Counting Heads

This will be the first of two posts inspired by my recent perusal of Peter van Inwagen’s article “How to Think about the Problem of Free Will” (forthcoming in The Journal of Ethics). The next post will be more substantive. This one is just for kicks. It also resurrects a discussion started by Neil Levy in the post “How many battalions does incompatibilism have?”

Van Inwagen suggests a “sociological point. Before the Consequence Argument was well known…, almost all philosophers who had a view on the matter were compatibilists. It’s probably still true that most philosophers are compatibilists. But it’s also true that the majority of philosophers who have a specialist’s knowledge of the ins and outs of the free-will problem are incompatibilists. And this change is due entirely to the power, the power to convince, the power to move the intellect, of the Consequence Argument” (p. 15 of version posted at van Inwagen’s homepage).

Now, I agree entirely that the Consequence Argument is a powerful argument that compatibilists need to address, and that it isn’t easy to show what, if anything, is wrong with it (my own attempt remains, perhaps deservedly, unpublished; my personal favorite response is John Perry’s “Compatibilist Options,” because it nicely encapsulates options compatibilists have offered over the years, including Lewis’, which van Inwagen, in his article, praises for talking about the problem of free will in the right way).

But I wonder whether van Inwagen’s sociological claim is accurate and whether the Consequence Argument has in fact convinced many people who were or would otherwise be compatibilists to become incompatibilists. The latter question would be very hard to gauge. The former is at least approachable.

Here’s how I have approached it. I considered everyone I could find who has written articles or books on the free will problem since about 1960 and started listing them (in no particular order). Obviously, I have left off people (I apologize to anyone I forgot!) and I ask others to fill in these lacunae (including confirming whether I have situated people below correctly or arguing about whether I am right to put them where I do). I think everyone I include has at least tried to attain and demonstrate a “specialist’s knowledge of the ins and outs of the free-will problem” (though van Inwagen may disagree since he seems to define the problem in a particular way—see post to come). Some, such as the last few compatibilists mentioned, may have published less on the topic than others, but I still take them to have a specialist’s knowledge (I’m sure I’m neglecting others who have a specialist’s knowledge but haven’t published much). If you disagree about anyone having the knowledge to be included on the list, I think it would be better not to make that claim publicly here at the blog (I suppose you might say something like “well, there are 4 compatibilists I think should not be counted but just 1 incompatibilist…”). I also did not list people who (to my knowledge) are untenured faculty or grad students (such as myself, Vargas, Sommers, Werking, etc.), on the assumption that we are still working to attain specialist’s knowledge! I suspect if we added these people, the proportions would remain similar.

(If nothing else, this exercise may help us come up with a near exhaustive list of the people who specialize in free will.)

Compatibilists

David Lewis, John Perry, Bill Lycan, Harry Frankfurt, Daniel Dennett, Michael Bratman, Peter Strawson, Gary Watson, Susan Wolf, Hilary Bok, Michael McKenna, Thomas Scanlon, Bernard Berofsky, Gerald Dworkin, Bruce Waller, Jay Wallace, Dana Nelkin, Joe Campbell, Thomas Kapitan, Keith Lehrer, Paul Russell, David Sanford, Phillip Pettit, Michael Smith, Terry Horgan, David Velleman
I think they count as compatibilists but please confirm: Michael Slote? Kadri Vihvelin? Kai Nielson? David Hunt? Paul Benson? Susan Buss? Ish Haji? David Zimmerman? Gideon Yaffe? Nomy Arpaly? Robert Audi? Mark Ravizza?

John Fischer? Tricky case but I think he should count as a compatibilist.
Al Mele?? (come on, Al, come out of the agnostic camp, though as far as I can tell, if you remain there, you get to be on a list all by yourself!)

Incompatibilists

Peter Van Inwagen, Fritz Warfield, Tim O’Connor, David Widerker, Randy Clarke, Carl Ginet, Robert Kane, Laura Ekstrom, David Wiggins, William Rowe, Roderick Chisholm, Richard Taylor,
and (the incompatibilist skeptics) Derk Pereboom, Galen Strawson, Saul Smilansky, Richard Double, Ted Honderich, Thomas Nagel
Is Eleanor Stump an incompatibilist?

Now, if I’m right about those marked with ?, it’s 38 compatibilists (not counting Fischer or Mele) to 19 incompatibilists. This a 66%-33% (or 2 to 1) ratio is just the way I predicted (and hoped) it would turn out for reasons I can share later.  Despite van Inwagen’s claim that among philosophers in general compatibilism is more common than among specialists, I suspect that the ratio is about 2 to 1 compatibilist to incompatibilist among professional philosophers, too (but I’m not about to try to confirm that empirically!).

In the meantime, please correct my list—perhaps it will move closer to 50-50—I’m open to empirical disconfirmation.)

Let me add, just in case someone misconstrues me, I am not arguing that this head count offers evidence for any philosophical position. Rather, it is (potentially) interesting information. I can imagine some interesting claims one might make with reference to this information, but I won’t make any (yet)—except that, so far, it looks as though van Inwagen’s “sociological point” does not seem to be accurate.

Comments

[Chris Franklin]

Interesting post Eddy. I was wondering about this question myself. I am pretty confident that David Hunt should be moved from the compatibilist to the incompatibilist list. I belive that Stump is an incompatibilist but I bet Kevin could speak more authoritatively on the matter. Is Hugh McCann an incompatbilist?

One thing that might be interesting to consider concerns the number of compatibilists you list that tend to think that the notions at stake in the consequence argument aren't the same notions that are at stake when it comes to the nature of moral responsibility. Here I am thinking about Gary Watson. Just a thought...

[Fritz Warfield]

A few scattered thoughts to begin:

1. Peter has (correctly) quoted me as saying something quite similar to what he says about this issue. Both of us, in making our claims, are talking about incompatibilism about causal determinism and free will. Neither of us, to my knowledge, has made any similar claim about moral responsibility and causal determinism or about any other compatibility or incompatibility claim.

2. I say this because I think, subject to correction of course, that some of your compatibilists are compatibilists about moral responsibility and causal determinism but have not explicitly taken a position on the compatibility of freedom and causal determinism.
That you say that Fischer, who has in many places argued explicity for the incompatibility of causal determinism and freedom is a tricky case but one you suggest is best thought of as a compatibilist confuses me. Perhaps this is what you'll be addressing in part two.

3. From the incompatibilist camp: You leave off McKay/Johnson [that's two!], who if I remember correctly endorse a modified consequence argument in their important paper presenting their challenge to principle beta of van Inwagen's version of the consequence argument. And Erik Carlson.
You also leave off at least some people from the nearby phil of religion debates who self-identify as *libertarians* (and so, incompatibilists about freedom and causal determinism). Some of these people certainly meet your criteria of having published papers on the free will problem, understood even as narrowly as I would prefer: papers on the question of whether freedom and causal determinism are incompatible - examples: my colleagues T. Flint, S.Goetz. How many you have left off from this group depends on what you meant by having "written articles or books on the free will problem" -- if you count people who have written on moral responsibility, even if they *don't* explicitly say anything about causal determinism and freedom, I'd think you'd also count people who've written on foreknowledge/freedom issues (especially those who explicitly take a stand on the causal determinism / *freedom* issue). [examples: Hasker, Plantinga, Fredosso, Zimmerman,...].

4. Of course, there are also people from the compatibilist camp who you leave off. The counting issue is sensitive both to what you take the problem to be (and your classification of Fischer suggests to me that you and PvI may not be talking about the same problem) and what you take to count as having "written articles or books on the free will problem". And as you pointed out, there is also the possibility of an equivocation (best left unexplored as you rightly suggest!) of the "specialist's knowledge" point...

[Neil]

Arpaly is a compatibilist about responsibility. Whether she is a compatibilist about free will is a difficult question. She says we have cheap will, you don't get anything for free. Kadri Vihvelin's a compatibilist. Ted Honderich seems now to be a compatibilist. You left out David Widerker on the incompatibilist side.

Two more substantive points. If we follow Fritz and PvI and separate the debates, we are left with problem that many of us no longer have any intuitions about free will. We take questions about responsibility to be the best (perhaps only) guide to questions about freedom. Indeed, I suspect that there's a (contingent) link between following the strategy they recommend and finding the consequence argument convincing. To the extent that one takes reactive attitudes as a guide to responsibility, and responsibility as a guide to free will, one will be left cold by the consequence argument (witness Angela Smith, Tim Scanlon, and Arpaly). To the extent to which one takes freedom to be independent of responsibillity, on the other hand, one may be forced (faute de mieux) to identify it with access to alternative possibilities, and be moved by the consequence argument.

The second point is just an expression of my ignorance. I don't know the free will debate prior to the '70s at all. But it seems to me that the consequence argument is just a formalization of the basic incompatibilist intuition. Is that not right? If it is, then we wouldn't expect it to have moved people much from their previous views.

BTW, I seem to recall Derk Pereboom saying (in conversation) that the compatibilist consensus that reigned in the 60s was something of an illusion. Many of the supposed compatibilists (he had Jack Smart in mind in particular) were free will sceptics, who nevertheless thought that punishment could be justified on consequentialist grounds. If scepticism had been a respectable position then, we would have seen more people coming out of the sceptical closet. Today, of course, all the best people are 'out'.

[Manuel]

Eddy, I know it is hard to believe and probably undeserved, but I actually have tenure!

[Manuel]

I think I know why Eddy would like those initial numbers to be right. Those ratios look suspiciously like some numbers he's talked about before in a not-totally-unrelated context.

Anyway, I'm inclined to be one of those annoying people who doesn't have a great deal of enthusiasm for these categories. I guess I'm officially committed to the view that (1) some not-insignificant chunk of the folk are incompatibilists, (2) so much the worse for the folk because compatibilism is probably but not definitely true, and (3) even if compatibilism is not true, something very close to it is, and the things described by this nearby thesis— free will*, moral responsibility*— play virtually the same functional roles as is played by the un-asterisked versions of these things. So, I guess I'm actually agnostic (although not an agnostic autonomist!), leaning towards compatibilism, but open to incompatibilist skepticism followed by conceptual revision or replacement. Or, you could just call me a revisionist. :-)

Smart is, I think, an interesting case of someone who doesn't neatly fit the terminological framework we tend to use. So is Henrik Walter.

If memory services, Arpaly signals that she is a semi-compatibilist in her new book.

[Blake]

You left off the incompatiblist list Kevin Timpe, Eleonore Stump, Linda Zagzebski, Richard Purtill, Richard Taylor, David Hunt (a source incompatibilist), John Sanders, Richard Swinburne, Bill Hasker, Ed Wierenga, Bruce Reichenbach, Robert Nozick, David Ray Griffin, Hugh McCann, Tom Flint, John Lucas, David Basinger, Donald Viney, William Lane Craig, William Alston, Stewart Goetz, and -- ahem, Alvin Plantinga and, well, me. As Fritz has already pointed out, there are a fairly large number of philosophers who were not included in your sampling. Did you have a more limiting condition on the population in mind?

[Andrei Buckareff]

For what it is worth, I suspect that MOST of the folks who endorse the causal theory of action (which is the "orthodox" view among those theorizing about intentional action) are compatibilists. Of course, there are some notable exceptions such as Randy Clarke. But most of the folks I know either personally or whose work I have read who clearly have compatibilist commitments. Among those who I am confident are compatibilists whose names jump to mind are Alvin Goldman, John Bishop, Berent Enc (R.I.P.), Robert Audi, and Lynne Rudder Baker. Also, I believe that Fred Dretske is a compatibilist. I know that Richard Feldman is a compatibilist. I suspect that the complaint that will be offered by those who wish to support PvI's claim is that most of the folks mentioned, while they work in the philosophy of mind and aciton, do not work primarily on the free will problem. I believe it has been suggested in places that folks who work chiefly on free will tend to be incompatibilists.

I have two complaints about Blake's list. First, he lists some untenured philosophers, something that Eddy did not do. Second, among the people on his list are people who work chiefly in the philosophy of religion and have published nothing on free will or the philosophy of action/moral psychology more broadly for that matter outside of thinking about issues about foreknowledge/providence and free will. This in itself may not be a problem. But what I conclude about some of the issues about free will in the philosophy of religion have few obvious direct implications for what I conclusions I reach about human agency (John Bishop's work in the philosophy of religion comes to mind here).

[Tamler Sommers]

I agree with Derk--I've never understood the controversy over Smart. There is nothing "Freewill, Praise and Blame" that a hard determinist or free will skeptic would not wholeheartedly endorse. For those who disagree (Manuel maybe?), can you identify a substantive difference between Smart and the hard determinist (hard incompatibilist, skeptic etc)?

[Tamler Sommers]

Also, a couple more additions.

Incompatibilist: Martha Klein
Compatibilist: Susan Hurley

[Tamler Sommers]

Also, a couple more additions.

Incompatibilist: Martha Klein
Compatibilist: Susan Hurley

[J. Coates]

Regarding Fischer, most of his explicit denials of the compatibility of free will and determinism came in the form of "the freedom to do otherwise" is incompatible with determinism.

Seemingly, this still leaves open the question of whether "free will" and "the freedom to do otherwise" are conceptually equivalent (of course perhaps, PvI would just say that I'm thinking about free will the wrong way).

Also, I think (for what that's worth)that Flint (and perhaps Hasker) should count for the incompatibilists. A large section of Divine Providence is spent developing a version of the consequence argument.

[Fritz Warfield]

Neil says: "If we follow Fritz and PvI and separate the debates, we are left with problem that many of us no longer have any intuitions about free will."

Though "can" is many ways ambiguous, most people manage to find one reading of it as "metaphysical power or ability". Or at least most people do. Are you free to continue typing? Free to take a nap? I don't think most people need to work backwards to their "intutions" about freedom (or lack of it) in these cases by thinking about moral responsibility.

But perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps the view doesn't imply that we have to work backwards in this way at all. But still, I'd like to hear to hear more about why if the two debates are separate (as they sure seem to be with so many people taking a variety of positions on the two issues!) people claim to be left without intuitions about freedom. I do know that Neil isn't the only one who says things like this.

If that view is wrong, what might help bring out the freedom intuitions, divorced from moral responsibility issues, is reflection on cases in which we ask about one's metaphysical ability/power to perform acts that sure don't seem to be morally important (in a typical setting)..... Something like -- You're about to put on your socks, are you free to put on your left sock first?

Andrei is right to suggest at least some of the names he suggests (depending, of course, on what exactly the criteria are, as already discussed).
And Andrei is of course right that some of the names proposed for the incompatibilist list have worked exclusively or primarily on freedom with phil of religion debates. But surely some of these people have taken clear stands on the relation between freedom and *causal determinism* (positions which don't always mirror their position on freedom and foreknowledge). If one doesn't want to include phil of religion people if their primary work isn't on freedom/determinism, that would be fine, but I'd suggest that we then also exclude people from the compatibilist list people whose primary work is on moral responsibility rather than on freedom/determinism. This way of doing things would leave us with shorter lists. And I'm not, of course, suggesting that any particular criteria of putting this sort of survey list together is best. No doubt different criteria would result in different lists and we can be pluralists about reasonably approaches...
But excluding some people because they don't work primarily on freedom/determnism and are incompatibilists while including those who don't work primarily on freedom/determinism but are compatibilists might, it seems, skew the list in one particular direction.

[Eddy Nahmias]

I find this discussion really fun--I hope others do too. When I was looking back for Neil's old post on this topic, I ran across some of the ones where we would go at it and go at each other as should happen on a blog, the ones with 80+ comments. I miss that.

Anyway, I was hoping to come up with a final list at the end of this discussion and may still try it, but I suspect it will be too controversial to satisfy anyone as being "final" and I'm not sure I'll have the time and energy (if anyone else wants to...).

We should add Robert Allen to the compatibilist side. We should also add Manuel Vargas, who I cannot believe I forgot (wasn't he born with tenure!). And yes, Manuel, I think the 2 to 1 ratio may be similar to the way non-philosophers think about the issue.

I agree that Smart is just like Pereboom (I taught him that way just yesterday in my free will seminar). But, like Richard Taylor, I didn't include him because they came to their views before reading the Consequence argument. (Charles Taylor, on the other hand, could conceivably go on the compatibilist side?).

I'm fine with most of the additions so far and it looks like it may move the balance towards incompatilists (I hate to admit that I don't know some of the people Blake mentions who work in the phil religion side of the debate).

I understand Fritz's points, but one thing to remember is that van Inwagen completes his discussion of the Consequence argument (1983) by saying that if it is not clear whether his use of "choice" in the argument (and the N operator) are relevant to the free will debate, then substitute for Np "p and in just the sense of having a choice that is relevant in debates about moral responsibility, no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p." This leads me to think that a semi-compatibilist should count as a compatibilist about free will and determinism and that the sense of "can" in the free will debate should be the one that people have in mind when they think about whether they can perform an act such that they can legitimately be held morally responsible for the act.

[Neil]

Fritz, you're perfectly right. We do have intuitions about ability divorced from the responsibility issue. Here's another stab at the point I was trying, badly, to make. In trying to construct an adequate account of free will, we need to think hard about the difficult cases. These are cases which, for instance, satisfy a preliminary account but which have features that make us unsure whether the account is adequate (think manipulation cases, for example). Now, many of us find that when we consult our intuitions about ability in these kinds of cases, they are simply too fleeting and weak to serve. We need to call in heavier artillery, by asking whether the action strikes us as one which, were it morally significant, would justify the attribution of reactive attitudes.

Here's a tentative hypothesis. We know (from the experimental work conducted by various folk) that when actions are described in a morally laden way, folk go compatibilist. When, however, they are described in less morally laden terms, they tend to go incompatibilist. It may be a similar phenomenon that underlies the fact that people who, like you and PvI, want to separate free will and moral responsibility, are more likely to be incompatibilist than those who treat them together. This is not intended to be deflationary of either view (I don't have a dog in this fight, after all).

[Kip Werking]

Thanks for the (paranthetical) mention, Eddy! This is a great thread and one that fascinates me. Some philosophers have expressed a certain resistance or suspicion about empirical polls like this. "Just because everybody else jumps off the bridge, doesn't mean I should too!" There is a kernal of truth to that idea. But there is also great value in doing polls like this to verify just how popular each position is, especially if others sometimes speculate about these empirical claims (as PvI has done).

I would also add that, like others, I find the spirit, if not the letter, of Fischer and Mele to be very compatibilist. Although Fischer disagrees with compatibilist accounts of the ability-to-do-otherwise-, he does not seem to think that such an ability is essential to fw (and he certainly doesn't think it is essential to mr). For example, in a recent article Fischer wrote:

"I have suggested that our acting freely is what gives our lives a distinctive kind of value--narrative value. Free Will, then, is connected to the capacity to lead a meaningful life in a quite specific way: it is the ingredient which, when added to others, endows us with a meaning over and above the cumulative value derived from adding together levels of momentary welfare. In acting freely, we are writing a sentence in the story of our lives, and the value of acting freely is thus a species of the value of artistic creativity or self-expression (understood appropriately)."

Mele also strikes me as compatibilist in spirit. Both Watson and Mele find something troubling about design scenarios, but where this seems to make Watson adopt a hard or revisionist compatibilist position (somewhere between compatibilism and non-realism/eliminativism), Mele's worries about compatibilism would seem to push him towards libertarianism, and not non-realism. In this way, he seems to be like PvI in reverse (who says that the failure of incompatibilism would just incline him to compatibilism, because his commitment to mr is so strong). This optimism about freedom/autonomy, in combination with his robust compatibilist account of autonomy (in contrast to his very soft libertarian view) suggest to me that he is compatibilist in spirit.

Unlike Neil, I think Eddy correctly identified Honderich as an incompatibilism (again, in spirit), even though he says strange things such as "both compatibilism and incompatibilism are mistaken". I think he's traditionally been associated with a hard determinism or hard-determinist-like position, and that would belong to the incompatibilist group.

I'm glad others brought Smart's view to my attention.

[Neil]

Kip,

Honderich seems to have changed his mind. See my review of his 2005 in Phil Quarterly.

[Kip Werking]

Neil,

I had intended, but forgot, to add "unless Neil knows something I don't." I'm very eagerly awaiting reading your review. :)

[John Fischer]

It is NOT tricky or puzzling: I am a compatibilist about causal determinism and moral responsibility. I believe there is a kind of freedom--acting freely or guidance control--which underwrites moral responsibility and is compatible with causal determinism. But I incline toward incompatibilism about causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise (regulative control).

In my view, "Free Will" is an umbrella term that can refer either to "acting freely"/guidance control or "freedom to do otherwise"/regulative control. One simply has to specify more precisely what sort of freedom one is employing the term to refer to.

[Kevin Timpe]

To answer a question from earlier up, both Stump and Hunt think that free will is incompatible with the truth of causal determinism as that thesis is defined in the CA.

[Blake]

Isn't Carlos Moya also an incompatibilist that we should add?

Here is my concern about the way the incompatibilist/compatibilist dichotomy is expressed, reflecting further on Fritz's concerns. It seems that one could believe that determinism is incompatible with certain kinds of moral commitments without being inconsistent with other kinds of moral practices as Saul Smilansky has argued. Thus, one could believe that determinism is incompatible with a "deep" morality where agents really deserve praise and blame and can be punished because of such dessert and yet is compatible with other moral practices. One could believe that determinism is incompatible with free will but not with all kinds of moral practices or judgments. One could believe that determinism is incompatible with seeing ourselves as agent causes or buck-stoppers but not as incompatible with being algorithmic difference makers. Don't we need to make such distinctions if we're going to count heads?

[Eddy Nahmias]

John, in saying you are a tricky case, I did not mean to suggest that *you* are being tricky! Nor do I think your position is puzzling. You have been extremely clear about your position, though I think others have been unclear when they say you believe that determinism is incompatible with *free will* but compatible with moral responsibility. But I would be curious to hear what ways you think people feel regulative control is significant (in your paper in latest edition of Watson's Free Will volume, you seem to be arguing that it is not significant for most things we care about--or is it a revisionist claim that it need not be considered necessary for most things we care about?).

I think Blake is correct that we would need to be very clear about exactly what we mean by "free will" (and what sorts of attributions and practices we associate with it) to say whether someone takes it to be compatible with determinism. I guess I am trying to follow van Inwagen as best I can in his recent claim about the power of the Consequence argument to have made more specialists in the debate into incompatibilists and in his 1983 claim I mention above that the relevant sense of choice in the Consequence argument (and I presume in the free will debate as he sees it) is "just the sense of having a choice that is relevant in debates about moral responsibility." Of course, that just shifts the discussion to what we mean by moral responsibility, and as Blake points out, we may mean various things by it.

Perhaps the only way to count heads would be this. Ask the relevant philosophers: "Regarding "free will" as you understand the concept (after all, you have developed a specialization on the topic), do you take free will to be possible in a deterministic universe?"

Of course, how to understand "deterministic universe" will complicate things too...

[John Fischer]

Actually, I think it is very common assumption of ordinary "folks" and also more reflective theorizing that we sometimes have genuine freedom to do otherwise--regulative control. This is an assumption of practical reasoning and also of assignment of moral responsibility. So Semicompatibilism really is a significant departure from the ordinary picture we have of Agency. Ordinarily, we think of ourselves as having the power to select from among genuinely available paths into the future. On my view, this may or not be so, but it is not necessary for either practical reasoning or moral responsibility.

[Fritz Warfield]

Eddy, You write:

"I guess I am trying to follow van Inwagen as best I can in his recent claim about the power of the Consequence argument to have made more specialists in the debate into incompatibilists and in his 1983 claim I mention above that the relevant sense of choice in the Consequence argument (and I presume in the free will debate as he sees it) is "just the sense of having a choice that is relevant in debates about moral responsibility." Of course, that just shifts the discussion to what we mean by moral responsibility, and as Blake points out, we may mean various things by it.

Perhaps the only way to count heads would be this. Ask the relevant philosophers: "Regarding "free will" as you understand the concept (after all, you have developed a specialization on the topic), do you take free will to be possible in a deterministic universe?"

****
About this latter point, I agree (close) to 100%. Depending on how one identifies the relevant philosophers, I think we'd get answers ranging from about 2/3 to 1/3 incompatibilist to 1/3 to 2/3 compatibilist.

But about the first point (and van Inwagen's quote about "just the sense of having a choice that is relevant in debates about moral responsibility"):

Peter takes himself to have *argued* successfully in other work that the proper understanding of 'having a choice' / freedom is *also* relevant in the moral responsibility discussions. This is very different from *stipulating* before the arguments begin that there is a sense of (or kind of) freedom that is relevant to moral responsibility.

If his arguments for the straightforward link he endorses are unsuccessful (as John F and many others think they are) I doubt he'd insist on maintaining the connection between the two debates by stipulation. So I don't think his quoted 1983 remark "just shifts the discussion to what we mean by moral responsibility" (about which there are of course many disagreements).

[Saul Smilansky]

Nice topic, Eddy, and an interesting discussion. I am struck by how conservative our FW debate is, on the compatibility question (not of course in the sense of the arguments for or against compatibilism, but in the type of positions we find). I see three relevant ways in which it could be less conservative:

a. Compatibility concerning X, but not concerning Y: for example, control or FW are compatibile with determinism (or absence of LFW irrespective of determinism), but desert or moral responsibility are not compatible with determinism.

b. Compatibility for other reasons: the standard compatibilist will say that FW/MR is compatible with determinism because despite determinism we *have* FW and/or MR. But utilitarians like Smart (as was pointed out) don't really care whether we have MR etc, but whether it would make the world better if we *held* people responsible. So they give a reply which sounds like a Yes on the compatibility question, but without really addressing that question (and for all we know thinking that actually there is no FW/MR). P.F. Strawson arguably does something similar, in a Humean way (i.e. no need to worry because we will keep holding people to be free and responsible).

c. Both compatibilism and incompatibilism: this keeps the question on a given X (unlike "a"), and remains within the traditional FW debate on compatibility (unlike "b"), but says that in some ways or respects FW/MR are compatible with determinism, and in other ways or respects not. Recently, Robert Kane has said some general things in this direction, and "contextualist" analysis of FW/MR fit that bill. I am probably the only guy now wanting to argue this systemaically, concerning a given instance (my "Fundamental Dualism" on the compatibility question is broadly the claim that we should often be both compatibilists and hard determinists at the same time).

I think that it would be good for the debate if all three directions would be tried out more. (a) has received the most attention. I think that (except perhaps for hard determinists) it has its limits, because as was noted most people care most about the sort of FW that is the basis for MR. (b) bypasses the FW debate, so naturally FW debaters are less attracted to it. Finally, (c) seems to me the most promising, and I am surprised that this is a road so rarely taken. In any case, I hope this typology is interesting.

[Tamler Sommers]

Saul, sorry that I'm not commenting on the main point of your post, but your offhand remark about Smart reflect a common but, I believe, mistaken interpretation of his position. And this relates to a more general confusion that sometimes arises about what hard determinists do, and do not, deny. I don't think it's accurate to say that Smart "doesn't care whether have MR or FW." He does care, and explicitly denies that we have MR or FW in the ordinary senses of the terms. Here's a quotation from Freewill, Praise, and Blame:

"most men do NOT feel that blame, in the way they use the word 'blame' would be appropriate if a man's action was the result of heredity plus environment. The appropriateness of blame and praise is bound up, in the eyes of the ordinary man, with a notion of freewill that is quite metaphysical. Admitedly, this metaphysics is incoherent and unformulated.... Nevertheless we can see that a rather pharisaical attitude to sinners and an almost unhealthy attitude to saints is bound up with this metaphysics in the thinking of an ordinary man if we look at the way in which very often his whole outlook and tendency to JUDGE (not just to grade) other men when he is introduced to, and bcomes convinced by, a philosophical analysis of freewill like the one in the present paper."

Now one might think that he is simply asking ordinary men to revise their notions of blame and judging but in the conclusion he writes:

"The upshot of the discussion is that we should quite as ready to GRADE a person for moral qualities as for his non-moral qualities, but we should stop JUDGING his. (Unless 'judge' just means 'grade' as in 'judging apples.') Moreover if blame in general is irrational, so must be self-blame or self-reproach, unless this comes simply to resolving to do better next time.

But he is fully aware that 'judge' doesn't usually mean 'grade,' and self-blame doesn't usually mean'resolve to do better..' So what is he saying? He is flat-out telling the reader here to stop attributing desert-entailing moral responsibility to ourselves and others. And NOT just for utilitarian reasons. Also because he thinks we ARE a product of heredity and environment, that the metaphysics underlying current notions of blame and praise is incoherent, and therefore that the belief in moral responsibility, as we understand it, is irrational.

I agree that his solution to this problem is utilitarian in the sense that he wants us to hold people responsible for bad behavior. But he wants this to be done with the explicit understanding that they do not deserve blame or punishment for their actions. No hard determinist or skeptic that I know of would disagree.

[Tamler Sommers]

Sorry for the double post. I left out a key word in the first Smart quote. It should read:

...bound up with this metaphysics in the thinking of an ordinary man if we look at the way in which very often his whole outlook and tendency to JUDGE (not just to grade) other men CHANGES when he is introduced to, and becomes convinced by, a philosophical analysis of freewill like the one in the present paper.

I left out 'changes.' Incidentally, I'm not unaware that Smart is making an empirical claim here. Does anyone know of any philosophers (or group of philosophers) that tries to test claims like that one?

[Patricia Greenspan]

These comments are of interest to me, in part because I think there has been some real change in the direction of incompatibilism in recent years -- at least to the extent of taking it more seriously -- whether or not it's all due to the Consequence Argument.

Fischer's notion of "semi-compatibilism" is a factor; but there still seems to me to be a largely overlooked view on these issues that might be called "libertarian semi-compatibilism." It's the view that free will in the sense that implies alternate possibilities is something important to us for its own sake (as part of our self-conception or the value we place on our efforts and our lives) and is incompatible with determinism, whereas all or most of our attributions of responsibility in practical life can be rendered compatible with determinism. This is my own view, though like others I've argued (at least in published work) mainly for the claim about responsibility -- e.g., in "Unfreedom and Responsibility," in F. Schoeman (ed.), *Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions* (Cambridge, 1987), and most recently, "Responsible Psychopaths," *Philosophical Psychology* (2003), 417-30. Readers have generally assumed that I'm a soft determinist, but I detach the notions of freedom and responsibility (as the title of the first article suggests) and understand freedom as implying the ability to do otherwise. Fischer, if I have him right, more or less sets that notion aside in favor of what a compatibilist sense of freedom, so I can see classifying him as a soft determinist despite recognizing one sense of freedom that's incompatible with determinism.

When I first started publishing on these subjects, in the late '70's, I was initially puzzled at the automatic assumption that I was a compatibilist on free will. I'm only now becoming aware how many recent compatibilists just *define* freedom in terms of responsibility. But besides that, various exchanges at that point (e.g. with Davidson, a then colleague) made it clear that the "hard-headed" side in this debate, the side that goes with science rather than religion, was widely assumed to be necessarily Humean. There *has* been a real change since then, I think, in whether incompatibilism is considered a respectable position among the nonreligious, even if the numbers have been slow to catch up -- at any rate, among people actually working in this area, many influenced by mentors with commitments established earlier. It would be interesting to collect data on philosophers outside the free will circle.

[Saul Smilansky]

Tamler, Smart indeed also has a specific (perhaps hard determinist) view on FW. But my point was that people like him, AS UTILITARIANS, need not, and can be agnostics, or hard determinists, or indeed compatibilists in the traditional sense. IF they are utilitarians, then the whole traditional FW paradigm (FW as a condition for MR, which is a condition for desert, which is a condition for e.g. actual blame and punishment) is thrown out, as it is simply irrelevant to the logic of the pertinent morality (which is consequentialist rather than, well, deontological in a broad sense). Of course someone may be pushed towards utilitarianism because he or she thinks that there is no FM/MR in either the libertarian or the compatibilist senses. I don't know which way Smart's thought developed here (was he first a utilitarian or first a FW pessimist). But the important thing is that FW/MR in the traditional sense inherently don't matter to utilitarians. That's why utilitarianism is a "bypass position" on the compatibility question, rather than a position within that debate. But it still might be correct (either because utilitarianism is independantly the right normative ethical theory, or because if one believed in hard determinism then one might be attracted to utilitarianism as the only way of justifying certain reactions and practices). Finally, if one is a hard determinist, then it is still very much an open question whether to opt for something like utilitarianism (but that's a different issue).

[Al Mele]

It's nice to see the post from Pat Greenspan. It's her first GFP post, I think.

[Patricia Greenspan]

Thanks, Al. It's actually my first acquaintance with the blog, so I'm sure I've missed a lot.

[Patricia Greenspan]

P.S. It occurs to me that, since "libertarian semi-compatibilism" also implies that libertarianism can be sustained against the objection from randomness, arbitrariness, luck, etc., a wider term is needed just to cover the form of semi-compatibilism that assigns importance to freedom in the sense that implies alternative possibilities, but perhaps denies that we can have freedom in that sense. For obvious reasons, "incompatibilist semi-compatibilism" won't work. But what would? Is there a term in use?

[Patricia Greenspan]

One more thing, to bring things back to Eddy's original question: a simple way of raising the issue for purposes of data-collection might be just to ask people whether they think there's a sense of freedom that's important for philosophers to make sense of (or is significant, "worth having," or etc.) but that's incompatible with determinism.

[Eddy Nahmias]

This discussion has been very illuminating to me. I think it has become clear how much turns on how "free will" is understood in terms of its relationship to moral responsibility and other things that are significant, "worth having," etc. (to use Patricia's language) and to "the ordinary picture we have of Agency" (to use John's language). I think Patricia's suggestion about how to ask the question to the specialists is very good (better than my earlier suggestion) and I think it would be nice to ask as well: "and please explain what sense of freedom you think it is important for philosophers to make sense of" (though I worry about using "freedom" and "free will" as synonyms). I'd be very happy to hear people's answer to these questions!

I also find it difficult to understand how, if we take this route, we could (fruitfully) proceed without considering how the philosophical conception of free will is (or is not) connected to ordinary people's conception of and intuitions about free will, its significance, its connection to moral responsibility, etc., as well as the relevant practices regarding responsibility attribution, etc.

Fritz, you write: "Peter takes himself to have *argued* successfully in other work that the proper understanding of 'having a choice' / freedom is *also* relevant in the moral responsibility discussions." What work is that?
I was referring to p. 104-105 (section 3.11) of An Essay on Free Will, where he asks his readers to substitute in the N operator "the sense of choice relevant to debates about MR" throughout the three incompatibilist arguments and suggests, "no step becomes doubtful under this new interpretation of 'N'". My own view is that, once that substitution is made, it becomes much easier to see various compatibilist options to respond to the Consequence argument (which is not to say any of those options will work).

[Tamler Sommers]

Saul, you wrote:

"IF they are utilitarians, then the whole traditional FW paradigm (FW as a condition for MR, which is a condition for desert, which is a condition for e.g. actual blame and punishment) is thrown out, as it is simply irrelevant to the logic of the pertinent morality (which is consequentialist rather than, well, deontological in a broad sense)."

I guess I don't agree with that entirely. It seems one could (a) be a utilitarian, (b) be a skeptic in the sense that one doesn't think we have the sort of free will that could justify moral desert, and (c) still think that the traditional FW/MR debate matters. In fact, I think Smart embraced all three positions.

Utilitarians can think the FW/MR debate matters--and embrace hard determinism--not because it has any bearing on happiness or welfare, but simply because they think people have irrational or inconsistent beliefs. Utilitarians aren't bound to throw every form of important philosophical inquiry into the calculus, are they? They're not pragmatists..

I agree that what they decide to DO about their skepticism becomes subject to utilitarian considerations. If they believe, like you, that losing certain beliefs about FW/MR would be too damaging for most people, they might recommend illusionism or keeping the truth from the masses. Or if they are pollyannaish (to use your term) about denying MR, they might recommend that everyone read the most persuasive skeptical arguments against MR available. But either way, the truth about questions of desert and how they cohered with people's metaphysical beliefs would still be important to the utilitarian. The utilitarian still has reason to care about FW/MR.

(It's possible that I'm misunderstand your position. Do you agree with me that (a), (b), and (c) are compatible?))

"Finally, if one is a hard determinist, then it is still very much an open question whether to opt for something like utilitarianism (but that's a different issue)"

I agree. Michael Slote made a good case for virtue ethics being fully compatible with hard determinism, if I remember that essay correctly. But HD does seem to rule out certain deontological theories that rely on strong notions of desert.

[Tamler Sommers]

Doubling up again.

My point here is that a utilitarian could still embrace a (traditional) set of claims like:

(a) Genuine moral desert requires some form of libertarian free will.

(b) Libertarian free will does not exist

(c) Therefore there is no genuine moral desert. No one deserves blame and praise for anything. To believe otherwise is irrational.

Utilitarians might accept these claims and still believe that the belief in strong desert-entail moral responsibility was condusive to general happiness. (This is about the time where one tends to bring up the God analogy. A utilitarian can be an atheist and still think that believing in God leads to greater happiness. We wouldn't say that the traditional debate about the existence of God is thrown out or subverted for the utilitarian, right?)

On the other hand, as Shaun Nichols has pointed out, even if ordinary people intuitively accept claim (1)--I know, Eddy, I know...-- and reject claim 3 only because they falsely believe themselves and others to possess libertarian free will, they still have two options (once they become convinced by claim (2)). One is to accept claim (3) and become convinced MR skeptics. The other is to reject claim (1), even though they still find it intuitive. After all, again as Shaun points out, they also found it intuitive that people can deserve praise and blame. So no matter what, they have to reject one intuitive belief or set of beliefs. And maybe their utilitarianism must come to bear on decision of which of these to reject. Is that what you're saying?

[Patricia Greenspan]

Eddie: Though some answers might be interesting, as you say, I think that asking people to "explain" what sense or element of freedom (or free will, if they distinguish) they think is incompatible with determinism might be read in a way that would tend to bias your data against incompatibilists. It should be made clear that all they need say is something fairly minimal (and not all that interesting) such as "the ability to do otherwise."

[Saul Smilansky]

Tamler, I don't think we disagree fundamentally. I do however think that "caring" is ambiguous here, and once we unpack what it makes sense for utilitarians to care about, then they would care less about FW (less deeply overall, and at least in one sense not care much at all). They can of course care philosophically ("hey look, there is no desert!"). They can (indeed must) also care in the sense that what people believe, even if false, matters to their e.g. happiness (as you pointed out). But MORALLY, a utilitarian can well think that the whole historical concern about free will matters much less than all (or nearly all) us Gardeners think, because what REALLY matters is to maximize sentient well-being (or the like). To put this differently, for a utilitarian morality is "compatible" with determinism not because compatibilist free will is what matters and we have it, but because morality doesn't care much about free will one way or the other.

I also find it interesting that while utilitarianism is a big player in normative ethics, it is not so in the FW debate. I hope we have better reasons for this neglect than that (if my previous point is convincing) utilitarianism makes the free will debate far less important.

[Andrew]

Robert Audi is a compatibilist about both FW and MR...

[Jeff]

For what it's worth--I believe Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso are incompatibilist...and I think that Keith Yandell may be an incompatibilist also...?

[galen strawson]

This discussion reminds me of a footnote in my 1986 book Freedom and Belief:

“Four out of five of the most recent books on freedom that I have seen are either libertarian or at least incompatibilist—Free Will: A Defence against Neurophysiological Determinism, by J. Thorp, Time, Action and Necessity: A Proof of Free Will, by N. Denyer, An Essay on Free Will, by P. van Inwagen, and Free Will and Responsibility, by J. Trusted. (Elbow Room, by D. Dennett, is the exception.)”

Thorp’s and Denyer’s books, published in 1980 and 1981 respectively, were both pretty good (I reviewed them and was disappointed to have to add Dennett to the above footnote in 1984 after reviewing Elbow Room). People forget so fast that I think it would be unwise to have any confidence in this head counting. It’s also most unclear that publication percentages mirror opinion percentages—given fashion effects, and so on.
Thorp’s and Denyer’s books also constitute evidence that the tide had turned. If we take 1980 as our terminus a quo (for the purposes of Peter’s sociological claim, I think 1980 is better than 1960) then I very much doubt that ‘almost all philosophers who had a view’ on the free will issue before the Consequence Argument was well known were compatibilists—even if we qualify ‘philosophers’ by ‘working in the Anglo-American tradition’.
It seems plain to me, too, that the Consequence Argument doesn’t have any more power to convince than the ancient (and effectively equivalent) observation that if determinism is true then everything about your actions was determined long before you were born. This never failed me in twenty years of teaching undergraduates at Oxford. I think that you have to enjoy logic in a certain way in order to think that the Consequence Argument has a stronger impact.
Peter’s sociological claim may be true for all that—especially if we restrict attention to the USA—because his Consequence Argument spells out the determinism point in distinct, nice steps that are very helpful for teaching. I don’t know whether my argument about the impossibility of self-determination (according to which indeterminism is no better than determinism when it comes to radical free will) had any effect, but, once again, the basic point was old.
In fact serious and sensible compatibilists and incompatibilists don’t really disagree about anything except the use of the word ‘free’. The free will debate is a form of ‘agonistic play’ (as Huizinga said about the equally old debate about particulars and universals), insofar as it is conducted adversarially. The same basic issues—exactly the same basic issues—have been on the table since Alexander of Aphrodisias, Carneades, Chrysippus, Cicero, Epicurus, Lucretius, and others, and no doubt long before, and heaven knows what treasures are to be found in the scholastics.

[Manuel]

Well, it seems clear that your argument for the impossibility of self-determinism has had some influence on at least the demographics of this blog: many of our vocal skeptics about free will seem to find it compelling. For what it is worth, my sense is that no-free-will views have undergone the biggest expansion in members (at least as a percentage of the profession, and perhaps among academics more generally) over the past 15 years.