A Libertarian Response to Dennett and Harris on Free Will (original) (raw)
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A Critique of Compatibilist-Libertarianism
2018
Christian List has recently defended what he refers to as a compatibilist-libertarian theory of free will. He attempts to satisfy the libertarian requirement for alternative possibilities without assuming the falsity of physical determinism. To do so, List relies on a multi-level modal theory that he developed with Marcus Pivato. In this theory, List and Pivato demonstrate the compatibility of physical determinism and agential indeterminism. The success of compatibilistlibertarianism essentially hinges upon whether or not List and Pivato’s theory is truly consistent with a non-hypothetical conception of possibility. In this paper, I argue that, despite his attempt to distance himself from a standard compatibilist (i.e. hypothetical) conception of possibility, List remains committed to such a hypothetical conception. I also argue that List’s theory of agential causation is implausible given his modal interpretation of agency. Therefore, I conclude that compatibilist-libertarianism is...
Libertarianism as a Naturalistic Position author original version
There is a rather thinly-veiled suspicion amongst some compatibilists that libertarians are able to embrace their claims about the nature of the human will only in virtue of a general readiness to suppose that human beings occupy a very special place within the order of nature. This readiness, they imagine, is borne of an assumption that many of those compatibilists eschew – the assumption that the universe is theistic and that an omniscient and benevolent god has provided for human beings to be specially positioned within it. Though the world might conceivably be indeterministic, these compatibilists believe, there is no scientifically acceptable ground for supposing that the indeterminism involved might be of such a kind as to provide for anything like freedom of the will – and they are therefore wary and mistrustful of the libertarian's willingness to accept that the will itself might be the locus (at least on some occasions) of an indeterministic form of operation. To accept this, without taking oneself to have other grounds for embracing the idea that the powers of human beings need not be rooted in ordinary sorts of physics and metaphysics, seems to them wildly unmotivated; it is therefore inferred that probably, their libertarian opponents do believe themselves to have such other grounds. But I am both a libertarian and an atheist. In this paper, therefore, I want to try to defend libertarianism against the charge that it flies in the face of what we know or are justified in believing about the order of nature – and indeed, try to make out the beginnings of a case for the view that libertarianism should, on the contrary, be regarded as the position of choice for those who take their science seriously. Libertarianism is generally explained in introductory volumes as a multiply conjunctive doctrine – and I propose to consider some possible forms of objection to its naturalistic credentials in an order suggested by this conjunctive form. The first of its two main conjuncts is incompatibilism, which alleges incompatibility between determinism and something that for now, in deference to the tradition, I will simply call 'free will'. I do not intend, in this paper, to examine the arguments for incompatibilism, nor the various critiques to which they have been subject1; I want rather to focus here on a particular feature of the incompatibilist's claim, viz. that it is a claim about whether free will is incompatible with determinism, where free will is thought of as a property possessed only (at any rate in its earthly manifestations) by human beings. This represents, in my view, the traditional incompatibilist's seminal error, and is the main obstacle to the construction of a plausible naturalistic version of libertarianism, as I shall shortly explain. The second main conjunct of the libertarian position is itself conjunctive. It is generally represented as a belief about what response should be adopted to the incompatibilism expressed by the first main conjunct; the libertarian reacts to the incompatibility she discerns between free will and determinism, it is said, by asserting that (i) we do indeed have free will and (ii) that (therefore) determinism must be false. Some worries about whether or not a libertarian position can properly respect naturalism unsurprisingly 1 1 I do so in considerably more detail in my (2012).
SOFT LIBERTARIANISM AND HARD COMPATIBILISM
In this paper I discuss two kinds of attempts to qualify incompatibilist and compatibilist conceptions of freedom to avoid what have been thought to be incredible commitments of these rival accounts. One attempt-which I call soft libertarianism-is represented by Robert Kane's work. It hopes to defend an incompatibilist conception of freedom without the apparently difficult metaphysical costs traditionally incurred by these views. On the other hand, in response to what I call the robot objection (that if compatibilism is true, human beings could be the products of design), some compatibilists are tempted to soften their position by placing restrictions on the origins of agency. I argue that both of these attempts are misguided. Hard libertarianism and hard compatibilism are the only theoretical options. KEY WORDS: agent causation, compatibilist conceptions of freedom, hard and soft, libertarianism, the robot argument, ultimate responsibility Both compatibilism and its denial are in some respects unappealing; that's why the issue remains a classical philosophical problem. The cost of incompatibilism seems to be a choice between skepticism or a metaphysically and morally problematic (if not incoherent) picture of free agency. But compatibilists have their own troubles explaining how human beings can be products of nature and at the same time authors of their actions, how freedom as they see it can amount to anything more than what Kant contemptuously called the "freedom of the turnspit." 1 Some recent libertarian and compatibilist sympathizers have tried to minimize the costs of their respective commitments by qualifying them in certain ways. 2 In this paper, I will speak against some of these attempts. In the first part of the paper, I criticize the most well developed version of what I will call "soft libertarianism," Robert Kane's The Significance of Free Will. 3 Then I take up the corresponding temptation to qualify compatibilism. I conclude by endorsing Harry Frankfurt's uncomprom-1 Immanuel Kant,
THE HEART OF LIBERTARIANISM: FUNDAMENTALITY AND THE WILL Forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy
It is often claimed that libertarianism offers an unattractive conception of free will and moral responsibility because it renders free agency inexplicable and irrational. This essay aims to show, first, that the soundness of these objections turns on more basic disagreements concerning the ideals of free agency and, second, to develop and motivate a truly libertarian conception of the ideals of free agency. The central contention of the paper is that the heart of libertarians' ideal of free agency is the ideal of agential fundamentality.
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.
We live in an extremely individual age called neoliberalism. The pluralistic Democratic Constitutional State demands from society a certain moral action that is inclusive, free of coercion, and which guarantees relations of reciprocity and intersubjective communication, capable of stimulating the subjects' self-determination in their institutionalized social practices, to this freedom of the kind social, we shall call the name democratic freedom. Freedom must be an instrument of solidarity to stimulate the democratic potentialities of alterity and inclusion of the invisible. To form subjects free of pathologies, the liberal overcoming of the value of freedom as an absolute individualization is made necessary, bringing out in each individual and in society the responsibility of communicative interaction in the formation of social free will through the development of a social freedom, since the degree of freedom (autonomy) of the subjects depends on how their relate, how our pretensions are corresponded and how their behave in our social roles with the other subjects.
On the role of indeterminism in libertarian free will
Philosophical Explorations
In a recent paper in this journal, "How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?" Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility. .. [he made] "two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism"-one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role-"both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument". In this paper, I respond to Franklin's criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will in general and to do justice to the complex historical debates about it, one must distinguish different kinds of control agents may have over events and correspondingly different kinds of freedom they may possess.