A Principle of Rational Explanation? (original) (raw)
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Libertarian Free Will and the Argument from Reason
2020
The argument from reason is really a family of arguments to show that reasoning is incompatible with naturalism. Here, naturalism is understood as the idea that foundationally, there are only physical objects, properties and relations, and anything else reduces to, supervenes on, or emerges from that. For our purposes, one of the most important claims of naturalism is that all causation is passive, automatic, event causation (an earthquake automatically causes a tidal wave; the tidal wave responds passively): there are no agent causes, where something does not happen automatically but only because the agent exerts his active power by choosing to do it. The most famous version of the argument from reason is epistemological: if naturalism were true, we could not be justified in believing it. Today, I want to focus on the ontological argument from reason, which asserts that there cannot be reasoning in a naturalistic world, because reasoning requires libertarian free will, and this in turn requires a unified, enduring self with active power. The two most promising ways out of this argument are: (1) Compatibilism-even in a deterministic, naturalistic world, humans are capable of free acts of reason if their minds are responsive to rational causes; (2) Libertarian Naturalism-a self with libertarian free will emerges from the brain. I argue that neither of these moves works, and so, unless someone has a better idea, the ontological argument from reason stands. 2. Compatibilism and Human Rationality. The basic idea of compatibilism is that a decision is free if it derives from rational causes. This assumes that reasoning is compatible with determinism. On Dennett's view, you are unfree if your actions result from a closed program, like the Sphex wasp that can be made to repeat the same actions indefinitely (move a cricket to the threshold of its burrow; go inside to check if it is safe) by moving the cricket away from the threshold when it is inside (it never just drags the cricket in, but moves it back to the threshold and goes inside to check if it is safe again). 1 What's wrong with the Sphex is that it is insensitive to the obvious fact that its routine is pointless, and can't break out of the loop. However, being controlled isn't the problem: what matter is what controls you: you are free so long as your will is governed by the right (rational) causes. Thus, a demonic neurologist might rob you of freedom by inducing irrational beliefs and desires, but if we were overwhelmed by the persuasive arguments of a well-informed truthful oracle, we would still be free. So long as reason drives the bus, we can be free even if, like Luther, we could do no other. 2 A major problem for compatibilist theories of reasoning is that they don't tell us why some reasoning belongs to, or is owned by, a particular agent. The occurrence of phenomena responsive to rationality is not enough for reasoning: a notepad may be responsive to rational formulae, but it isn't reasoning; likewise a computer is responsive to a rational algorithm, but it is not reasoning for itself. This objection is standardly pressed through manipulation arguments, e.g., couldn't a kinder, gentler neurologist implant reasoning of his own in a subject? The subject is now responsive to reasoning, but his decisions are controlled by the neurologist's reasoning, not his own. This appears to show that a person's using reasons is not enough to show that he is reasoning for himself.
Libertarianism and rationality
The Southern journal of philosophy, 1988
Theargument that libertarian style free will would bedestructive to the rationality of human decisions is not new. Despite the antiquity of this compatibilist theme two important recent defenses of libertarianism, Peter van Inwagen's A n Essay on Free Willand Robert Kane's Free Will and Values, are not daunted by this objection. In this paper I argue that these accounts leave little or no room for the reasonability of libertarian freechoices. 1 begin with theaccounts of van lnwagen and Kaneand then show how the compatibilist theme counts against each.
Libertarian Papers, 2, 5., 2010
The dominant tradition in Western philosophy sees rationality as dictating. Thus rationality may require that we believe the best explanation and simple conceptual truths and that we infer in accordance with evident rules of inference. I argue that, given what we know about the growth of knowledge, this authoritarian concept of rationality leads to absurdities and should be abandoned. I then outline a libertarian concept of rationality, derived from Popper, which eschews the dictates and which sees a rational agent as one who questions, criticises, conjectures and experiments. I argue that, while the libertarian approach escapes the absurdities of the authoritarian, it requires two significant developments and an important clarification to be made fully consistent with itself.
Axiomathes, 2014
Incompatibilism is the doctrine according to which the truth of determinism entails that there is no free will. One of its versions-libertarianism-claims that there is free will. Libertarians thus conclude, by Modus Tollens, that determinism must be false. Typically, the incompatibilist premise of the libertarian argument is argued for by means of philosophical reasoning. Usually, this reasoning proceeds along the steps of the so-called Consequence Argument. These are the following. First, the statement that the truth of determinism entails that our actions are a consequence of both events that occurred long before we were born and the laws of nature. Second, the statement that both what happened before we were born and the laws of nature are entirely beyond our control. Third, the statement that whatever is a consequence of these past occurrences and the laws of nature must also happen entirely beyond our control. Fourth, the statement that whatever else our having free will might mean it certainly must mean that we do have control over our actions. Finally, the conclusion that, if determinism is true, then we have no free will. Regardless of the question of how convincing this chain deduction really is (Dennett, for instance, produced an interesting evolutionary counter-argument against it), it is meant to justify only the major premise of the libertarian argument. Obviously, determinist hardliners accept it too. Contrary to libertarians though, they affirm that determinism is indeed true. This they typically justify by appealing to what they take to be the current scientific world view, deemed to be generally accepted everywhere outside of quantum mechanics. Therefore-they conclude by Modus Ponens-we have no free will. What confers its distinctive character to the libertarian position within incompatibilism is thus the minor premise of the Modus Tollens argument by means of which it is arrived at. As mentioned above, this premise states that there is free will (because we have it). But how do libertarians know this to be the case? The free will libertarians claim we do have is of a peculiar sort. This makes the question above all the more relevant. As a matter of fact,
“Critical-Rationalist Libertarianism” (CRL) was replied to in “Libertarianism Without Argument” (the reply). Various points in that text are here given responses. Both critical rationalism and how it applies to libertarianism are elucidated and elaborated. This response will proceed by quoting the reply where relevant (virtually all of it) and then responding immediately after the quotations, following the order of the reply’s very brief “critique” (605 words).
Libertarian Free Will, Naturalism, and Science 157
Stewart Goetz, JPTR, 2021
If we have libertarian free will, then it is plausible to believe that the occurrences of certain physical events have irreducible and ineliminable mental explanations. According to a strong version of (metaphysical) naturalism, everything in the physical world is in principle explicable in nonmental terms. Therefore, the truth of naturalism implies that libertarian choices cannot explain the occurrences of any physical events. In this paper, I example a methodological argument for the truth of naturalism and conclude that the argument fails. I then consider additional concerns raised against the reality of libertarian freedom. First, I examine the claim that if a physical event E is not causally determined to occur by another physical event, then there is no way to account for the difference between E's occurring randomly and E's being causally determined to occur by a mental event. Second, I consider the assertion that the affirmation of libertarianism is a mind-of-the-gaps version of the God-of-the-gaps objection to a divine explanation of a physical event. Third, I take up the question of whether the inability of libertarians (or anyone else) to pinpoint precisely where the initial physical effects of libertarian choices occur is a good reason for rejecting libertarianism. Fourth, I examine the claim that belief in the existence of the soul or immaterial mind is the result of an explanatory hypothesis to account for how libertarian free choices can causally produce physical effects. Fifth, I look at the traditional objection to substance dualism from the impossibility of causal interaction between a soul and its body.