That means he thinks that at least some things that happen are not causally determined, namely, the voluntary actions of rational agents, such as people and, presumably, God. Hobbes cannot imagine anything happening without a cause. He also thinks that causes make their effects necessary. So he was a determinist. That means he believes that all events are caused and necessary. Hobbes also denies that there is such a thing as free will.
However he is a compatibilist about the freedom of action and responsibility for what we do. That means he thought freedom and responsibility are compatible with the causal determination of the will. Greene and Cohen will occupy the third position we identified: hard determinism. Hard determinists are incompatibilists who believe in the truth of determinism. It does not matter whether your decision to do one thing rather than another was caused by factors outside of your control.
This is what he means. Hobbes believes your actions are free if there is nothing preventing you from doing what you have a will to do. So the definition of liberty of action cannot apply to the will itself. So there is no such thing as free will. Kant wrote that we take an agent in her action to begin an entirely new series of consequences, and that for philosophers to say that it would have been enough for moral responsibility if she had just acted voluntarily is only quibbling, indeed a wretched subterfuge.
They have ever agreed that a free action is only a voluntary one. My own view in one part is that it is provable that each of us has two different and important attitudes with respect to moral responsibility, attitudes being complexes including desires and evaluations. It is provable, also, that we act differently on these two attitudes, as in the case of punishment. These propositions necessarily presuppose that each of us has two ideas of a free action.
For example, we may hold a vicious politician responsible, which is to say we disapprove of her morally for an action, where this particular disapproval involves a retributive desire -- a desire to subject her to discomfiture or worse -- and where the disapproval issues in certain behavior. We may also disapprove of her morally for her action in another way. This attitude involves desires, but it does not involve a retributive desire, and it issues in distinct behavior. It follows that the attitudes have different contents, and in particular that the first takes the politician's action to be both voluntary and originated, and the second only takes it to be voluntary.
Further, putting aside their relations to determinism, there is no interesting sense in which either attitude or idea is less important or secondary. It is thus also my view that the principal philosophical problem about determinism and freedom cannot possibly be what Incompatibilists and Compatibilists take it to be, proving that we have a single idea.
The true problem, in so far as it concerns moral responsibility, springs from the fact that each of us has the two attitudes between which we move. The attitude which takes an action as originated is inconsistent with determinism, and hence when we contemplate that determinism is true, our response is dismay.
The attitude which takes an action only as voluntary is consistent with determinism, and hence when we contemplate that determinism is true, we respond with intransigence. The two responses of dismay and intransigence are also in a way inconsistent with one another, and each response is unsatisfactory in itself.
The true problem of determinism is that of making our way towards a third and satisfactory response to it. This will be affirmation. It is a valuing of what we can persist in attitudinally and also behaviorally if determinism is true, and a giving up of what we cannot persist in. Finally, it seems to me that moral disapproval is not uniquely important among the things affected by determinism. Three others, life-hopes, personal feelings of a non-moral kind, and attitudes with respect to knowledge, are at least as important.
In each of these cases it is also provable that each of us has two attitudes and ways of behaving, again necessarily presupposing that we have two ideas of a free action.
There is also the same story about responses. To turn now to two articles by Double and his book,4 he supposes that Incompatibilists and Compatibilists in general did not get to the real truth because they mistakenly took determinism's challenge to moral responsibility to be a challenge to something other than an attitude of the sort indicated above.
He supposes further that we can all follow some recent philosophers including myself and himself towards the truth by becoming attitudinists rather than cognitivists or Moral Realists. I agree that most Incompatibilists and Compatibilists did not clearly understand that to hold someone morally responsible for an action, or to credit someone with responsibility for one, is to adopt an attitude to her. Instead, most of them supposed that in holding someone morally responsible for an action, I am not taking an attitude to something, but perceiving or registering some funny moral fact.
Something the same is supposed, presumably, by contemporary defenders of Moral Realism. This helped Incompatibilists and Compatibilists to suppose we all share a single settled idea of a free action, written into our language.
But dealing adequately with determinism does not actually depend, at all, on seeing that what is affected by it is attitudes, and of course resulting behavior. Dealing adequately with determinism mainly depends on seeing that each of us has two relevant ideas of a free action. Plainly a Moral Realist could come to see this without giving up his Moral Realism.
And Hume was an attitudinist, and he didn't see it. To my mind Double's second mistake, as you may not be stunned to heard, is claiming that my resolution of the problem of freedom and determinism is just warmed-up Incompatibilism. One reason he gives is that Incompatibilists have allowed that in addition to their own idea there is another "weaker" idea of freedom, the idea of voluntariness by itself, and that this idea is consistent with determinism.
In fact they could not conceivably have missed it, embroiled as they were with the Compatibilist philosophers who never stopped going on about it. You may fill in the details however you like, but you must imagine that Black has the power to interfere with Jones in a way that ensures that Jones does exactly what Black wants him to do.
By lucky co-incidence, Jones did exactly what Black wanted him to do. He even deliberated and decided the way Black wanted him to deliberate and decide. So Black remained on the sidelines and only watched. Because Black never laid a finger on Jones, or interfered in any way, it seems that Jones is as morally responsible in the second step of the story as he is in the first step.
How can Black, sitting on the sidelines, deprive Jones of the ability to deliberate, decide, or try otherwise? But Black never exercises his power. There is a difference between the existence of a power and the exercise of a power.
The truth about Jones is not that Black robs him of the ability to do otherwise; it is the more complicated truth that Black puts him at constant risk of losing the ability to do otherwise. His thought experiment was a failure; while most compatibilists were convinced, most incompatibilists were not. Compatibilists who were not convinced include Smith , ; Campbell ; Fara ; Vihvelin These incompatibilists insisted, though not for the reason given above, that Black does not succeed in robbing Jones of all his freedom; there is something that remains up to Jones Widerker ; Ginet ; Kane The critics of the argument rejected this charge, arguing that Jones retains a morally relevant ability to do otherwise, thus resurrecting the very debate that Frankfurt had hoped to undermine.
But there has been a cost. Our interest in free will is not limited to our interest in moral responsibility. The literature on the traditional problem of free will and determinism is dominated by incompatibilists.
There is a growing consensus that the incompatibilist is right: if our universe is a deterministic one, we never have the ability to choose and do anything other than what we actually do. Before we ask whether this pessimism about the compatibility of free will with determinism is warranted, we should pause to ask whether there really is a substantive disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists.
When an incompatibilist says that determinism would rob us of the free will we think we have, including genuine choices and the ability to do otherwise, and when the compatibilist denies this, are they asserting and denying the same proposition?
Or is the incompatibilist asserting one thing while the compatibilist is denying something else? Some of the things said in the literature suggest that there is no substantive debate.
And one leading semantic proposal might seem to support the claim that there is no real dispute. Lewis , Kratzer For a different kind of contextualist proposal see Hawthorne ; for criticism, see Feldman So the proposition denied by the incompatibilist is not the proposition asserted by the compatibilist. The debate, he says, is about whether determinism has the consequence that no one is ever able to do otherwise equivalently, that no one ever has it in their power to do otherwise given what ordinary speakers mean, in the contexts in which they use these words.
The contexts to which he is referring are the contexts of deliberation and choice in which we consider our options, while believing that we are able to pursue each of them. The proposition asserted by the compatibilist is the proposition denied by the incompatibilist.
Citing David Lewis as his example of a compatibilist opponent, van Inwagen says that he and Lewis cannot both be right. One of them is wrong, but neither is muddled or making a simple mistake van Inwagen In what follows, we will assume that the debate about free will including, but not necessarily limited to, genuine choice and the ability to do otherwise and determinism is a substantive debate, and not one that can be dissolved by appeal to different senses or contexts of utterance.
We will now turn to the arguments. These are arguments that appeal primarily to our intuitions. There are many variations on this way of arguing for incompatibilism, but the basic structure of the argument is usually something like this:.
If determinism is true, we are like: billiard balls, windup toys, playthings of external forces, puppets, robots, victims of a nefarious neurosurgeon who controls us by directly manipulating the brain states that are the immediate causes of our actions.
Billiard balls windup toys, etc. Most of these intuition-based arguments are not very good. Billiard balls, toys, puppets, and simple robots lack minds, and having a mind is a necessary condition of having free will. For discussion of cases involving more subtle kinds of manipulation, see Section 3. The No Forking Paths argument van Inwagen ; Fischer ; Ekstrom begins by appealing to the idea that whenever we make a choice we are doing or think we are doing something like what a traveler does when faced with a choice between different roads.
The only roads the traveler is able to choose are roads which are a continuation of the road she is already on. By analogy, the only choices we are able to make are choices which are a continuation of the actual past and consistent with the laws of nature.
But if determinism is true, then our journey through life is like traveling in one direction only on a road which has no branches. There are other roads, leading to other destinations; if we could get to one of these other roads, we could reach a different destination.
So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future ; we are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do. But several crucial assumptions have been smuggled into this picture: assumptions about time and causation and assumptions about possibility. These assumptions are all controversial; on some theories of time and causation the four-dimensionalist theory of time, a theory of causation that permits time travel and backwards causation , they are all false D.
Lewis ; Horwich ; Sider ; Hoefer The assumption about possibility is that possible worlds are concrete spatio-temporal things in the way that roads are and that worlds can overlap literally share a common part in the way that roads can overlap.
But most possible worlds theorists reject the first assumption and nearly everyone rejects the second assumption Adams ; D. If we strip away the metaphors, the main premise of the argument turns into the claim that we have genuine choices between alternative course of action only if our choosing and doing otherwise is compossible with the actual past and the actual laws.
But this claim is none other than a statement of what the incompatibilist believes and the compatibilist denies. If the intuitions to which the No Forking Paths argument appeals nevertheless continue to engage us, it is because we think that our range of possible choices is constrained by two factors: the laws and the past. Even if backwards causation is logically possible, it is not within our power. These beliefs—about the laws and the past—are the basis of the most influential contemporary argument for incompatibilism: the Consequence argument.
More of this later. Producer designs or manipulates Victim in some of the stories, in the way the maker of a robot designs his robot or a god creates a human being; in other stories, by employing techniques of behavioral engineering or neural manipulation.
We are supposed to accept premise 1 on the grounds of our intuitive response to the story about Victim. The argument for premise 2 is that if determinism is true, then we are like Victim with respect to the fact that we are merely the proximate causes of our actions. The only difference between us in this imagined scenario in which determinism is true and Victim is that our psychological features are not the causal upshot of the work of a single Producer who had a specific plan for us.
But this fact about the remote causes of our actions—that they are caused by a variety of natural causes rather than the intentional acts of a single agent—is not relevant to questions about our freedom and responsibility. Or so it is argued, by the advocates of Manipulation arguments. In his story, Black was a stand-in for determinism, and Frankfurt was trying to convince us that the facts about Black are consistent with the facts, as we know them, about how we actually deliberate, decide, and act, and these facts are the only facts that matter, so far as moral responsibility is concerned.
So even if Jones lacks the ability to do otherwise, he is still morally responsible. The Manipulation argument says, in effect:. Let me tell you a story to make this clear…. And then Producer is introduced, and we are told that he has a plan concerning the action or actions of another person, Victim, the power to enforce his plan, and moreover, unlike Black , he does enforce it.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that manipulation of one person by another automatically undermines freedom. In real life, we know that we may be manipulated by others to do things we would not have done, but for their arguments or other ways of persuading us to change our minds. We think that we could have resisted the argument or the sales pitch or the subtle pressures exerted by our manipulative friend or colleague and we might blame ourselves later for not doing so.
The question, then, is whether there is a case that can serve the purposes of a manipulation argument: a case where Victim lacks the freedom that is a necessary condition of moral responsibility while not being different, in any relevant way, from a normal agent in normal circumstances at a deterministic world that is, from someone who we think acts freely and is morally responsible for what she does. There are cases and cases, and many of the ones in the literature are under-described.
The first three Plums of Pereboom are an example. Alternatively, the story might be fleshed out in a way that supports the judgment that Plum is not different, in any relevant way, from a normal agent deterministic or indeterministic in normal circumstances. But this leaves it open to the compatibilist to take the hard-line reply McKenna a, that since the normal deterministic agent is morally responsible, so is Plum. Opinions vary as to whether the intuitive cost of the hard-line reply is too great.
Consider, next, cases of the Brave New World variety—cases where children are subjected to intensive behavioral engineering from birth, in a way intended to make them accept their assigned roles in a rigidly hierarchical society. Everything depends on the details, but it is surely not implausible to think that the subjects of some Brave New World cases lack a morally significant freedom because their cognitive, evaluational, and volitional capacities have been stunted or impaired in certain ways:.
Watson There are cases where Victim is under the direct control of Producer in a way that makes it true that Victim is not morally responsible for what she does because she no longer has the kind of causal control that is a necessary condition acting freely. Defenders of Manipulation arguments claim, however, that the argument works even if these kinds of cases are set aside. They also say that the argument succeeds even when Producer is such a sophisticated designer of Victim that Victim has a past history that satisfies the requirements of those compatibilist accounts of free agency that include a historical condition.
For a helpful account of the difference between historical and nonhistorical compatibilist accounts in the context of Manipulation arguments, see McKenna a. To many people, it seems intuitively clear that Ernie acts unfreely and is for that reason not morally responsible for what he does.
For consider this: Ernie has a next door neighbor, Bert, a normal guy in every way, much like Ernie ideally self-controlled, rational, etc. There is no relevant difference between Ernie and Bert. Therefore, Bert also acts unfreely and is also not morally responsible for what he does. But Bert like Ernie is normal in every way, and we can also stipulate that he like Ernie satisfies all plausible compatibilist conditions historical as well as nonhistorical for being a free and morally responsible agent.
If he acts unfreely, so does every deterministic agent on every occasion. Therefore the kind of freedom necessary for moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. Mele claims that the case of Ernie is an improvement on earlier Manipulation cases in two ways. Second, it is a case where it is clear that there is no relevant difference between Ernie and any case of apparently free and responsible action at a deterministic world.
Mele is right about the first point. And, while some have contested this Waller , we should agree that he is right about the second point as well. But we should not agree that the argument succeeds. It should be noted that Mele does not claim that it does. There is a problem. If there really is no freedom-relevant difference between Bert and Ernie, why should we reason from the unfreedom of Ernie to the unfreedom of Bert rather than the other way around, from the freedom of Bert to the freedom of Ernie?
By contrast, we do have reasons for thinking that Bert acts freely and is morally responsible for what he does; he satisfies the ordinary conditions we use in real life, as well as all the conditions of the best compatibilist accounts on offer. For further elaboration on this critique, including some helpful counter-thought experiments, see Fischer and Kearns A defender of the Zygote argument might respond by claiming that the intuitions that favor the unfreedom and lack of responsibility of Ernie are stronger than the intuitions that favor the freedom and responsibility of Bert.
But this is problematic. Perhaps our intuitions are explained though not justified by the belief that being created in this way robs Ernie of the freedom required for responsibility.
The first premise of the Zygote argument must be defended by something more than appeal to intuition. For a critique of the use of intuitions in Manipulation arguments, see Spitzley The Manipulation argument works only if the second premise is true, and the second premise says that there is no relevant difference between Victim in this case, Ernie and any normal deterministic case of apparently free and responsible action in this case, Bert. Ernie differs from Bert with respect to certain historical facts about his creation: the fact that he was created by a goddess with foreknowledge, and intentions about his future.
So none of these facts can be counted relevant, even if they affect our intuitions. The claim, then, is that Ernie acts unfreely and without responsibility because determinism is true.
But this claim was supposed to be the conclusion of the argument, not the premise. What has this boy to do with it?
He was not his own father; he was not his own mother; he was not his own grandparents. All of this was handed to him. He did not surround himself with governesses and wealth.
He did not make himself. And yet he is to be compelled to pay. Darrow The idea is that freedom means there is nothing external blocking you from doing what you decide to do. It does not matter whether your decision to do one thing rather than another was caused by factors outside of your control. I used what I hope was a boring example to illustrate the point. No one can control whether they are are thirsty; thirst is not a matter of will.
Thirst also causes us to do things like drink water. But no one really thinks that this means we are not free when we get up to get a drink. Compatibilists are usually consequentialists about punishment. Incompatibilists are usually retributivists. You can see why these positions tend to go together.
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