Greg Detre
Thursday, June 07, 2001
Jeremy Watkins, Hertford
Ethics VII
If determinism is true, can anyone be held morally
responsible?
Inwagen, �Incompatability of free will� in Watson (ed), Free Will
There have been various attempts to resolve this tension more explicitly.
On the face of it, the two seem fundamentally opposed.
consider nihilism and the Eternal Recurrence
consider Davidson and anomalous monism
does epiphenomenalism have the same ramifications for ethics as determinism??? is it the lack of our conscious input that is important, or are we happy to identify ourselves with our body/brains???
how does intentionality differentiate us from salmon or machine cogs, in a deterministic world???
determinism vs fatalism???
how important is moral responsibility in terms of our legal system, views on retribution and common sense morality???
would we actually live in a better, more mature society if we were hard determinists (i.e. we accepted determinism and incompatabilism, and just punished people as quarantine), or would that be inauthentic, lacking integrity, lacking virtue, amoral and unhappy???
is it possible that the world could be nomological in places, and anomalous in others � kind of like Davidson�s thesis � and that they could mingle and take over from each other�???
in Van Inwagen�s argument, why is it only one of the antecedent premises that the judge would have to falsify (the laws)???
It
is often taken as the very general thesis about the world that all events
without exception are effects - events necessitated by earlier events. Hence
any event of any kind is an effect of a prior series of effects, a causal chain
with every link solid. If the thesis cannot be expressed in terms of some part
of science or theory in it, some determinists say, the shortcoming is not in the
thesis.
If
the thesis is true, future events are as fixed and unalterable as the past is
fixed and unalterable. One graphic expression of determinism is in terms of
what William James called 'the iron block universe': 'those parts of the
universe already laid down,' he wrote, 'appoint and decree what other parts
shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the
part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future
complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each
and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron
block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.' If this is
the way the world is, then only what actually happens in it could possibly have
happened. There are no genuine alternatives to be realized.
Philosophers
have cared less about whether or not the rest of the universe is determined -
what they have cared more about is whether or not our lives are determined.
Indeed, determinism has often been taken as the more limited thesis that all
our choices, decisions, intentions, other mental events, and our actions are no
more than effects of other equally necessitated events. The problem of
determinism in this second sense is pretty well identical with the problem of
freedom, or the free will problem.
Strawson
led us to see that more is at stake than that, including many human attitudes
such as resentment and gratitude. Honderich has raised the stakes higher.
Determinism puts in doubt all 'life-hopes, personal feelings, knowledge, moral
responsibility, the rightness of actions, and the moral standing of persons'.
And van Inwagen has suggested that if determinism were known to be true, no one
could ever rationally deliberate about any type of action. Deliberation, it is
said, makes sense only if genuine alternatives are available to us. If I
deliberate about whether or not to raise my arm, my deliberation is rational
only if I am able either to raise it or not to raise it. If determinism is
true, only one course is genuinely open to me. So, it is alleged, my
deliberation is irrational.
Typically
we believe that agents are morally responsible only for those acts that are
freely chosen and within the power of the agent to decide. We are guilty only
if we could have done otherwise. But if determinism is true, then in some sense
we never could have done otherwise. Thus many philosophers have concluded that
determinism and holding people responsible are incompatible.
The
great problem of freedom and determinism is really two problems, one of them
metaphysical and empirical in kind, the other ethical and in other ways
attitudinal in kind. The first problem is that of whether human choices and
actions are causally determined or are in a way free. The second problem is
that of the implications of determinism for our moral, personal, and social
lives.
Determinism
in the context of these problems, to be more specific, is usually the thesis
that all our mental states and acts, including choices and decisions, and all
our actions are effects necessitated by preceding causes. Thus our futures are
in fact fixed and unalterable in much the same way that the past is. The truth
or falsity of the thesis depends upon our natures, including our physical
natures, and not at all upon our desires or hopes or other feelings.
Metaphysical
freedom or origination, one of the two main kinds, involves not being
completely governed by deterministic causal laws. Those who support it say
there are no laws, whether of mind or brain or both, that completely settle
what we will choose and do. Metaphysical freedom also involves not just the
absence of such laws but also our having a kind of power to choose which path
the future will take.
Let
us start with the second problem to the fore (they are a little hard to keep
apart). In everyday life, we suppose that free actions in some sense or other
are the only ones for which we can hold persons morally responsible, or for
which we can appropriately feel gratitude or resentment (Strawson). Ordinary
morality says that we are excused for doing something that would otherwise be
blameworthy if we can establish that in some sense or other we had no choice in
the matter, that in some sense or other we could not have done otherwise.
Some
philosophers, incompatibilists, believe that determinism if true destroys moral
responsibility, undermines interpersonal relations, and destroys our life-hopes
by making all actions unfree. Freedom and determinism are incompatible.
Incompatibilists who also believe that determinism is false, and hence that
some actions are morally responsible, are often called libertarians.
Incompatibilists who also believe, differently, that determinism is true, and
moral responsibility is therefore an illusion, are sometimes called, following
William James, hard determinists.
Other
philosophers, compatibilists, deny that determinism has any such effect on
freedom and moral responsibility. Freedom and determinism are compatible. In
fact some of these philosophers do not believe in determinism, and maybe not in
the denial of determinism, but only believe that if it is true, this does not
have the upshot that we are not free and responsible.
Compatibilists
rest their argument on the claim that the sense of 'free' in which actions must
be free in order to be morally responsible is not the sense that involves
origination and is opposed to 'caused' or 'determined'. We only need to be free
in the sense in which 'free' is opposed to 'compelled' or 'coerced'. We only
need to be voluntary in this sense. All we need is voluntariness. (Think of
what men in prison lack, or anyone who is subject to a serious addiction.) In
G. E. Moore's famous analysis, I am free in performing an action if I could
have done otherwise, but this latter proposition is to be understood as I would
have done otherwise if I had chosen. So I could have done otherwise even if
determinism is true.
Moore's
analysis seems to capture much of the pre-theoretical or everyday-life
distinction between excused and unexcused infractions of the moral law. Its
essential notion is that some actions result from effective choices by the
actor, and hence are free, and some do not result from such choices, and are not
free. Moore's analysis, nevertheless, seems beside the point to libertarians,
because, as they say, if determinism is true, I could not have chosen otherwise
in the right sense, and therefore could not have done otherwise. I could not
have originated anything. Thus, they say, moral responsibility collapses.
It
has been argued, in this vein, that libertarianism does not give us an
explanation of human action. It gives us a blank where an explanation should
be. And, one might add, it would take a very odd something to fill in the
blank. The desired entity - whether called mind, soul, self, agent, or
originator - must be sufficiently connected to the past to constitute a
continuing locus of personal responsibility, but sufficiently disconnected so
that its past does not determine its present. It must be sufficiently connected
to the causal chain to be able to interrupt it, but sufficiently disconnected
not to get trapped. It must be susceptible to being shaped and maybe governed
by motives, threats, punishments, and desires, but not totally controlled by
them. 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.
If
indeterminists seem dated in their description of what fundamental thing is
free (Strawson spoke of their 'obscure and panicky metaphysics'), they can be
up to date in their arguments that something or other is free. The weight and
intellectual respectability of physical science are claimed to be on their
side. Quantum mechanics is said to have rejected causal determinism. But the
kind of indeterminism involved in quantum mechanics is randomness, pure chance.
If my arm randomly jerks and strikes someone, that is just the kind of thing
that excuses me from moral responsibility. Indeed, there must be some causal
link between my action and my past life for it to make sense to think of it as
my action. Libertarianism needs to steer a course between the Scylla of
randomness and the Charybdis of determinism. Maybe there isn't any such course.
If
one cannot be responsible for consequences of one�s acts due to factors beyond
one�s control, or for antecedents of one�s acts that are properties of
temperament not subject to one�s will, or for the circumstances that pose one�s
moral choices, then how can one be responsible even for the stripped-down acts
of the will itself, if they are the product of antecedent circumstances
outside of the will�s control?
The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgement, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point. Everything seems to result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent�s control. Since he cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be responsible for their results.
But can there be any possibility of reconciliation between such clearly opposed positions as those of pessimists and optimists about determinism? Thus, suppose the optimist�s position were put like this: (1) the facts as we know them do not show determinism to be false; (2) the facts as we know them supply an adequate basis for the concepts and practices which the pessimist feels to be imperilled by the possibility of determinism�s truth.
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