Roderick Chisholm: Human Freedom and the Self
The following review moves through each of Chisholm’s numbers in the article, so you can read
along with the text to help you understand.
2.
If a person is responsible for shooting someone, then it must be the case that that person ‘could
have fired and could have not fired’. If he did fire, it must mean that he didn’t do so ‘against his
will’.
3.
G.E. Moore’s attempt at making responsibility compatible with determinism looks like this:
(a) He could have done otherwise
means the same thing as
(b) If he had chosen to do otherwise, then he would have done otherwise
Moore’s argument is that (b) = (a), and since (b) is clearly compatible with determinism, so is (a).
Since (a) is required for talking about responsibility, determinism is compatible with
responsibility.
Chisholm is not convinced. Is it really the case that (b) = (a)? No. Chisholm states that there is
clearly a case where (b) can be true while (a) is false (if so, then they are not identical). The case
is obvious: what about a case where it is not possible for the man to have chosen otherwise? If so,
then (b) is true, since it is still the case that if the man could have chosen otherwise, he would
have done otherwise, but (a) is false because there never will be such a case where the man could
have chosen otherwise than he did.
Rather, Chisholm argues, if Moore’s claim that (a) = (b) is to be taken to be true, we must
already accept another proposition, (c), which states
(c) He could have chosen to do otherwise.
( c ), however, is not compatible with determinism. As such, (a) doesn’t follow from (b), and so
we’re back in the same boat – responsibility doesn’t seem to be supported under determinism.
4.
Chisholm: Indeterminism doesn’t yield responsibility. If the event randomly occurred, then no
one is responsible for the event. If this is so, then if we want to uphold a sense of action
compatible with responsibility, human action can neither be deterministic or indeterministic.
5.
What this means is this. First, we must deny the following two propositions:
(a) all events (including human acts) have other events as causes
(b) human acts have no causes at all
In their place, we must assert a new proposition, ( c ), which claims
(c) human acts are caused by man
6.
Some vocabulary:
Transeunt Causation : state of affairs where an event causes an event (event is a technical term –
all events are by definition caused by prior antecedent causes)
Immanent Causation: state of affairs where an agent causes an event (so in this case an event
doesn’t cause an event)
Human actions, then, are actions of immanent causation .
7.
First of two objections.
(a) If man moves something, it is the hand, not the brain. After all, some men don’t even
know that they have brains. But yet they still act. So how can a man move something
immanently if he doesn’t even know it exists?
Chisholm’s reply: The agent doesn’t do anything with or to his brain in the way that he does
something with his hand or to a staff. To see this, let’s draw a distinction between:
“Making something A happen” and
“Doing A”
What’s the difference? The difference is simple. “Doing A” means that the agent intentionally
causes something to happen. So if A occurs, and I “did A”, then I intentionally caused A to occur.
To “make something A happen ” is unintentional – it is something that happens in the course of
my doing something else, but A in this case is not something I intentionally brought about.
Example: if I move my hand to pick up a soda, then I did something such that I intentionally
moved my hand to get a soda. While doing this, however, I also caused a number of air particles
to be moved about as my hand moved through the air. These air particles were moved in the
sense that I made it happen but I did not do it. It happened unintentionally as a result of my
moving my hand.
Chisholm now says that I can make something happen to my brain without knowing it exists. So
while I intentionally do something, this doing something is actually a brain state that I caused to
happen, but I didn’t intentionally cause the brain state to occur.
8.
Second of Two objections.
What is immanent causation?
What’s the difference between
(a) A just happening and
(b) Agent causing A
If there is no difference, then we have a distinction without a difference.
Chisholm’s reply: difference is simple. In one case (b) but not the other (a), the agent caused the
event.
But then, comes the counter-reply, immanent causation doesn’t mean anything.
Chisholm’s reply: transeunt causation has the same problem.