The level after next: Clarke on Vihvelin

You've heard of taking it to the next level. Now witness the spectacle, nay, the earth-shattering event of Randy Clarke taking it to the level after next! As Beyonce taught us all to say, I don't think you can handle this. So, get your mama, get your copy of Kadri Vihvelin's paper, and get ready to join in the extraordinary experience of the latest edition of the GFP Online Reading Group.

Thanks to Ed Minar and Phil Topics for letting us post a copy of Kadri's paper.

Randy's comments begin below the line:
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Compatibilists have long argued that having an ability to act is having a causal power or disposition. Incompatibilists have long disagreed. The dispute was, for a long time, side-tracked by the mistaken assumption, on both sides, that causal powers or dispositions are analyzable in terms of simple conditionals: e.g., x is water soluble iff, if x is immersed in water, x dissolves.

Incompatibilists were right that having an ability to act is not analyzable in terms of any such conditional. But the core compatibilist claim, that having an ability to act is having a causal power (or a bundle of dispositions) is nevertheless correct. Seeing where the simple conditional analysis of dispositions goes wrong allows us to see where the simple conditional analysis of ability to act goes wrong, and we can then see that the latter mistake leaves untouched the thesis that an ability to act is a disposition (or a bundle of dispositions). With this correct view of ability to act, we can see that having free will–having the ability to make choices on the basis of reasons--is compatible with determinism, and, indeed, that even in Frankfurt scenarios, agents are able to choose and act otherwise.

So, in brief, argues Kadri Vihvelin in “Free Will Demystified: A Dispositional Account” (Philosophical Topics 32, nos. 1 & 2 [2004]: 427-50).

The paper is rich and instructive. (Pointing out the parallel [pp. 444-45] between cases involving disposition finks and an objection from Lehrer meant to counter conditional analyses of ability is one of many nice observations.) There’s long been a need to bring to bear on the free will debate some very good recent work on dispositions, and Vihvelin’s paper is one of a few recent papers that begin to fill this need. There’s a lot I’d like to say about the paper; I’ll have to select only a few points for comment. (Even so, the comments are lengthy. If you aren’t at all interested in what dispositions are [though you should be!], you might skip no. 1.)

1. What was wrong with the simple conditional analysis of dispositions? For one thing, the analysis failed for cases involving finks, entities that might remove a disposition in just the circumstances that would ordinarily trigger its manifestation, or that might add a disposition in precisely such circumstances. A glass might be fragile, disposed to shatter if struck. Yet a wizard might stand ready to render the glass non-fragile should it be struck. Then, although the glass is fragile, it is false that it would shatter if struck. Conversely, a wizard might render a glass non-fragile (by somehow changing its molecular structure), but stand ready to make it fragile as soon as it is struck. Then, although the glass isn’t fragile, it would shatter if struck.

In his “Finkish Dispositions” (Philosophical Quarterly 47 [1997]: 143-58), David Lewis observed that finks work by altering intrinsic properties of objects that constitute the causal bases of their dispositions. He proposed the following template for a revised conditional analysis of dispositions:

RCAD: Something x is disposed at time t to give response r to stimulus s iff, for some intrinsic property B that x has at t, for some time t’ after t, if x were to undergo stimulus s at time t and retain property B until t’, s and x’s having of B would jointly be an x-complete cause of x’s giving response r. (Lewis, p 157)

(An x-complete cause is “a cause complete in so far as havings of properties intrinsic to x are concerned, though perhaps omitting some events extrinsic to x” [Lewis, p. 156].)

Vihvelin assumes, for the sake of her argument, that something like RCA is correct. But it is quite doubtful that anything like RCA is correct.

a) Finks remove or add dispositions. Things of another sort–masks--prevent dispositions from manifesting without removing the dispositions. A poison’s power to kill when ingested can be masked by an ingested antidote. A glass’s fragility can be masked by internal packing that prevents breakage even if the glass is struck. Masking presents a difficulty even for RCAD. For, given the possibility of masking, the causal basis for a disposition may be present and retained, the stimulus conditions may be present, and yet the manifestation not occur.

Can any conditional analysis accommodate masking? One might think that all the possible maskers of a given disposition can be considered part of the stimulus condition, or that an additional condition that none of these maskers is present can be added to the analysis. But one difficulty with either strategy is that there is no end to what might mask a given disposition; a comprehensive list of potential maskers would be infinite. And all that they need have in common is that they can prevent the manifestation of the disposition, even when (the rest of) the stimulus as well as the causal basis of the disposition are present. To cover them with any such general characterization would trivialize the analysis.

b) Even setting aside masking, the stimulus conditions for the manifestation of a disposition need not guarantee its manifestation. There need be no such guarantee. A causal power might be indeterministic. In the case of such a disposition, the stimulus might be present, the causal basis retained, and all masks absent, and still the manifestation might or might not occur. This point would not seem irrelevant when what is at issue is the proper understanding of an ability to choose otherwise, particularly if such an ability is, even in part, a causal power. Shouldn’t it, at the start, be an open question whether the ability to choose otherwise includes such a power?

c) Some dispositions are unconditional: their manifestations aren’t conditional on any stimulus. Some such dispositions might be continuously manifesting. George Molnar (Powers, Oxford University Press: 2003, p. 87) suggests that rest mass may be such a disposition, as massive objects manifest gravitational power in interaction with space-time for as long as they possess mass.

Other unconditional dispositions spontaneously manifest. Again, here’s an example from Molnar (p. 85): a muon has a capacity to decay into an electron, a neutrino, and an antineutrino. The power is manifested (when it is) without any trigger or stimulus.

Of course, the point stands if there so much as can be such unconditional dispositions. No conditional analysis can cover them.

Certainly no one wants to claim that abilities to act are continuously manifesting dispositions. And no one should hold that an ability to act is just a spontaneously manifesting disposition, for the manifestation of such a disposition, in a case like that of the muon, is just a matter of chance. But might incompatibilists not think (something along these lines) that having an ability to choose to A is having a spontaneously manifesting disposition AND its being up to you whether, on the occasion in question, that disposition is manifested?

2. Setting aside the question of whether there is any correct conditional analysis of dispositions, is there some such analysis of ability to act?

Vihvelin observes that abilities to act (like dispositions) can be finkish. A fink can remove an ability in just those circumstances in which it would, if retained, be exercised, or create an ability to act only when such circumstances obtain. The lesson, she recommends, is that “persons have abilities by having intrinsic properties that are the causal basis of the ability” (p. 438). She suggests the following Revised Conditional Analysis of Ability:

RCAA: S has the ability at time t to do X iff, for some intrinsic property or set of properties B that S has at t, for some time t’ after t, if S chose (decided, intended, or tried) at t to do X, and S were to retain B until t’, S’s choosing (deciding, intending, or trying) to do X and S’s having of B would jointly be an S-complete cause of S’s doing X (p. 438).

(To be precise, her claim is that RCAA, or something reasonably close, is correct for “basic abilities,” those that are dispositions. “Complex abilities, including the ability to make choices for reasons, are not dispositions; they are bundles of dispositions” [p. 439]. On the ability to choose, see no. 6 below.)

Vihvelin argues (pp. 441-45) that various objections that were taken to be forceful against the simple conditional analysis of ability fail when applied to RCAA. Some of her claims here are puzzling.

One objection was that an agent may be able to A, and yet may try but fail to A. (J. L. Austin’s case, in “Ifs and Cans,” of the golfer who misses a putt of a sort that he usually makes is an example.) Vihvelin says the objection has no force against RCAA, but it seems to apply as powerfully here as it does against the simple conditional analysis, for it has nothing to do with subtraction or addition of any causal basis of the ability.

Another objection was that the conditional ‘if S chose (decided, intended, or tried) to do X, then S would do X’ may be true, but still S may be unable to do X, for S may be unable to choose (decide, intend, or try) to do X. Vihvelin considers this objection as part of a regress objection (which adds that if we in turn try to analyze ‘S is able to choose to do X’ in terms of a similar conditional, then we are off on an infinite regress). But the original objection may be considered in its own right, and as such it seems to count as fully against RCAA as it does against the simple conditional analysis. It may be true that (as Vihvelin says) some agent (an animal, or a young child) may have an ability to perform an action of type A without having any ability to choose to A, but the further possibility that some agent may lack that ability to choose and, for just that reason, lack the ability to A undermines RCAA as an analysis of ability to act. For despite that lack of ability to choose to A, the agent may have some set of intrinsic properties B such that, if the agent chose to A and retained B, then the agent’s choosing to A and her having B would jointly be an agent-complete cause of her A-ing.

Vihvelin also suggests that, in such a case, if asked whether the agent can A, we should answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’. But the ‘yes’ goes against one of her remarks about her target: she is concerned with the ability that is relevant to moral responsibility. An agent who can’t A because she can’t choose to A may, because of that inability, be excused from responsibility.

3. Setting aside the question of whether there is any correct conditional analysis of either dispositions or abilities to act, is ability to act a disposition (or a bundle of dispositions)?

Vihvelin notes (p. 431) several important similarities between dispositions and agents’ abilities to act. Like dispositions, abilities to act are relatively stable features that typically continue to exist even when not being manifested. Indeed, like a disposition, an ability to perform an action of a certain type can exist even if never manifested. And as objects possessing a certain disposition can behave in certain ways, so agents possessing a certain ability to act can act in that way.

On the basis of such observations, Vihvelin advances the following:

ABD: To have an ability is to have a disposition or a bundle of dispositions (p. 431).

Is this claim correct?

Here are some things we might have in mind when we think or say that someone, S, has an ability to (is able to, can) do something, A:

i) S has a general capacity to A. (S can speak Spanish, ride a bicycle, drive a car, etc.)

ii) S has a general capacity to A, and the circumstances are friendly to S’s exercising that capacity. (S is capable of driving a car, she has a functioning car handy, she has the keys to it, the weather is mild, there are good roads between her house and her intended destination, etc.)

iii) S has a general capacity to A, and it is open to S (at some specified time) to exercise (at some specified time) that capacity.

iv) S has a general capacity to A, and it is up to S (at some specified time) whether S (at some specified time) exercises that capacity.

v) S has a general capacity to A, and S has a choice (at some specified time) about whether S (at some specified time) exercises that capacity.

Some of these characterizations are less than perfectly clear; one thing we might seek is further clarification of them. Perhaps some are equivalent to others. Note that on none of them is an ability to do otherwise explicitly incompatible with determinism. It may be, however, that some argument shows that on one or another of these characterizations, the ability to do otherwise is in fact so incompatible.

The type of ability characterized in (i) is quite plausibly just a causal power, or a bundle of such powers. ABD is apparently correct about such abilities. But the other sorts of abilities aren’t so obviously just dispositions, though having each may require having some dispositions. ABD isn’t so obviously correct about them.

Is, then, THE ability to act just a disposition (or a bundle of them)? Arguably the question carries a false presupposition. There are many different things that we might be thinking or talking about when we think or say that someone can or is able to do a certain thing.

4. Can agents act otherwise in Frankfurt scenarios? Vihvelin points out (p. 447) that the would-be intervener in common Frankfurt scenarios is a fink: he doesn’t actually remove any of the agent’s dispositions, but he would, if necessary, remove those that constitute the ability to do otherwise. But since none of these dispositions is actually removed, the agent is in fact able to do otherwise, despite the set up. Frankfurt’s claim to have shown that responsibility is compatible with the inability to do otherwise is thus mistaken.

How could there possibly have been any disagreement on this point? Consider this hypothesis: there is a type of ability, ability_V, that Vihvelin is concerned with when she maintains that, even in Frankfurt scenarios, agents are able to do otherwise. And there is a different type of ability, ability_O, that her opponents are concerned with when they deny that, in Frankfurt scenarios, agents can do otherwise. Vihvelin is right that, in Frankfurt scenarios (at least in prior-sign cases), the agents have the ability_V to do otherwise. Her opponents are right that, in those scenarios, the agents lack the ability_O to do otherwise. (So maybe we CAN all be friends.)

Vihvelin’s concern is, I think, roughly, (i) above. The would-be intervener doesn’t actually mess with such abilities. But the presence of the would-be intervener arguably undermines abilities of some of the other types.

Vihvelin says that her target is the ‘can’ that is relevant to moral responsibility. If the agent in the Frankfurt scenario is responsible for what she does, then obviously no ability that is relevant to moral responsibility is missing. Vihvelin’s opponents might be tempted to say that Frankfurt’s argument shows that NO ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility, but perhaps that is too strong. Surely certain powers or general capacities for deciding and acting otherwise are retained by the agents in Frankfurt scenarios (at least in the prior-sign versions). Perhaps it should be accepted that, in a sense, any agent possessing those kinds of powers to A can A.

But what about ability_O? If having that type of ability to do otherwise isn’t something required for responsibility, then do we really have any interest in it, are there really any contexts in which we are concerned with it? Those who accept Frankfurt’s argument perhaps owe an answer to these questions. Since this comment is already rather long, I’ll forego offering any suggestions here.

5. Is the ability that is relevant to moral responsibility a disposition (or a bundle of dispositions)? Sometimes, in excusing, we say that someone was unable to do something, or couldn’t do it, when it was some circumstantial factor that prevented them from doing it. I regret that I wasn’t able to get to the family reunion because the airport had closed due to inclement weather. None of my intrinsic powers to get to the reunion was removed by the airport closing. There is at least A sense of ‘can’ or ‘ability’ that is relevant to responsibility and concerns more than the agent’s dispositions.

Even setting aside circumstantial factors, here’s something that one might think: to be responsible for A-ing, one must have possessed a general capacity to A, and one must have originated one’s exercise of that capacity. Whether originating an exercise of a causal power is itself simply a matter of manifesting a disposition would seem to be a relevant question. Certainly some argument would be needed to show that such origination isn’t just disposition-manifestation, but what in Vihvelin’s paper shows that it is (or, alternatively, that no such origination is required for responsibility)?

6. What is free will? Vihvelin rightly chides earlier compatibilists for attempting to reduce or replace the question of free will with that of freedom of action. Free will, she suggests, is “the ability to make choices on the basis of reasons, an ability that can be exercised in more than one way” (p. 427).  To have this ability is to have a bundle of simpler abilities, such as an ability to form and revise beliefs in response to evidence and argument, an ability to form intentions in response to one’s desires and instrumental beliefs, and an ability to engage in practical reasoning in response to one’s intention to make up one’s mind what to do (p. 439). Each of these abilities is, in turn, a disposition or a bundle of dispositions. Hence,

FWBD: To have free will is to have the ability to make choices on the basis of reasons and to have this ability is to have a bundle of dispositions (p. 429).

As with abilities to act, the ability to make a certain choice that is of concern to Vihvelin is, she says, the sort that is relevant to moral responsibility.

But now, setting things up this way just about makes it incomprehensible that anyone should have ever thought that an agent lacking an ability to choose otherwise might be responsible for what she chooses and does. Whether or not that thought is correct, it’s comprehensible that some have thought it. That’s comprehensible because there are notions of ability to choose that aren’t at all obviously tied to responsibility. Many writers simply set things up differently from the start. Perhaps their target is a type of ability to choose characterized roughly along the lines of (iii), or (iv), or (v) above. (Again, it would help if they said more about what our interest in such an ability is.)

I admire much in Vihvelin’s paper. I’ve noted here some points on which I dissent, and I’ve raised some questions that bloggers may want to discuss.

Comments

[Neil]

I've long thought that bringing the dispositions debate and the free will debate together will prove illuminating (which is not to say that I think that it will solve the problem). I've argued that, implicitly at least, this is what Fischer is doing; we can understand his approach to FSCs by modelling it on Lewis's approach to finkish dispositions (see my critical essay on "My Way", in the January issue of Phil Q). If that's right, the distance between Vihvelin and Fischer is smaller than she concedes, though Fischer might be seen as doing what Clarke recommends, and distinguishing two kinds of ability (abilityV and abailityO in Clarke's terms), one susceptible to Vihvelin-style analysis, one not. Hence semi-compatibilism.

I have myself previously defended the line that counterfactual interveners are finks (in my contribution to the Online Philosophy Conference). I am no longer sure this line will work. Daniel Cohen and Toby Handfield have a paper coming out in Phil Studies which suggests one line of reply: that dispositions can be lost altogether, when finks are intrinsic to agents. I doubt that line will work, because agents are only responsible (given that the Vihvelin/Fischer lines works at all) when the disposition is *retained*. But a more serious problem, in my view, is that the line works only so long as we assume that the bundle of dispositions underlying agential abilities are always intrinsic to the agent. Dispositions need not be only intrinsic, and in the case of agential abilities they are not. If that's right, then FSCs have problems, but they are not the kind of problems best approached via consideration of finks.

[Neal]

Thanks for doing this, Randy. I learned a lot from your comments. Let me second one thing you said and then add another puzzlement to the mix.

I really liked the way that you separated the different ways one might understand 'ability'. I think you're right (and Vihvelin is right) that there is a clear sense of 'ability' that is only concerned with the dispositions of agents. And I feel like everyone in the debate can agree to that. So if we say that we'll call that ability 'free will', then everyone can agree that free will is compatible with determinism. After all, as Vihvelin rightly points out, dispositions can still exist even when not exercised.

But the big question is whether this is the sort of ability relevant to issues of moral responsibility. And, as you point out Randy, it's arguably not the relevant notion. At the very least, we seem to care about more than just whether an agent has the appropriate dispositions -- we also care whether the agent is in circumstances that are conducive to the manifestation of those dispositions -- or something like that.

My second point is a small note of puzzlement. In her paper, Vihvelin distinguishes the incompatibilists from the impossibilists by saying that incompatibilists think there are some worlds with free agents, whereas impossibilists think there are no worlds with free agents. I don't see why an incompatibilist must grant that there are worlds with free agents. After all, the incompatibilist is only committed to the following claim: Determinism is incompatible with free will. But one might also think that indeterminism rules out free will, too, right? Maybe I'm missing something here.

[Kadri Vihvelin]

Thanks, Randy, for those detailed, thoughtful, and thought-provoking comments.

Neil: I don’t think that John and I are saying the same thing at all. I am a compatibilist, an old-fashioned compatibilist, not a “semicompatibilist”. I believe that free will, including the ability to do otherwise, is compatible with determinism. I am not persuaded, nor do I think we should be persuaded, by the Consequence Argument, the Forking Paths argument, or any other argument for the claim that determinism robs us of the ability to do otherwise. I hold that we are morally responsible only if we have the ability to do otherwise and so I reject the semicompatibilist’s claim that we might be morally responsible even if we always lack the ability to do otherwise. I hold that Frankfurt stories, in all their many variations, fail to show that there is a way of depriving us of the ability to do otherwise while leaving our moral responsibility intact. Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me that John and I disagree about….well, more or less everything.

[Neil]

Kadri, John and you may disagree about more or less everything, nevertheless the methodology you're using is extremely similar. You suggest that we treat counterfactual interveners as finks: since agential abilities supervene on intrinsic properties of agents, we should follow Lewis, and bracket extrinsic elements. Thus, we bracket the counterfactual intervener when we ask whether the agent could have done otherwise. John follows precisely the same method, with the same justification, when he asks whether the agent was moderately reasons-responsive: since MRR supervenes on intrinsic properties of the agent, we treat the counterfactual intervener as a fink... Of course, John doesn't invoke Lewis or Martin, but the justification of the move is plainly parallel.

Since you share the same methodology, put to different ends, but justified in the same way, you are both equally the target of my claim that the move won't work because agential abilities (or moderate reasons-responsiveness) do not supervene only on intrinsic properties of the agent. But you, and not Fischer, are the target of Handfield and Cohen's claim that agential abilities can be radically finked.

[Kadri Vihvelin]

Neal, thanks for your comments and questions. Here are some answers.

1. General capacities (know-how, skills, competence) are indeed clearly compatible with determinism. No one has ever denied this nor has anyone ever thought that this is what is at stake in the free will/determinism debate. Determinism doesn’t have the consequence that we have no skills, nor does it have the consequence that we have only those skills we are currently using.

2. Randy and Neal both seem to think that my paper should be understood as an argument for the claim that general capacities are dispositions or bundles of dispositions. But I explicitly denied (see footnote 3) that I was talking about general capacities. To see the difference between general capacities and abilities, consider this: I have the general capacity to speak English – I am a competent English speaker. But I lack the ability, on this occasion, to speak English; I have laryngitis. My claim that abilities are dispositions or bundles of dispositions is meant to apply to ability, not general capacity.

3. The traditional free will/determinism debate is about whether determinism entails that no one ever has the ability or power to do otherwise. Since we all agree that the debate is not about whether determinism entails that our general capacities cease to exist whenever we are not exercising them, it must be about something else. What is this thing?

Here is how van Inwagen puts the problem (in his recent paper “How to Think about the Problem of Free Will”):

“The free will thesis is the thesis that we are sometimes in the following position with respect to a contemplated future act: we simultaneously have both the following abilities: the ability to perform that act and the ability to refrain from performing that act.”

Van Inwagen believes that determinism entails that the free will thesis is false. I disagree.

But we agree that the debate between us is a substantive one; we deny that we are using the word ‘ability’ in different senses. (ie that I am talking about abilityV whereas he is talking about abilityO). We are both using “ability” in the way that ordinary people use it, in contexts in which they say that they have both the ability to do something and the ability to refrain from doing it. My claim – my substantive and controversial metaphysical claim – is that we have this ability to do and to refrain from doing by having a bundle of dispositions.

4. On the question of why an Incompatibilist is not an Impossibilist: This is the subject of another paper (which I will be presenting at a symposium session at the Pacific APA), but here’s a quick answer. You aren’t missing something. What you say is correct given the definition of ‘incompatibilist’ standardly used in the literature. I believe that the standard definition is inadequate. What follows is my way of drawing the distinction.

The Incompatibilist is someone who believes that the truth or falsity of determinism is relevant to the question of whether we have free will. Since determinism is a contingent thesis, it follows that the Incompatibilist is someone who believes that there are possible worlds – worlds with the right kind of indeterminism - where we, or creatures like us, have free will. The Impossibilist, by contrast, is someone who believes that it is impossible for anyone (or, perhaps, anyone lacking godlike powers) to have free will. If you believe that we lack free will regardless of whether determinism is true or false, then you believe that it is impossible for us to have free will. This makes you an Impossibilist rather than an Incompatibilist.

[Kadri Vihvelin]

Randy, thank you so much for your comments. It will take me a lot of space to address them all, so I will begin by addressing your last comment.

6. You ask, if I am understanding you right, whether my way of defending Compatibilism starts too close to moral responsibility. I start with the idea that the ability relevant to moral responsibility is the ability to choose on the basis of reasons, argue that this ability is a bundle of dispositions, and then use Lewis’s analysis of dispositions to show that even in Frankfurt stories the agent retains the ability to choose otherwise. You don’t dispute that I have shown this, but you say that “setting things up in this way just about makes it incomprehensible that anyone should ever have thought that an agent lacking the ability to choose otherwise might be responsible for what she chooses and does”.

A couple of quick points, then a rather lengthy elaboration.

First, it ought to seem incomprehensible. If we were persuaded, by Frankfurt stories or by some other argument, that moral responsibility does not require the ability to choose otherwise, we were confused and one of the reasons we were confused was because we did not have a good philosophical understanding of ability to do (deliberate, choose, etc.) otherwise. My paper seeks to remedy this.

Second, it may have been a strategic mistake to set up my paper in the way I did, with the Meaning Argument, the too brief discussion of Lewis’s contextualist proposal about ‘can’, and my claim that the ‘can’ relevant to free will is the ‘can’ we use in contexts where we raise questions about moral responsibility. I didn’t need to set it up that way; in particular, I did not need to restrict the free will ‘can’ to contexts of moral responsibility. (I could have said something like ‘contexts of decision-making’.) However, in that case the paper would have been more complicated.

The elaboration:

Until Frankfurt came along the so-called Principle of Alternate Possibilities was regarded as a platitude or even an a priori truth. Everyone agreed that if determinism entails that we are never able to do (or choose to do) otherwise, then we are never morally responsible; the only question was whether determinism really has this entailment, and this was generally thought to turn on the question of whether a Conditional Analysis (that is, the Simple Conditional Analysis) of ‘could have done otherwise’ is correct.

And I think just about everyone in those days agreed that the relevant ‘could’ is the ‘could’ of ‘has the ability’ or ‘is able to’. It was assumed, without much discussion, that this “could” is of interest at least partly because it’s necessary for moral responsibility. But the examples used to test proposed analyses were not restricted to contexts where we are asked to consider whether someone is morally responsible for an action. That is, it was assumed that we have a common concept of ability to do otherwise that is robust enough to investigate independently of questions of moral responsibility. And it was assumed that the debate between Compatibilists and Incompatibilists is the debate about whether this thing (the ability to do otherwise) is compatible with determinism.

(Today it appears that only Peter van Inwagen sees the question this way. I’m thinking of his recent paper “How to Think about the Problem of Free Will.” I agree with him. Well, I think it’s a bit more complicated than he suggests, but I basically agree with him that there is something about which compatibilists and incompatibilists can have a genuine metaphysical disagreement.)

Frankfurt changed all that. Even though his argument was a failure insofar as the debate about whether his thought experiment succeeded in refuting PAP is still ongoing, he succeeded in the following, incredibly important respect: Almost all Compatibilists reject the former platitude/a priori truth and assert what would previously have been ‘almost incomprehensible’: that moral responsibility for action does not require the ability to do or even choose otherwise. And some Incompatibilists agree and others reserve judgment. Compatibilists tend not to be interested in metaphysics so they have almost entirely abandoned the traditional free will/determinism debate. (That is, the pre-Frankfurt debate about whether determinism entails that we lack the ability to do otherwise.) They have left the field to the Incompatibilists. But since lack of challenge tends to result in lack of argument, the current free will literature is almost entirely devoid of arguments about what was once the central issue: Does determinism really entail what it intuitively seems to entail: that we are never able to do otherwise?

One of the things I was trying to do, in writing this paper, was to restore the traditional question to discussion by pointing out that Compatibilists gave up too soon. The failure of the Simple Conditional Analysis does not refute a more complex Conditional Analysis. And the failure of a more complex Conditional Analysis would not refute the claim that abilities generally, and the ability to choose for reasons more specifically, are dispositions.

I addressed your last comment first, because it goes to the heart of the paper and in addressing it I see how my remarks about contextualism and moral responsibility at the beginning of the paper may have given the wrong impression. It’s true that in this paper, I was mostly concerned with defending the claim that there is a way of understanding ability to choose otherwise which is intuitively plausible, intuitively necessary for moral responsibility, and clearly compatible with determinism. But this is not because I think that we can raise questions about ‘can’ and ‘ability’ only in contexts of moral responsibility. And it’s not because I think that that we can sensibly debate the free will/determinism question only by subsuming it under the moral responsibility/determinism question. That is, unlike the vast majority of Compatibilists, I think that the question: “Does determinism entail that we don’t have the kind of free will we think we have? “ is a genuine question in metaphysics and should be treated as such.

[Cihan Baran]

Hello there,

(1) Kadri Vihvelin, you write that "I am not persuaded, nor do I think we should be persuaded, by the Consequence Argument, the Forking Paths argument, or any other argument for the claim that determinism robs us of the ability to do otherwise."

Well, this just makes me wonder what your reaction would be to the classical manipulation arguments and Al Mele's Zygote argument. The agents in these arguments satisfy all the conditions you set out for moral responsibility and intuitively, they do not seem morally responsible. Here is the Zygote Argument as it was discussed here at GFP:

Diana creates a zygote Z in Mary. She combines Z’s atoms as she does because she wants a certain event E to occur thirty years later. From her knowledge of the state of the universe just prior to her creating Z and the laws of nature of her deterministic universe, she deduces that a zygote with precisely Z’s constitution located in Mary will develop into an ideally self-controlled agent who, in thirty years, will judge, on the basis of rational deliberation, that it is best to A and will A on the basis of that judgment, thereby bringing about E. If this agent, Ernie, has any unsheddable values at the time, they play no role in motivating his A-ing. Thirty years later, Ernie is a mentally healthy, ideally self-controlled person who regularly exercises his powers of self-control and has no relevant compelled or coercively produced attitudes. Furthermore, his beliefs are conducive to informed deliberation about all matters that concern him, and he is a reliable deliberator.

1. Because of the way his zygote was produced in his deterministic universe, Ernie is not a free agent and is not morally responsible for anything.

2. Concerning free action and moral responsibility of the beings into whom the zygotes develop, there is no significant difference between the way Ernie’s zygote comes to exist and the way any normal human zygote comes to exist in a deterministic universe.

3. So determinism precludes free action and moral responsibility.

Well, I just have an urge to say -tongue-in-cheek-, if Ernie can do otherwise, why doesn't he?

I don't think we necessarily need this version of manipulation arguments. I think agents that are manipulated and yet behave on the basis of reasons "can do otherwise" according to you but I'll just stick to the Zygote argument since I think it is the most powerful form of such arguments.

(2) Your paper does not really touch on "sourcehood" worries. (i.e. In order to be morally responsible, one must be the ultimate source of one's actions.)

However, I believe that such worries can be relevant to your arguments as well. The main thesis of your paper is that having the relevant ability for moral responsibility is "to have a bundle of dispositions".

But do we have any control or say in what kind of dispositions we are thrown into the world with? Consider Susan Wolf's thought experiment:

Jojo is the favorite son of Jo The First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country. Because of his father's specail feelings for the boy, Jojo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, it is not surprising that little Jojo takes his father as a role model and develops values very much like Dad's. As an adult, he does many of the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He is not coerced to do these things, he acts according to his own desires. Moreover, these are desires he wholly wants to have. When he steps back and asks, "Do I really want to be this sort of person?", his answer is resoundingly "Yes"...

I think that JoJo lacks the relevant disposition that will give him the ability to make choices based on reasons and by your criteria, he would not be responsible.

But then, isn't it ultimately a matter of chance that some of us have the relevant bundle of dispositions and others don't have such dispositions? And if so, wouldn't this lead to an asymmetric view of responsibility where we can praise people (because they have the relevant dispositions) and yet cannot blame them (because they lack these)? And wouldn't this ultimately put you in the camp of compatibilists that are not very much distinguishable from hard determinists as you say in page 434?

Lastly, I really enjoyed reading your paper. Thanks for putting it online.

[Randy Clarke]

Kadri:

There's something like a general capacity that you've (temporarily) lost when you have laryngitis: you've temporarily lost the general capacity to speak. I see that it isn't skill, or competence, or know-how, that you're analyzing. And I grant that we can call it ability. I don't think it's the only kind of ability that's of importance to us.

I doubt that van Inwagen's formulation of the free will problem in terms of ability to do otherwise suffices to specify what the problem is. Could it be that there's some type of such an ability that's compatible with determinism, and some other type that isn't, and both are of some importance to us, and both are things we sometimes mean to refer to? (A few years ago, I never thought I'd say such things; maybe it's the Florida heat getting to me.)

Seeing things this way doesn't commit one to holding that the dispute over compatibilism is merely verbal. For some writers seem to think that no interesting ability do otherwise is (or isn't) compatible with determinism.

Neal:

Did you mean to say that there can't be intrinsic finks (that leave the respective dispositions in place)? Suppose we place a tiny fink in a sugar cube. The sugar retains the dispositional properties that make for solubility, but the cube won't dissolve if dropped in water.

[Neil]

Randy, did you mean "Neil", not "Neal"? Anyway, I certainly don't think there can be intrinsic finks. Suppose that a certain material was disposed to crumble into dust at the slighest pressure, but due to an intrinsic fink, it was sturdy. Do we still want to say it has the disposition to crumble *at all*? I think not. Note that the material might be widely used in the construction industry! This is the line defended by Choi.

[Randy Clarke]

There's an interesting Neil that I meant to refer to.

I'll take a look at that paper by Choi.

You describe your material as sturdy. So the disposition to crumble that it previously had has been removed. Not so in the case of my sugar cube and its solubility. Its fink hasn't acted, because the cube hasn't been dropped into water.

Consider the opposite sort of case. A cube of some substance lacks the causal basis for solubility. But it has within it a fink that will change its chemical make-up so that it acquires that basis, if it is ever dropped into water.

[Neil]

A plausible principle: an object has a disposition, if (inter alia) any intrinsic duplicate of that object also has that disposition. Actually I don't think that's quite right (because I think there can be extrinsic causal bases for dispositions). But it's a good first pass.

[Kadri Vihvelin]

Cihan:

I reject the first premise of the Zygote argument because I am a Compatibilist and because I accept the second premise.

I don’t find the Zygote argument even remotely compelling, so I am curious: Why do you think it’s the most powerful of the manipulation arguments?

I should explain something. I distinguish the Incompatibilist from the Impossibilist (see my answer to Neal, above). Since the Incompatibilist thinks that free will is possible, but only at indeterministic worlds, whereas the Compatibilist believes that free will is possible at deterministic as well as indeterministic worlds, the Incompatibilist has the burden of proof. She needs an argument of the form: Free will entails X, X entails indeterminism; therefore free will entails indeterminism. The Consequence argument fits that form. The Zygote argument does not (at least not without much more unpacking of the premises).

You’re right that in this paper I do not address ‘sourcehood’ worries. My view, in a very crude nutshell, is that the relevant notion of ultimate sourcehood is, on closer examination, either impossible for a human being to satisfy or compatible with determinism. I think that the best arguments for incompatibilism are arguments for the conclusion that determinism deprives us of the ability to do otherwise and it is these arguments that I try to answer by defending FWBD.

Susan Wolf’s JoJo case. I think you might have misunderstood what I was doing in this paper. I was not offering an analysis or even a sufficient condition for free will (or morally responsible action). My claim – FWBD – should be thought of as a kind of schema for a compatibilist account. (Some people have even responded by saying that FWBD could be accepted by an incompatibilist. I used to think that this was crazy, but I’m not so sure anymore.) FWBD is compatible with Wolf’s account, but does not imply it. If you think that Wolf’s account gets the wrong results, tinker with the bundle of abilities.

Your real worry, I believe, is “sourcehood”. You ask: “But do we have any control or say in what kind of dispositions we are thrown into the world with?” The answer, of course, is “no”. I believe that the starting point for thinking sensibly about free will and responsibility is coming to terms with this. Our origins are not in our control and we begin life with no control over anything. Despite this, we somehow acquire control (or at least appear to acquire control) as we grow up. If anything can give us control, it seems that intrinsically based abilities can. I say that these abilities can be understood as dispositions and thus shown to be compatible with determinism.

Randy:

Why do you think that van Inwagen’s formulation of the free will problem fails to specify what the problem is?
I agree that we use ‘ability’ in more than one way, but I’m inclined to believe that the ability you named ‘abilityV’ is conceptually central and that we can define the others in terms of it. Here’s a quick shot at it. To have abilityV to do something is to have “what it takes” to do that thing, where ‘what it takes’ includes know-how, skills, and competence and the physical capacity to use these skills. When we say that the pianist with the broken fingers has the ability (“general capacity”) to play piano, we mean that she would have abilityV if her body had not let her down. When we say that the pianist without a piano lacks the ability to play, we mean that she has abilityV but lacks the opportunity (the circumstances aren’t friendly). When we say that the pianist with a piano has the ability to play, we mean that she has abilityV and also the opportunity (“she’s got what it takes and the circumstances are right”). This way of using ‘ability’, in contrast with ‘opportunity’, provides further support for my claim that abilityV, rather than ‘general capacity’, is conceptually central. Finally, we sometimes use ‘S has the ability to do X’ to mean something like “she has ability V to do X and also ability V to use her reasoning ability to bring it about that she chooses to do X”. (More controversially, this is equivalent to “S has the abilityV to do X and it’s up to her/she has a choice about whether she exercises that ability.”)

So, yes, it’s a bit more complicated than what van Inwagen says, but if what I say above is even roughly right, then we’ve got the tools to make quite a bit of progress in figuring out what the disagreement between compatibilist and incompatibilist is supposed to be. Does determinism entail that we never have any abilitiesV because, despite what I claim, they are not properly understood as dispositions? (Perhaps they are agent-causal powers.) Or is determinism compatible with abilitiesV understood as dispositions but entails, rather, that we always lack opportunity to exercise any unexercised ability; the circumstances are always unfriendly. Or does determinism entail that we lack some third thing (agent-causation?) that would make it true that it is “up to us” whether we exercise our abilitiesV?

There is more to say, but it’s late so I’ll stop for now.

[Randy Clarke]

Kadri:

I think a sensible incompatibilist answer to your question is that determinism entails that it is never up to us (we never have a choice about) whether we exercise the abilities of the sort you analyze. Whether its being up to us (or our having a choice about this) requires agent causation is a further question.

Neil:

Nothing in my example violates your principle. Here's another example. Suppose there was something we could mix with water so that the resulting mixture, though liquid, would instantly freeze if anything weighing as much as a human being pressed upon it. While liquid, it would be disposed to swallow up dense objects. But it would loose that disposition as soon as anyone stepped on it. This could be useful stuff. It could flow, but you could walk across it without getting your shoes wet.

I do think that if we put our heads to it, we could think of plenty of real-world things with intrinsic finks. Intrinsic masks are certainly easy to find. (I believe Molnar desribes several.)

[Kip Werking]

Here are some short responses to comments by Kadri:

[BTW Manuel, the title of this post really made me laugh.]

“I reject the first premise of the Zygote argument because I am a Compatibilist and because I accept the second premise.”

This expands to:

If Compatibilist AND No-Difference principle -> ~(Original-Design-Undermines-Freedom)

But the Zygote Argument was designed to test compatibilism. So it seems awkward, or circular, to rely upon compatibilism in dismissing it. Perhaps you mean: the concept of freedom (or free will, or moral responsibility) I use is consistent with original-design as described in the Zygote Argument.

But now the greater larger question comes is: is this notion of freedom idiosyncratic? When people say “he has free will” or “he acted freely”, is this what they mean? Mele himself feels the pull of the incompatibilist intuition here, even if he doesn’t succumb to it, and so more needs to be said (I think) than “I come to this argument with preexisting compatibilist commitments and so my response to the argument follows from these beliefs.” One way to test this would be to go out, and ask people if Ernie could still be free if his entire life was designed in this way. I suspect that 1. answers would vary wildly depending upon how the question is framed and 2. although the answers would not be consistently incompatibilist, they would also be far from consistently hard compatibilist. [This is at least one way to get closer to the truth; many Gardeners have reminded me that common usage may not be the sole criterion for a term’s meaning.] If so, then one might wonder whether such a notion of freedom, which allows agents like Ernie to be free, is idiosyncratic or revisionist.

“I should explain something. I distinguish the Incompatibilist from the Impossibilist (see my answer to Neal, above). Since the Incompatibilist thinks that free will is possible, but only at indeterministic worlds, whereas the Compatibilist believes that free will is possible at deterministic as well as indeterministic worlds, the Incompatibilist has the burden of proof.”

I think it is dangerous, and confusing, to start using terms of art in nonstandard ways. If by incompatibilist, you mean something other that what philosophers traditionally mean (that free will and determinism are incompatible), I think it would be better to label your term incompatibilism* (or some other thing), to avoid confusion. [Note that the other Neal, namely Neil, also tends to use the term incompatibilist in an unusual way: where free will and determinism are incompatible and furthermore, they are incompatible because determinism, and not just luck, is especially threatening to free will. Perhaps he should call his term incompatibilism**.]

“Your real worry, I believe, is “sourcehood”. You ask: “But do we have any control or say in what kind of dispositions we are thrown into the world with?” The answer, of course, is “no”. I believe that the starting point for thinking sensibly about free will and responsibility is coming to terms with this. Our origins are not in our control and we begin life with no control over anything. Despite this, we somehow acquire control (or at least appear to acquire control) as we grow up. If anything can give us control, it seems that intrinsically based abilities can. I say that these abilities can be understood as dispositions and thus shown to be compatible with determinism.”

I don’t think anyone doubts that humans have certain abilities and powers, and some measure of control over their lives, and that all of this is consistent with determinism. The question is whether these powers, and this measure of control, as consistent with determinism, is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of “free will” (whatever that is).

[Cihan Baran]

Hello there,

Thanks for the response. You say that "My claim – FWBD – should be thought of as a kind of schema for a compatibilist account." Yes, indeed, I misread your paper and this clears up the confusion.

However, I still think that even such "schema" wouldn't be enough to establish the reality of moral responsibility.

Let me answer your question about why I find the Zygote Argument so compelling.

To me, it seems intuitively true that agents manipulated in a certain way (i.e. value engineering and such - see Mele's paper for the details) can not be morally responsible. If someone thinks that these manipulated agents can be morally responsible, there is nothing I can do to convince her otherwise. I would just argue that we differ about what it means to be morally responsible and that my sense of moral responsibility is the one we should care about.

(Since you reject the first premise, you think that manipulated agents can be morally responsible. I don't think there is anyway I can argue for that premise except by saying that it is intuitively true.)

What the Zygote Argument does is that it shows that there is no important difference between the effect that determinism has over us and manipulation has over the manipulated agent. In other manipulation arguments, the agent already has some control that's being bypassed. Here, the agent has no control to begin with. This is the difference that makes it the most compelling manipulation argument in my opinion.

For this reason, I find it curious that you agree with the second premise, yet don't find the argument "remotely convincing", since the main objections in the last reading group targeted the second premise.

Daniel Dennett, regarding manipulation arguments in general claims, that there is a difference, that nature has no end. Nature is random but other agents have their personal ends. I disagree. One might construe goddess Diane as an insane Goddess with no real ends but purely random actions. The argument would still work.

You also write that "Compatibilist believes that free will is possible at deterministic as well as indeterministic worlds, the Incompatibilist has the burden of proof." I think the Compatibilist has the burden of proof for showing how free will at all is possible in the first place, for showing whether moral responsibility is a coherent notion - let alone actual.

And this is why I think that even such schema won't work and why such a philosophical project is unlikely to convince me. In my opinion, what all Compatibilists' arguments do is that given that moral responsibility is coherent, it would still be intact even when determinism is true. To me, it all sounds a bit like "look if we have a round square, we still have it in a determined universe." The problem is not here about the determined universe. The problem is about the round square, i.e. what exactly is moral responsibility?

If a compatibilist account doesn't address these (broadly put) "sourcehood" worries (the pull of the Zygote argument is that Ernie is not the "source" of his action), I don't think it will be successful, no matter how ingenious.

[Neil]

Randy, your example could be understand as possessing a complex disposition: to be liquid except in the presence of humans. As for intrinsic masks, consider a substance composed of two deadly poisons, but which in combination are essential to health. There is such a substance: sodium chloride. Are we disposed to think it is *really* poisonous?

[Mark Smeltzer]

Cihan,

You said,

To me, it all sounds a bit like "look if we have a round square, we still have it in a determined universe." The problem is not here about the determined universe. The problem is about the round square, i.e. what exactly is moral responsibility?

That comment would be quite scathing for compatibilists, except that you've got the whole situation flipped backwards. Compatibilists offer ostensive definitions to circumscribe what we're talking about when we utter the phrase "moral responsibility" (e.g. we define concepts like "Apple" the same way: we point to a series of different apples and say "Apple" to each one; it is only afterward that we can engage a philosophical project of trying to produce a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for apples) and it is the NON-REALISTS who retort silly, non-sensical things like, "Sorry compatibilists, but in order to satisfy the conditions of your foundational examples the subjects would have to possess an unintelligible, logically impossible feature of the will."

If you pointed to an apple and said "Apple", how would you react if someone replied, "Silly apple realist, don't you know that apples can't exist because because apple-essence is logically impossible?" Since all of us would be more inclined to say that the apple non-realist is begging the question, why do some jump the gun and assume that non-realism about DEMR is the default position? After all, the class of behaviors and attitudes that DEMR is supposed to underwrite are far more commonplace than apples...

Bottom line: if you're going to push the we've-got-the-more-intuitive-approach-so-neaner-neaner card, at least get your facts straight ;)

[Kadri Vihvelin]

Kip:

You accuse me of begging the question in my reply to Cihan’s question about my view of the Zygote argument. But that’s impossible. To beg a question, you must give an argument. I wasn’t giving an argument, either for or against the Zygote argument. I was simply reporting, in answer to Cihan’s question, that the Zygote argument fails to move me. (I added, gratuitously, that the reason for this is that I am a compatibilist. Are compatibilists supposed to be persuaded by the Zygote argument? Mele doesn’t appear to think so.)

There are better arguments for Incompatibilism than the Zygote argument. I gave a reply to the best of these arguments – the Consequence argument – in the paper that is the subject of this GFP discussion. Instead of insulting me, it might be more philosophically productive if you told me where you think my arguments fail.

You object to my distinction between Incompatibilism and Impossibilism on the grounds that it is ‘dangerous and confusing’ to use philosophical terminology in nonstandard ways. But this objection holds only if the terms are not defined clearly, and I have a clear definition. (See my replies to Cihan and Neal, above.) I also have a rationale. There are many different kinds of reasons for thinking we might not have free will, and thus many different kinds of worries that must be addressed. If I discover that a person claiming to be an Incompatibilist really believes that free will is impossible, then I know that I am wasting my time in trying to convince him that determinism and free will are compossible. To get anywhere, I have to discover why he thinks that free will is like ‘round square’. On the other hand, if my opponent believes that free will is possible, but only if determinism is false, then I insist that he explain to me what it is about determinism that robs us of free will. Appeal to intuition is not a good form of argument because the intuitions appealed to (for instance, intuitions about the predictability of our future actions or intuitions about the fact that we are not the ultimate sources of our selves) are often intuitions that support Impossibilism rather than Incompatibilism.

[tnadelhoffer]

Mark,

You say:

“It is the NON-REALISTS who retort silly, non-sensical things like, "Sorry compatibilists, but in order to satisfy the conditions of your foundational examples the subjects would have to possess an unintelligible, logically impossible feature of the will."

First, most non-realists are perfectly happy to grant that humans can sometimes exercise something like compatibilist control. They will also readily admit that people can and should be held accountable for intentionally and voluntarily violating basic social norms. The issue is whether it makes any sense to blame people. Everyone agrees that people who voluntarily violate social rules will have to be dealt with effectively. They simply disagree concerning whether these violators deserve to suffer. Self-creation is necessary for neither compatibilist control nor consequentialist notions of punishment and responsibility. But this just makes it clear that the non-realist is stalking libertarian and not compatibilist prey. More specifically, the target is often what I am going to call Ordinary Incompatibilism (OI). According to OI, most people believe the following two statements:

(a) Humans have the power to cause things to happen in the world without being caused to cause things to happen.
(b) This power is both sufficient and necessary for ultimate moral responsibility (of the heave and hell variety).

The non-realist then claims that (a) is impossible. Hence, according to OI, the conditions for the ordinary notion of ultimate moral responsibility are impossible to meet. If the compatibilist wants to step in and develop an account of the kind of control and accountability we can have, that’s fine. But according to the free will skeptic compatibilists ought not to pretend that they are giving us what most people think we already do have.

Now is neither the time nor place to argue about whether OI is correct with respect to what “most people” believe concerning free will, self-creation, and responsibility. As everyone here at GFP knows, shedding light on this issue is more challenging than it would at first appear. For present purposes, I just wanted to try to make clear that the dialectic of this particular debate—at least by my lights—is not as you repeatedly assume in the comment threads here. To see why, consider the following two stories (which are modifications of stories I used in an earlier comment thread to make the same point):

The Myth of Santa:

Rather than being told that Santa Claus does something that adults know is physically impossible--namely, delivering toys to all the children of the world via a reindeer driven airborne sleigh in just a single night--children are told instead that Santa appears in every single living room at the very same time and delivers all of the toys in the world at once. Moreover, imagine the children come to believe that if Santa lost his power to appear in every single living room at the very same time, there would be no more presents. Surely, it is possible for a number of children to come to believe in a creature with a power that all adults recognize is logically impossible. But of course Santa cannot have this power. So, at least according to the point of view of the children who believe in the myth of Santa, they will no longer get any presents.

The Myth of Self-Creation:
As the result of (a) their subjective phenomenological experiences of control and openness, and (b) the things their parents teachers, pastors, and priests teach them about responsibility, individualism, morality, and free will, children come to believe that humans beings are creatures that have the power of self-creation (or at least the power of re-creation). Moreover, by the time they become adults most of these children will have come to believe—partly owing to religious fables—that if we did not have this power, we would no longer be responsible. But according to the free will skeptic this kind of power is impossible. Hence, at least according to the people who come to believe the myth of self-creation and ultimate moral responsibility, we are not morally responsible.

Viewing the debate in this way makes it clear that it is not the non-realist who is peddling in ”silly and non-sensical” statements at all. They are simply fleshing out what they take to be the ordinary notions of free will and ultimate responsibility and the purported flaws therein. Of course, if you want to deny that many (or most) people do believe in these things, so be it. But be prepared to be called to the mat for data supporting your claim.
For now, reconsider your aforementioned remarks:

“It is the NON-REALISTS who retort silly, non-sensical things like, "Sorry compatibilists, but in order to satisfy the conditions of your foundational examples the subjects would have to possess an unintelligible, logically impossible feature of the will."

I have tried to show that the non-realist who is the target of you ridicule is little more than a straw man. I have also tried to show that at least according to the dialectic, it is “Joe Six Pack” and not the free will skeptic who is interested in fairy tales and illusions. Indeed, the latter is merely trying to plumb the depths of the inconsistencies, confusions, and contradictions that are endemic to how most people view themselves in relation to the material world around them.

[Kip Werking]

Kadri,

Woah, woah, woah! I apologize if my earlier remarks were too biting. But still, when did I ever "insult[] you"? At worst, I accused you of begging the question, which is something that philosophers do all of the time, even here at the Garden, and such accusations are not taken to be ad hominem or personal insults. (In fact, in the post immediately after yours, Mark accuses non-realists of begging the question against compatibilists; I did not take this as a personal insult and I don't think anyone else did either.)

You write:

"To beg a question, you must give an argument. I wasn’t giving an argument, either for or against the Zygote argument."

But you also wrote this on Mar 2, 2007 1:04:19 AM:

"I reject the first premise of the Zygote argument because I am a Compatibilist and because I accept the second premise."

That sounds like an argument to me, or at least something close enough to an argument to beg the question. And, indeed, I explained how I thought it begged the question: the Zygote Argument is supposed to test the truth of compatibilism and yet you cite compatibilism as a reason for rejecting it.

"Are compatibilists supposed to be persuaded by the Zygote argument? Mele doesn’t appear to think so."

Well, I find the argument very persuasive, but I suspect we may be using different concepts of "free will." Still, even though Mele doesn't find the argument convincing, he says more, in rejecting it, than "I am an agnostic autonomist, so obviously this argument wouldn't move me."

You also write:

"But this objection holds only if the terms are not defined clearly, and I have a clear definition."

No, I think the objection holds, for practical reasons, even if you do clearly define the terms. Consider Mark's example with the apple. Suppose we are all fruit specialists, and debating the merits of different fruits. Now suppose that you clearly define the term "apple" to mean something different, and narrower, that everyone else defines it. The fact that you've clearly advertised your revisionist definition doesn't seem to inoculate you against criticism. There is nothing wrong with doing this, in a normative sense, but there remains a danger of confusion: when people see apple, they think of the traditional, wider definition.

Furthermore, all of the reasons you cite for redefinining "incompatibilist" also argue for definining "incompatibilist*" in the same way. So why not just use the term incompatibilist*?

[Kadri Vihvelin]

Randy and Neil:

I’m finding your exhange about the possibility of intrinsic finks very interesting. I had assumed that intrinsic finks are possible (at least in complex things like persons), but now I’m not so sure. I need to think more about this.

Neil:

Why do you think that dispositions can have an extrinsic causal basis?

Cihan:

Thanks for explaining to me that you are an Impossibilist. I can now understand why nothing in “Free Will Demystified” was the least bit persuasive to you; I was attempting only to persuade those who think that free will and moral responsibility are possible. Philosophy is hard; one step at a time, etc. Although I doubt it will persuade you, I do have a bit more to say about Impossibilism in the paper I will be giving at the APA. If you are interested, I can email you the long version of that paper.

Mark:

I think that you are right about two important points:

i) If we set aside the determinism question and ask, instead: ‘Is free will (moral responsibility) possible?” our intuitions are on the side of possibility rather than impossibility, so the burden of proof (in the argument between those I call Possibilists – Incompatibilists as well as Compatibilists - and Impossibilists) is on Impossibilists.

ii) Even if you disagree about who has the burden of proof, Compatibilists have already done a great deal towards meeting their burden of proof. They have produced detailed accounts of free will and moral responsibility, revised these accounts in the face of counterexamples, worried about whether these accounts are intuitively plausible, and so on.

To your points I would add only this: In addition to the debate between those who think that free will is possible (compatibilists, libertarians, agnostics, etc.) and those who think that free will is impossible (the “free will nihilists”, “non-realists, “no free will either way” guys, etc.), there is another debate which we would do well to keep distinct from the first debate. This debate, now in danger of being forgotten, is the traditional debate about whether DETERMINISM would deprive us of the free will we would otherwise have. There is no point in having this second debate unless your answer to the first question (“Is free will possible?) is ‘yes’.

Kip:

Apology accepted. However, I think you have forgotten how argument works. The point of an argument is to persuade someone to believe something they don’t already believe. The usual way of doing this is by providing a valid argument and defending the premises of that argument. If I reject the premises of your argument, I don’t thereby beg the question.

If I had written a paper addressing the Zygote argument, I would, of course, say more than ‘I reject the first premise.’ But this is not a paper on the Zygote argument (nor is it a free-flowing discussion of topics connected with free will, including the Zygote argument); it is supposed to be a discussion of the argument I gave in my “Free Will Demystified” paper. I’m still waiting to hear what you think is wrong with my argument.

You dismiss my paper by saying “I suspect we may be using different concepts of free will.” Philosophical discussion would be pointless if every disagreement were treated as an equivocation. We should follow the Quinean stricture not to multiply senses unless we find ourselves asserting a contradiction. To show that there are different concepts of free will you must provide us with a case where we all want to say “S has free will and S has no free will”. Absent this, charges of using different concepts of free will is so much sand thrown in the eyes. A tired rhetorical device. I’m not offended but I think this sloppy use of charges of question-begging and multiplication of concepts is an offense to good philosophical practice.

Randy (again): In the flurry of comments and replies this week, I somehow never got around to posting the remainder of my replies to your original commentary. Here it is. (With a few small revisions, this is what I emailed you the week before the GFP discussion started.)

1. You make some good criticisms of Lewis’s Revised CA of disposition, and my Revised CA of ability. But they don’t worry me. Some are easily handled. Of course there can be probabilistic dispositions – I can’t believe Lewis didn’t think of that; maybe I overlooked a footnote. This is easily accomodated by revising the consequent of the Conditional to something like “there would be a .n probability of..” I’m not sure what the best way of handling masking is, but I’m pretty sure that there is some way because in practice we generally have no difficulty in distinguishing masking of an ability or disposition from lack of ability/disposition.

(There are exceptions and the exceptions are revealing. For instance, I think it can be plausibly argued that a time traveler is unable to kill her baby self. But David Lewis has plausibly argued that a time traveler may have both the ability (‘she’s got what it takes’) and also the opportunity to kill the helpless sleeping baby who is the time traveler’s younger self, and that our reasons for thinking she cannot are all bad reasons – the logical fatalist’s confusion of ‘can’ with ‘can, given all the facts’. My hunch is that we can learn about ability and opportunity as well as about dispositions and masking if we can understand the difference between the time travel case and ordinary cases.)

If my paper said or implied that the relevant dispositions must be deterministic, then that was a mistake. I’m not a Hobartian Compatibilist (my name for a Compatibilist who insists that free will requires determinism, at least so far as our choices and actions are concerned). I’m happy to allow that free will is compatible with (the right kind of) indeterminism. What I deny is that free will requires indeterminism.

So while you are right to point out that dispositions may be probabilistic and perhaps right (I would have to think more about this) that they can be unconditional and spontaneously manifesting, this doesn’t affect my main point. If abilities are dispositions or bundles of dispositions, then abilities are compatible with determinism because dispositions are. And if free will is a bundle of abilities, then free will is compatible with determinism. Now that I think of it, that’s ALL my argument requires. I don’t need to specify that the abilities that constitute free will are the abilities (whatever they are) that constitute the ability to choose on the basis of reasons. If someone has a different view about free will – if she thinks that free will requires the ability to choose on the basis of no reason, or if she thinks that free will requires the ability to choose for reasons plus some other ability, my argument still goes through provided you agree that abilities are dispositions.

Well, maybe not quite. The Incompatibilist claim might be, as you point out, that free will requires indeterministic dispositions of the unconditional and spontaneously manifesting kind, together with it’s being up to you whether, on the occasion in question, that disposition is manifested.

Well, perhaps. But now I want to know two things: i) why indeterministic dispositions are necessary for free will (as opposed to being one way of having free will); and ii) what it takes for it to be “up to you” whether the disposition is manifested or not.

(Why shouldn’t it be ‘up to you’ in virtue of having a set of abilitiesV? Or, if you think that abilitiesV are necessary but not sufficient, why shouldn’t it ‘up to you’ in virtue of the fact that you have abilitiesV and the circumstances are ‘friendly’?)

I’m a little surprised that you want to say that abilities to act are unconditional and spontaneously manifesting dispositions. It seems to me that you should agree with me that abilities to act are conditional (after all, I specify that they are conditional on something it is natural to describe as your will: on your choosing, deciding, intending, or trying to do the relevant act) and you should even agree with me that they may be deterministic. The place where I think you should disagree is about whether having a bundle of abilities is sufficent for free will. In order for it to be truly up to you whether any of your dispositions is manifested or not, you need something that is not a disposition of any kind (deterministic or indeterministic) – an agent-causal power. Or at least this is what I now think the Incompatibilist should say. (I’m still thinking about agent-causation and am only part way through your book. I’ll reserve my questions until I’ve finished.)

2. Your criticisms of what I say in my discussion of criticisms of the Simple CA of ability to do otherwise are well-taken insofar as I overstate my case by suggesting that Lewis’s Revised CA is corrrect. Obviously, it isn’t. The Austin golfer case shows that having an ability does not entail that in the right circumstances (ie. no fink or mask), an attempt to exercise it WOULD be succesful. Something weaker, like ‘might” or “would with probability n” is required. (But note that insofar as moral responsibility for failing to do or cause some X is concerned, “might” is too weak, and the probability has to be reasonably high.)

You object to my ‘yes and no’ answer to the question of whether the panic-stricken person is able to scream on the grounds that this goes against my remark that I am concerned with the ability that’s relevant to moral responsibility. But I don’t think it does. I say that the ability relevant to moral responsibility is the ability to choose on the basis of reasons, and it is this ability that the panic-stricken person lacks.

(Note, by the way, that this ability is not what you and others call a ‘general capacity’. The panic-stricken person has a general capacity to make choices for reasons, including the choice to scream when she is in danger. What she lacks is the ability to choose, right now (on this particular occasion, given the state of her brain at the relevant time) to make that choice. Her state of panic disables her, preventing her from using the reasoning skills and competence that she continues to possess. See my endnote 3 for a too quick attempt to explain the distinction between my ability (abilityV, as you call it) and what the literature calls ‘general ability’ (or ‘general capacity’, skill, know-how, competence, accomplishment). (I’m not sure if these are equivalent, but the terms tend to be treated, in the free will literature as equivalent.)

3. For my reply to this one, see my March 2nd post.

4. Again, lots to say, but it’s getting late so I will try to be brief. Sorry, but I don’t think we can all be friends quite so easily. You envisage the friends of Frankfurt responding by saying “Well of course we agree that there is an ability, abilityV, such that Jones has abilityV to do otherwise, but that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about another ability, abilityO, and FSE’s do show that this ability is not necessary for moral responsibility”. But Frankfurt’s claim was to show that no matter how you understand ability to do otherwise (abilityV, abilityO, abilityF, etc.) it is not necessary for moral responsibility. And the defenders of Frankfurt have always argued that the ‘flicker of freedom’ that (they concede) Jones retains in the stories is not sufficiently “robust” to “ground” attributions of moral responsibility. They can hardly turn around now and say that Jones’ abilityV to do otherwise is so robust and so obviously relevant to moral responsibility that they never meant to deny he lacked it.

My criticism of Frankfurt goes deeper than the three pages at the end of this paper. While I don’t claim that Black is a fink in all Frankfurt stories, I do claim that it is only by being either a fink or a mask that he succeeds in restricting Jones’ freedom in any way, and the only freedom he succeeds in removing is Jones’ opportunity to do alternative things with his body. In this paper, and also in my exchange with John Fischer in last year’s Online Philosophy Conference (forthcoming in Canadian Journal of Philosophy), I’ve used my account of free will as a bundle of dispositions to criticise Frankfurt’s argument. But my original (CJP 2000) criticism of Frankfurt’s argument was not based on any account (Compatibilist or Incompatibilist) of free will, and I stand by that criticism. In a nutshell, my argument was that insofar as Black is prepared to operate in the way that a fink or mask does – I used the term ‘conditional intervener’ – he deprives Jones of freedom of action (understood the traditional way to include the freedom to intentionally and voluntarily move one’s body in alternative ways), but he does not deprive Jones of freedom of will (again, understood the traditional way, as including the freedom to choose or decide otherwise, or at least to try or begin or begin to try to choose or decide otherwise). And, I claimed, freedom of will, even when not accompanied by freedom of action, is sufficiently “robust” for moral responsibility. That was one half of the paper. The other half of the paper examined the case in which Black is what I called a ‘counterfactual intervener’. A counterfactual intervener is someone whose intervention would be triggered by, and only by, an earlier (pre-action) sign of the subject’s overt or mental action . My argument in this section of the paper was, in a nutshell, that there are no good reasons for thinking that a Black who is only a counterfactual intervener deprives Jones of any freedom (of action, or of the will) whatsoever. If we think that he’s deprived Jones of any alternate possibilities, it is because we have succumbed to fatalist intuitions or arguments, or, perhaps, because we have engaged in fallacious (back-tracking) counterfactual reasoning. I concluded that, insofar as a Frankfurt story is told so that Black is only a ‘counterfactual intervener’, Black does not render Jones unable to do otherwise in any sense except the fatalist’s (“compossible with all the facts”) sense. So I deny that there is any abilityO (except of course the fatalist’s ability) such that Black renders Jones unable0 to do otherwise.

5. This is an interesting and good question. I have quite a bit to say about it, but I won’t say it now except that I agree with you that one (not standard, but legitimate) use of ‘unable to’ is in situations like the one you describe. These are cases where, intuitively, the fault is not in the agent but in the circumstances. (She’s got what it takes, but she lacks the opportunity.) I agree (though this is controversial; I believe Frankfurt defenders would deny this) that where X is something that we either fail to do or fail to prevent (getting to the family reunion, playing the piano, the death of a child) we are morally responsible for failing to do or prevent X only if there is something B (where B is some action we perform by moving our bodies) such that we could have done B and if we had done B, we would thereby have done or prevented X. (Or something like that.) And I agree that the relevant ‘could’ is not just abilityV; it is something like “had the ability V to do B and also the opportunity to do B”.

Why do you think that originating (do you mean agent-causing or do you intend this in some broader sense, and if so, what?) one’s exercise of a “general capacity” is necessary for moral responsibility?

Hmmm…looking at that part of my paper (p. 440, where I consider how the Incompatibilist might resist my claim that free will is a bundle of dispositions), I do dismiss agent-causation rather swiftly, in a footnote, with only the comment ‘free will includes at least one ability that is not a disposition…ad hoc…” That was definitely too fast. I will have to think more about this.

Insofar as I have a grip on the idea of origination, it doesn’t seem to me at all obvious that origination is necessary for responsibility. If I kick away a stone that would have stopped a rolling vehicle from continuing down a hill and off a cliff, I am responsible (or at least share responsibility) for the crash and destruction of the vehicle. But I do not originate the causal chain that culminates in the crash and destruction. If I fail to reach out a hand to save a drowning child I bear responsibility for the death of the child, but, again, I did not originate the causal chain that led to the child’s death.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Kip,

I explicitly accused apple non-realists of begging the question against apple realists, but I seriously doubt that anyone would be insulted by that claim. However, if you inferred from this example that it may be worthwhile to accuse DEMR non-realists of begging the question against compatibilists, then bravo! That would at least be a step in the right direction ;)

Tom,

Apparently you missed the thrust of my argument. If we collectively point at a situation, as we have been doing for thousands of years, and say, “Ah, here is a person worthy of our scorn,” or conversely, “Look! Here is a person worthy of our gratitude!” it borders on absurdity to respond that these statements are off base because they require that the agents in question possess a logically impossible power. How could the accuser possibly know this? In other words, if the supposedly requisite power in question is logically impossible, how could the accuser possibly know that a manifestation of that power would do the necessary work to add veracity to those statements?

That is why I brought up the example of the apple non-realist. Whatever magical, impossible feature the apple non-realist has in mind, when he declares that apples cannot exist, cannot possibly be a feature of the things the apple realist is pointing to: in the act of naming that set of objects “Apple”, the unstated, intensional definition cannot possibly contain logically impossible properties. There is no such thing as a logically impossible set whose members are all logically possible. For a set to be logically impossible, at least one of its members must be logically impossible.

Now, if compatibilists illustrate a large body of cases that exemplify the property that they name “DEMR,” it is analogously preposterous to assert that the entire set is invalid since it is at least logically possible that the compatibilists are naming an actual, observable phenomenon. It certainly stands to reason that the compatibilists may offer some good examples and some bad examples, and by scrutinizing the examples they offer, we may be able to discern principles that empower us say things like, “After further consideration, this particular case is not an example of DEMR for the following reasons…”

For example, it is logically possible that after a thorough consideration of all of the compatibilists’ evidence, we may yet conclude that virtually no one is blameworthy because virtually no one meets certain epistemic criteria. Or we may conclude that is a very rare thing when a persons’ character is actually expressed in a way that allows others to know of it (for situational reasons), and thus we are seldom justified in attributing praise or blame. These are the kinds of projects that the skeptic about DEMR could defend without placing himself within the non-realist camp.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Kadri,

Although the author(s) of the Consequence Argument intend it to serve as a defeater for Compatibilism, many of the core transfer principles can be used to demonstrate the impossibility of free will if they are valid. If we have good reasons to reject the Consequence Argument by invalidating those transfer principles, we have also rid the non-realist of his most potent ammunition. So, I agree with your point about the importance of addressing the Consequence Argument, and I applaud your efforts in that arena.

I will have to get caught up on my reading before I comment on your position specifically, but I find your approach intriguing nonetheless.

[Cihan Baran]

Kadri Vihvelin,

I am sorry that my original post caused a discussion unrelated to your paper. I am not an impossibilist by the way. I am an agnostic (or skeptic in the proper sense of the word - I suspend judgment. Or Humean if you will. After all these discussions, I play backgammon with my friends and Nature tends to my philosophical worries where Reason fails).

To be honest, I don't know what the proper ethics is. (I propose that in reading groups from now on, we should only post stuff that's relevant to the paper.) I was just curious about what you thought about the Zygote Argument that I find very convincing.

I should also note that I may not be philosophically competent/smart enough to engage in a technical discussion about causation.

If you excuse me, I'd like to respond to Mark's comments because I think he makes a good point.

Mark,

I think you make an excellent, stimulating point. First my apologies for sounding so scathing. That was not my intention. On the other hand, even though I think Compatibilists arguments are not enough, they are still worthwhile endeavors. The reason is that if you can get the round square, you will certainly require the other part: if you have determinism, you still have the round square. It's just that I believe the harder and more important part of of the project is explaining what moral responsibility is and how it is possible.

Onto your point about ostensive definition. It is true that so many times we make ostensive definitions about things and that doesn't necessarily mean logical impossibility.

Hilary Putnam wrote an essay called "Meaning and Reference" in 1973, which contained a famous Twin Earth experiment. According to this experiment, there is another earth exactly like our earth and with a substance that feels, smells, looks and functions like our water. However, Twin Earth's water* is made of XYZ instead of H2O like in our earth. Obviously, water* and water are two different things. Putnam argued that phenomenological or functional properties of something were not enough in defining what that thing was. He claimed that there was a "division of linguistic labor" and what something essentially is would be found by experts (in this case chemists who found that water's molecular structure was H2O.)

You could by ostensive definition identify what an apple is. However, some experts (botany biologists in this case) would have to do the linguistic labor of identifying what you really mean by apple. These experts could for instance identify the nature of apple's chromosomes, its position amongst and so on and so forth.

Now who is going to do the linguistic labor of identifying what moral responsibility really is? My bet is that philosophers. And if philosophers have done anything, they have shown that moral responsibility is not all that coherent. Instead of finding what moral responsibility is, this philosophical project progressed the other way. Moral responsibility might be something like the ghost or the soul, something we might have to give up on.

(I could also explain the reasons why I don't find moral responsibility as a coherent notion but I'll just refer the reader to Thomas Nagel's essay in his Mortal Questions and his reasons for thinking why autonomy is not coherent. I don't want to make my post much longer.)

There is another parallel I see with what you say and another philosophical debate. When Paul Grice and P. F. Strawson replied to Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" with "In Defense of A Dogma", they said things similar to what you say now. They said that "Look, all this analytic/synthetic talk might be circular. That doesn't seem very important, though. If you explained to someone about these things by giving examples [i.e. your ostensive definition] like 'round square', they'd still understand what you mean. And that's what matters." I think the important difference is that analytical/synthetic distinction stands to scrutiny. Of course, you have to shake your hands a little in the air and say "You know what I mean" and yes, I know what you mean. However, for moral responsibility, I think if you hold this concept to scrutiny, it just fails. What does it mean to have a control of the sort that would grant moral responsibility?

[Randy Clarke]

Neil:

To speak only for myself, I'm not in the least disposed to think that salt is poisonous. Though it does sometimes keep me awake if I eat too much of it late in the day.

My imagined mixture isn't disposed to be liquid. It IS liquid. Its being so is a matter of its having a bunch of dispositions, at least some of which are finkish.

If I remember correctly, here's one of Molnar's examples of an intrinsic mask. Midas has the same power you and I have to eat food. Unfortunately for him, he also has the power of turning everything he touches to gold.

Kadri:

We might wonder whether someone can be responsible for having A-ed even if he or she wasn't able to avoid A-ing. Am I reading you right in thinking that you accept that, where A-ing is an overt bodily action, this can be so?