Our topic will be the kind of thing we talk about when we say that someone “has (or exercised) free will,” or “made a free choice,” or “acted freely.”
We’ll discuss some different theories about when punishment is legitimate or justified or appropriate. On some of these views (“retributivist” views) punishment is only justified when it’s deserved. (Strong forms of this view say that punishment is always justified when it’s deserved; weaker forms can allow there to be excusing factors where even though you deserve punishment, it’s best in that situation that it not be imposed. We allow for the weaker view by saying that deserving the punishment is only a necessary condition for the punishment being justified.)
Our discussion will be trying to explore what this notion of “deserving” punishment involves. Some views (“consequentialist”/“utilitarian” views) about punishment don’t rely on such a notion. The debate between these accounts of punishment is ongoing.
There are other aspects of how we interact with each other that also seem to involve the notion of a response being “deserved.” Not just actions like punishing someone, but also attitudes like blaming them or resenting them or being angry with them. And not just negative actions and attitudes, but also positive ones like rewarding or praising them, or giving them credit and being grateful. And also attitudes we have towards ourselves, like feeling guilty or proud about something.
In all of these cases, it’s natural to think: the reaction we’re talking about is legitimate/justified/appopriate only if: (1) the subject really did perform the action in question, and (2) they did so freely and voluntarily, in a way that makes them “morally responsible” for it.
This connection between our actions and attitudes that involve the notion of “deserving” something, on the one hand, and notions like:
will be guiding our thinking as we proceed.
To try to get clearer on whether we have free will, or ever choose or act freely, we need at the same time to try to get clear on what free will is, or would be if anyone had it. It’s not so easy to do that. Many of the ways people will explain what they mean by “free will” are either uninformative, or else render the question of whether we have free will uninteresting. For instance, if we define “free will” as “having the power to do what you want to do,” this is not very informative: for the notion of “having the power to do something” is too similar to the notion we’re trying to explain. (If someone had philosophical perplexities about what free will was, they’d also have perplexities about what it is to have the power to do something.) We’d like to get a more informative understanding or explanation of what free will is than that.
Worries about whether we have free will arise from several different sources.
One sort of worry starts from the premise that the laws of nature and the past “causally determine” that you will act in the way you do. (More on what this means below.) This is thought to show that you’re not free to act in other ways. This worry concerns the relation between free will and Determinism.
A second sort of worry starts from the premise that there is only one “real” future. Perhaps someone already knows how this future will turn out. (For example, perhaps God knows this. Or perhaps some oracle with a crystal ball knows this, or a time traveller who’s come here from the future. Or perhaps we already have a problem if future historians looking back on the present day will know how things turn out.)
Or perhaps the trouble doesn’t depend on anyone knowing how the future will turn out. Even if no one now knows or is able to predict how you will act tomorrow, maybe there’s already some truth about how you will in fact act tomorrow. And if you will in fact act in certain ways tomorrow, it seems to be already true today that you will act in those ways tomorrow. This can seem like it also deprives of you of the freedom to act otherwise: what you’ll do tomorrow is inevitable, because it’s already true that you’ll act the ways you will. This is what’s called a fatalist worry.
We’re going to focus on the first sort of worry in our course (and these notes).
For both kinds of worry, one way to respond to them is to deny their respective premises. That is, we might deny that the laws of nature and the past causally determine your actions; and we might deny that claims about what you will do tomorrow are already true today.
Another way to respond to these worries is to concede the premises (perhaps only for the sake of argument), but to argue that no dire conclusions about free will follow from these premises.
What is Determinism? This thesis is defined in different ways. Sometimes it’s understood to be the thesis that how the future will be is entirely predictable from how the past was. Other times it’s understood to be the thesis that every event has a cause. However, for various reasons (some of which I’ll mention below), neither of those definitions really captures the core idea that’s most at issue in contemporary philosophical debates about free will.
For our purposes, the best way to define Determinism is instead as follows.
Certain laws of nature are such that, for a given “starting point” for the universe, those laws are compatible with only one subsequent future. Any world with that past but a different future would violate those laws. It couldn’t be a world that those laws described or governed. We call laws of this sort deterministic laws. Given a starting point, these sorts of laws guarantee or require that the future will proceed in a single fixed way. Any two possible worlds, if they started off the same way, and both had the same deterministic laws, must continue in the same way. Those laws make that future inevitable for that world.
Other laws of nature are compatible with more than one subsequent future. We call these indeterministic laws. These laws may say: given this starting point, the world can evolve in any of ways A, B, or C. None of these possible futures is guaranteed to happen. At most, it may be that some of the options are more likely to happen than others.
We will understand Causal Determinism, or Determinism for short, to be the thesis that all of the laws of nature that govern our world are deterministic laws.
Here are some presentations of this concept from texts we’ll be reading:
To say that a system is deterministic means that everything that happens with it is the result of prior causes, and that once the causes occur the effects must inevitably follow, given the surrounding circumstances and the Laws of Nature. (Rachels, p. 483)
[D]eterminism is the view that at any time the universe has exactly one physically possible future. That is, something is deterministic if it has exactly one physically possible outcome. (Lemos, p. 8)
Determinism is the thesis that it is true at every moment that the way things then are determines a unique future, that only one of the alternative futures that may exist relative to a given moment is a physically possible continuation of the state of things at that moment. Or, if you like, we may say that determinism is the thesis that only one continuation of the state of things at a given moment is consistent with the laws of nature. (For it is the laws of nature that determine what is physically possible…) (van Inwagen, p. 268)
If determinism is true, then, if the universe were “rolled back” to a previous state by a miracle (and there were no further miracles), the history of the world would repeat itself. If the universe were rolled back to a previous state thousands of times, exactly the same events would follow each of those thousands of “reversions.” (van Inwagen, p. 270)
If the laws of nature are indeterministic, would that mean events don’t have a cause? Many argue no: events could still have causes, where that involved just changing the probability of what happens. So an event’s being caused doesn’t necessarily mean it was causally determined. This point comes up several times in our discussion.
Is Determinism true about our world? This has been disputed for a long time. Some of the ancient Greeks, especially the Stoics, thought that it was. The “clockwork” picture of the universe we get from Newton is also a Determinist one. In more recent physics, things are less clear.
Our best theories of quantum physics are not obviously deterministic. They don’t say “in situations like this, so-and-so is guaranteed to happen.” Instead they involve probabilities in ways we can’t eliminate. However, it is philosophically controversial how the probabilities in those theories should be interpreted. Hence, one cannot easily say whether or not our best theories of quantum physics posit that our world has indeterministic laws.
To show that our laws of nature are indeterministic, one needs to show that the probabilities our physical theories appeal to are objective probabilities. But that is philosophically controversial. It is controversial whether the probabilities that appear in our theories of quantum physics should be understood as epistemic probabilities or objective probabilities.
If you want to read more on debates about how to interpret the probabilities in quantum physics, my friends who are experts on those issues say that this book is an excellent introduction and history of the debate.
Even if you think Causal Determinism is false about our world, still, you will learn a lot about our concept of free will by investigating what would follow if Causal Determinism were true.
Some philosophers hold the view that Determinism and free will are incompatible with each other. They think that if you’ve got one, you can’t have the other. We call these philosophers Incompatibilists. Other philosophers think that Determinism and free will are compatible. They think that it’s possible to have both. We call these philosophers Compatibilists. We can further sub-divide the Incompatibilists and the Compatibilists as follows:
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In a large poll of philosophers in 2020, 15% of the respondents favored us having no free will, 17% favored Libertarianism (so altogether, 32% were Incompatibilists), and 56% favored Compatibilism. (The remaining 12% were undecided, thought the question was too unclear, or that there’s no fact of the matter, and so on.) Philosophy isn’t a popularity contest, so these numbers don’t tell us which view is right. But they do show how much controversy there is, and that each of these positions has some serious support.
In the more detailed map I developed in class, I said we’d focus on three main players in the debate:
If you’re a pessimist, what should we do about it? Some pessimists will be reformers, and argue that we should radically change the ways we react when people have committed crimes or harmed us. As described in the Rachels reading, the lawyer Clarance Darrow was a “reformer” in this sense. Some of these reforms may be attractive, others may be unattractive. Some pessimists will be concealers, and think that once people accept there is no free will, some of the social consequences may be so unattractive, that it’s best for most of society to continue thinking (wrongly) that we still have free will. Some pessimists will be reconcilers, and argue that accepting the lesson that there’s no free will doesn’t need to radically undermine our social practices. Here is some optional reading by Derk Pereboom defending this kind of view.
Does Determinism imply — if it were true, which we’re not presupposing — that you can only choose and do the things you actually choose and do?
The answer will depend a lot on what we mean by “choosing” something, and by “doing” something, and most especially, by the word “can.” We’ll discuss these questions in upcoming classes.