Title

If determinism is true, can anyone be held morally responsible?

Greg Detre

Wednesday, June 06, 2001

Jeremy Watkins, Hertford

Ethics VII

Common sense morality accepts that if we are compelled to act in some way, our moral responsibility is diminished. This is difficult to square with our suspicion that psychological explanations, biological explanations and ultimately physical explanations for our behaviour combine to shrink the �area of genuine agency� that moral responsibility attaches to, �to an extensionless point� (Nagel, 1979). Or, put more formally, it seems as though the thesis of determinism, if true, is incompatible with the thesis of free will, which in turn seems necessary for moral responsibility.

Scientific determinism is the thesis that the universe operates according to a set of fixed, universal, causal laws of physics or nature, such that the state of the universe at a given time follows necessarily from previous states. In this way, every event is a link in a long, unbroken causal chain that stretches from past to future without splitting. Every state is a necessary effect of antecedent circumstances, or to put it the other way, every state necessarily gives rise to the next.

Psychological determinism replaces the laws of physics with psychological laws, taking the form of indoctrination, human nature, genetic predispositions, phobias etc. The problem for free will here lies in the fact that we, as agents, are clearly influenced by our past and our psychological make-up, sometimes to the point of being incapacitated to act any other way (e.g. a phobic prohibition on touching spiders).

One can see other forms of determinism, operating at different levels, all of which have in common the idea that the past determines the future according to causal laws, which we are subject to.

Free will is characterised in a variety of ways. The idea of �origination� is probably the strongest formulation, stating that human beings are not entirely subject to causal laws, that is, we are able to alter the path the future takes to some degree, according to our choice. This requires that the originator be sufficiently connected to the causal chain to be able to interrupt it, but sufficiently disconnected not to get trapped. Similarly, the originator operates within psychological determinism, being influenced but not entirely being entirely subject to phobias, innate predispositions or indoctrinated beliefs.

Origination, put in this way, is negatively defined � it says what we are free from, without explaining how the tension between determinism and free will actually resolves itself.

It resembles very much the river god, who serves as an explanation for what seems to be the free behaviour of the river - the explanation of its surges and whatever else happens - until a better explanation comes along through physical geography, meteorology, and physics (Weatherford, 1995).

Responsibility is usually framed in terms of causal responsibility, moral responsibility or legal responsibility. To be causally responsible for a state of affairs is to act so that a state of affairs would not have occurred had you not acted, which includes indirect action (e.g. by ordering someone else to bring it about). Legal responsibility means fulfilling the requirements for accountability under the law. Legal responsibility rests on moral responsibility to a great extent � if I cannot be blamed, then my crime is viewed differently by most people, and by the law (e.g. manslaughter is considered a less heinous and punishable crime than murder).

Moral responsibility covers (i) the having of a moral obligation and (ii) the fulfilment of the criteria for deserving blame or praise (punishment or reward) for a morally significant act or omission. It is this second sense that is affected by determinism. How can I said to fulfil the criteria for deserving blame or praise when I have no power to alter my behaviour. If every state of the world follows necessarily from the next, then I have no status as a causal agent, and so I cannot be held morally responsible. If this was to become accepted as fact, then society would eventually have to alter its notion and treatment of legal responsibility. Indeed, we can see now that when the law deems someone less culpable on the grounds of insanity, it is recognising that insanity renders one incapable of fully intending one�s actions. Just as it would seem ludicrous to blame a simple, closed computer program following a prescribed algorithm, so it makes little sense to hold someone morally responsible for their actions if they have no causal power to alter them, i.e. they were determined by the state of the world and its laws long before the person was even born.

Van Inwagen (1975) puts across a powerful argument for the incompatability of determinism and free will.

He characterises free will in terms of:

� the power or ability of agents to act otherwise than they in fact do. To deny that men have free will is to assert that what a man does do and what he can do coincide.

He uses an idiom to express this �power or ability� in terms of the capacity to refrain from an act:

S can render [could have rendered] � false

where the �� stands for the act in question. The ability:

He could have reached Chicago by midnight

becomes:

He could have rendered the proposition that he did not reach Chicago by midnight false

He considers the situation where a judge can grant clemency to a man on death row, just by gesturing. Paraphrasing Inwagen�s argument:

1. If determinism is true, then the laws of physics necessitate that the current state of the world must result from the state of the world 100 years ago.

2. If the judge had gestured, the current state of the world would not be as it is.

3. If (2) is true, then if the judge had gestured, the judge would have rendered the current state of the world different.

4. If the judge could have rendered the current state of the world different, and if the laws of physics necessitate that the current state of the world must result from the state of the world 100 years ago, then the judge could have rendered that the current state of the world need not be so

5. If the judge could have rendered that the current state of the world need not be so, then he could have rendered the laws of physics false

6. The judge could not have rendered the laws of physics false

7. \ If determinism is true, the judge could not have gestured

Van Inwagen�s argument seems extremely sound. Probably the strongest, but most specious, compatibilist argument cannot help. This states that it is not so much that we could have chosen to do otherwise, but that the action we do commit is the action we are most motivated to choose. However, it seems obvious that the act we do commit must necessarily be the action we are most motivated to � but if we could not have chosen any other action, even one we desire less, out of whimsy perhaps, then surely this is not free will in the sense that it needs to be for us to retain our moral responsibility. Otherwise criminals could simply argue that they are so constituted to maximally desire the rewards associated with successfully committing a crime that they cannot choose an action that is legal, but less rewarding. Frankfurt and others have argued that we need second-order choice � that is, we need to be able to choose what we want to choose and desire, to qualify as free will. Yet it seems clear, on a psychological level, that we cannot really do this, and moreover, that this choice itself would be causally subject to determinism, and so no freer than first order choices.

Even if we were to accept that we do have free will (either because determinism does not preclude it, or because determinism is false), as most moral systems implicitly do, Williams� concern about �moral luck� still remains a problem. Moral luck points to the fact that an identical act, committed under different circumstances, possibly without the the agent�s knowing, can have different consequences, with different levels of blame attached.

In one case, I might be day-dreaming while driving down a familiar street. If a child runs out in front of my car, and my reactions are slower than they should be, then the blame attached to my negligence is much reduced if the child avoids me in time. Yet, the consequences of my negligence do not solely depend on my driving � they can be mitigated by the child�s actions. This seems wrong.

Given that there are almost no cases where a change in circumstances beyond my control would not affect the consequences and moral worth of my actions, for better or worse, we can see that the notion of moral responsibility is imperilled even in a world where we do have free will. Kantianism provides one solution, with its consistent but counter-intuitive emphasis on dutiful intentions and will to the complete exclusion of consequences.