she chose as she did.
Why, cont’d
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As for the epistemic requirement, if we can’t
effectively distinguish ‘chance’ from ‘agent’ cases,
we surely ought to be much more skeptical, reserved
or modest than we usually are when we blame or
praise someone for what they’ve done.
Some would suggest the first person case is the key:
we know, in a special, privileged way, when we’ve
made a choice rather than merely flipped a coin– and
we can then go on to attribute similar choiceprocesses to others on the grounds of the similarity
of the cases and circumstances.
But
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This move only makes sense if we can say what the
difference is and show that it really is the sort of
thing we could reliably detect, at least in our own
case.
And just saying what the difference is, is already
very difficult.
Some character of the agent must make the
difference between the available choices.
But we can’t say that a causal process leads the agent
to become the kind of agent who makes one choice
rather than another—this leads back to determinism!
Whence ‘character’?
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Let ‘character’ stand for the features of agents that
explain why they make the choices they do.
So character grounds attributions of responsibility to
agents by linking them to their choices.
If character results from natural, causal processes,
we’re back to determinism.
But if character is just spontaneously there from the
start, we’re back to indeterminism–
Either way, how is it an agent’s fault that, by causes
or just by chance, she has a character that leads her
to do cruel things?
Oh, dear.
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Appeal to agent causation is just a place-holder for a
solution, not a solution in its own right.
When we try to fill that place-holder out, it leads
right back to the original puzzle.
If we’re to be responsible for what it leads us to do,
it looks like we need to form or choose our own
character ourselves, in a way that we’re responsible
for.
But there’s a nasty regress here: we need to invoke a
prior character to make us responsible for how
we’ve formed our character over time.
Who am I, anyway?
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Leibniz was a non-causal determinist.
For him, what happens for each monad (a
separate, independent ‘atom’) is fully
determined by its internal law and its
‘appetition’, a force that drives it to express
itself over time (its internal law, though,
respects a harmony that all monads are set up
to express).
Judas
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For Leibniz, Judas is determined, according to
his internal law, to betray Jesus. He must do
it, else (says Leibniz) he would not be this
Judas.
But this doesn’t mean Judas isn’t responsible
for what he does.
After all, what he does is part and parcel of
(and emerges from) who he is.
Character, again
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It looks as though the libertarian has a hard time
explaining how we can be ultimately responsible for
our character– we can’t freely choose our characters,
on pain of a regress.
On the other hand, who is each of us, if not a person
with a certain character?
Can an ‘initial’ self, the ultimate source of the
choices that we take ourselves to be responsible for,
be responsible for the character that s/he begins
with?
A fallback position
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Perhaps the best thing to say is that we are
responsible for our choices insofar as who we are is
what leads us to choose as we do.
Though we didn’t choose to become who we are, the
process of becoming our (present) selves (our history
as persons) is shaped by who we had (already)
become before.
This view of persons traces their present character
back to previous experiences and choices grounded
in a previous character.
But it is a view we can only take looking backwards.