Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

freedom.

identity.

But when we think about ourselves, we are conscious of other things as well. We don’t only register the world, as we take it to be. We act in it. We concentrate on alternatives. We deliberate and do things. We take control. How should we think about that?

FATE

Sometimes we are proud of our freedom: we are not mere creatures of instinct and desire. We can pull ourselves together and fight to control our obsessions or addictions. We deserve praise when we succeed. If we fail, we may deserve and sometimes receive punishment. Freedom brings responsibility, and people who abuse it deserve blame and punishment. But nobody deserves punishment for failing to do something if they could not do it. It would be most unjust to punish me for not having gone to the Moon, or to punish a man in prison for not keeping an appointment outside the prison, for example. Here the obstacles are beyond the agent’s control. That means, he or she is not to blame. So our moral reactions as well as our ordinary thinking seem to presuppose that sometimes, even if we acted badly, we could have done otherwise. But might this consciousness of freedom be an illusion? Could we ever really have acted otherwise than we did?

Lucretius and the young man at the beginning of the chapter can be given an argument: The past controls the present and future. You can’t control the past. Also, you can’t control the way the past controls the present and future. So, you can’t control the present and future. In fact, you can’t control anything at all, past, present, or future.

Hard determinism

The first premise of this argument is a thumbnail version of the doctrine known as determinism, which can be put by saying that every event is the upshot of antecedent causes.

This is close, maybe very close, to what I've come to believe. I'm moving gradually toward a harder and harder determinism, although that leaves open questions of accountability and behavioral change.

People who accept this argument are called hard determinists, or incompatibilists, since they think that freedom and determinism are incompatible.

Yeah, this may not *quite* be me, but I'm getting closer...

Such events have no cause: they just happen, or do not happen.

Yes, but what does this have to do with individual or group human behavior?

If anything, physical indeterminism makes responsibility and the justice of blame even more elusive. This is sometimes called the dilemma of determinism. If determinism holds, we lose freedom and responsibility. If determinism does not hold, but some events ‘just happen,’ and then, equally, we lose freedom and responsibility. Chance is as relentless as necessity.

the apparent injustice to the fig tree.

is

Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer denies that our own self-understanding, our self-consciousness, displays our real freedom. We can interpret him as criticizing this argument: I am not conscious of the causal background needed for me to do Y. I know I sometimes do Y. So, I am conscious that there is no causal background needed for me to do Y. His point is that this argument is invalid. Being unconscious of something cannot be parlayed into being conscious of its absence.

At this point one might start thinking something like this: Perhaps if we confine our thoughts to the physical world, we seem to have no option but determinism or random in-determinacies, and we lose sight of real freedom. But suppose there is another level. Behind or above the evolutions of brain and body, there is the Real Me, receiving information, and occasionally directing operations. There will be times when left to themselves the brain and body would move one way. But with direction from the Real Me, they will go the other way. I can take over, and interfere with the way things would otherwise have gone. This is where my freedom lies.

This seems to be the hope offered/promised by mindfulness, in a kind of crass language.

This conceptualizes the relationship between me on the one hand and my brain and body on the other in terms of a two-way interaction. The brain and body bring the Real Me messages, and this Real Me then issues them instructions. The Real Me sits in the control room, and the whole person behaves freely when it is in command. If it is not in command, the brain and body get on with their (‘mindless’) physical evolutions.

This is SO close to how I metaphor minding.

This is mind-body dualism again. The Real You dictates events. Messages come in, perhaps through the pineal gland. A breath of soul then fans neurones and synapses into action, and initiate new causal chains. There is a ghost in the machine, and the machine behaves freely when the ghost is in charge.

Dualism tries to understand human freedom by introducing an extra ingredient, the controlling soul. But how do we understand the freedom of the soul? Look again at the dilemma of determinism. How does a ghost or soul inside the machine escape the same problem?

The dualist approach to free will makes a fundamental philosophical mistake. It sees a problem and tries to solve it by throwing another kind of ‘thing’ into the arena. But it forgets to ask how the new ‘thing’ escapes the problems that beset ordinary things.

In fact, if you think about it, you will find that you surreptitiously think of the freedom of any non-physical soul, any ghost in the machine, on the model of human freedom. That is, far from helping to understand human freedom, the idea depends upon it.

Epicurus

Lucretius,

Is there any better way of breaking the argument for incompatibilism?

Think of the brain in ‘software’ terms,

Not again.

But dog-throwers can be deterred and changed and warned away.

How? Wouldn't you already have to believe in less than hard determinism to accept this? How does any of the decision modules get free of their set up in order to change? Are they homunculi with the unique power to alter their causal lineage? How did they get this power of people in general do not have it?

We have here the beginning—but only the beginning—of the programme of compatibilism, or the attempt to show that, properly understood, there is no inconsistency between acknowledging determinism and our practices of holding people responsible for their actions. Compatibilism is sometimes called ‘soft’ determinism, in opposition to ‘hard’ determinism. This is not a very good label for two reasons.

In other words, between determinism and free will and therefore being able to hold people accountable for their actions.

Of course, a compatibilist can accept some kinds of excuse.

Compatibilists, so far, seem to blame someone for events, when the person could not have done otherwise.

To get at the right sense of ‘could have done otherwise’, we might offer what I shall call the first compatibilist definition: A subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. The subject could have done otherwise in this sense provided she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently.

interventionist control.

libertarian conception of freedom,

according to compatibilism, that is how we control things. We are involved in the causal order. We are part of the way in which the past controls the future. And therein lies our responsibility. We can call this conception of control, inside control, control from inside nature. When we exercise inside control, the compatibilist holds, we are responsible for various events. And if we exercise that control badly, we may justly be held responsible for the upshot, and held to blame if blame is an appropriate reaction.

compatibilism can seem more like a dismissal of the problem of freedom, rather than a solution of it.

Kant

As we come to learn about causal regularities lying behind actions and other mental states, we are apt to switch into less moralistic modes.

But according to the determinist, there are always things like this to learn.

This kind of reply takes issue with the compatibilist version of ‘could not have done otherwise’. It is all very well, it points out, to say that someone would have done otherwise if he or she had chosen differently. But suppose they were set so that they could not have chosen differently. Suppose at the time of acting, their choosing modules were locked into place by mini-Martians, or chemicals, or whatever. What then? The compatibilist we have so far shrugs the question off—he is not interested in how the subjects got to be as they are, only whether the outcome is good or bad. The objector finds it important, and at least some of our reactions, when we find more about causal routes, show that we agree with the objector.

I think the best line for compatibilism, faced with this counterattack, is to query the word ‘set’, when there is talk of the modules being set to produce some outcome.

We are imagining the modules badly fixed by chemical or other processes. But these cases are special, precisely because once they are in them subjects become inflexible: immune to argument, or to additions or changes in the decisionmaking scenario. But normally agents are not so set in their ways. Their freedom consists in the fact that they are responsive to new information, and new differences in the situation.

revised compatibilist definition: The subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. This means that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently and, under the impact of other thoughts or considerations, she would have chosen differently.

Some philosophers (Baruch Spinoza [1632–77] is the most famous example) like to associate freedom with increased knowledge and understanding. We are free, they say, in so far as we understand things.

We are only free in so far as we have opportunities open to us, and lack of information denies us opportunities. We could add this thought to the revised compatibilist definition, by specifying that the ‘other thoughts or considerations’, first, are accurate representations of the agent’s situation and options, and second, are available to the agent.

We might incorporate that into a revised revised compatibilist definition: The subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. This means that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently and, under the impact of other true and available thoughts or considerations, she would have chosen differently. True and available thoughts and considerations are those that represent her situation accurately, and are ones that she could reasonably be expected to have taken into account.

This is all so rational, which is why I tend to lean a bit more in the deterministic direction. Sometimes we have the knowledge/information and even think of it before making our decision to act, but irrational impulses and motivators overrule these rational ones and, in essence, choose the "wrong" behavior. This is murky territory, where, I think, the individual is neither all victim nor all accountable moral agent. It's more complicated than either/or. It's more a matter of "to what extent"? I guess I'm homing in on the word "available." High quality healthcare is "available," but only if you have some means to access it: if it's too far to walk, you don't have a car, and there's no nearby public transportation, etc., it maybe be available but geographically inaccessible. If you can't afford to get to the care facility, pay the price of an appointment (or, more likely, series of appointments), and any tests or treatments ordered, the available healthcare is not accessible to you. And so on. Do we take seriously the argument that this person should have chosen to live closer to a hospital, bought and learned how to drive a car, made friends with someone who has a car and can lend it or drive the individual to care, chosen to make more money so they could afford care? That's a somewhat gray area I suppose, but if we accept that there are structural barriers barring the access of poor people to resources, and other or similar barriers keeping them poor, things get even more complicated. How similar is this to a person like me who needs to get healthier—lose weight, lower blood sugar and cholesterol, lower A1C, improve cardio-vascular health, etc. but who also has compulsive cravings to eat large quantities of junky food? I wrestle with this every day of my life—and not just this specific point, but MANY others in which my mental illness or my (disordered?) personality or whatever seem to play an oversized and counterproductive (dare I add "determinative"?) role.

What of the person to whom the thoughts or considerations just didn’t occur? Is she a victim rather than a responsible agent? This introduces a new twist to things.

So far we have talked as if ‘free choice’, either of some mysterious interventionist kind or of some substitute ‘inside’ or compatibilist kind, is necess...

The conceptual engineering we are doing at this point is supposed to tease out or make explicit real elements in our thinking. We want to highlight and try to encapsulate things like this: we do make a distinction between changing the past (cannot do) and acting differently than we do (sometimes can do); we do have discriminating practices of blame; we do make a distinction between being ill and being bad; we do allow some excuses and disallow others. The philosophical analysis is supposed to give us intellectual control of all this. It is supposed to exhibit it all, not just as an irrational jumble of disconnected habits, but as the application of a reasonable and defensible set of concepts and principles. It is because it is hard to do this that the philosophy is hard.

Myself, I believe that the revised revised compatibilist definition does that pretty well.

Sometimes an analysis will settle hard cases. But sometimes it leaves grey areas, and this may not be a bad thing.

But the point is that even if the revised revised analysis does not settle this issue, it certainly pinpoints it. And this is itself a step towards getting the issue of responsibility and freedom under control. But it must in fairness be added that there is still a road to travel. An incompatibilist, for instance, might insist that thoughts are only available if they are themselves the objects of free (interventionist) selection, and this would put us back to square one.

Blinder,

Apt last name.