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Hume on Liberty and Necessity

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Hume on Liberty and Necessity 1 Hume on Liberty and Necessity by George Botterill [***Note: This is a draft version of a paper whose final and definitive form was as published in: P. Millican ed., Reading Hume on Human Understanding, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2002, pp.277-300.***] Hume was certainly tackling a ‘long disputed question’ under his heading Of liberty and necessity. If our actions are causally determined, can we still maintain that we are capable of acting freely? Or does our deeply-rooted commitment to regarding other people as morally responsible agents also commit us to regarding them as exceptions to the general order of nature and, at some level, somehow exempt from the operation of causal laws? By now this has been disputed even longer, whether we call it the Problem of Free Will and (or versus) Determinism, or the topic of Moral Responsibility and Causal Determination. The basic issue is familiar enough to be referred to as an ‘old chestnut’ – which, in my view, implies we ought to have cracked it by now. Actually, I do believe that the position usually referred to nowadays as Compatibilism provides a solution to this problem, and no doubt this influences the view I take of Hume’s treatment of the topic. In order to relate Hume’s contribution to subsequent discussions and to the accumulated terminology of the debate, it will be useful to have a general scheme of the main positions in mind. Call the assumption that people – at any rate, normal adults – do have the capacity to act freely and are therefore morally responsible for their actions the Free Will Assumption. Evidently this is an assumption that we implicitly make in many different ways. For example, if a rottweiler attacks and injures a child, we may be shocked by the injuries and loathe and fear the dog that inflicted them. But we don’t blame the dog, because such an animal is not an appropriate target for that attitude: it cannot help the savagery which is part of its nature. And if the dog is put down, this is for reasons of safety, to prevent a repetition of the attack. It is not an execution. We take a different attitude to the dog’s owner, who should perhaps have foreseen the possibility of such an attack, and who in any case has a responsibility to control so dangerous a pet. What Hume calls ‘the doctrine of necessity’ is the Principle of Determinism, according to which all events (including all human actions) are entirely the result of prior causes. So now we go on to ask: can the Free Will Assumption and the Principle of Determinism both be true? That they can both be true, because they are logically consistent, is the answer given by Compatibilism. Those who hold that the Free Will Assumption and the Principle of Determinism cannot both be true are Incompatibilists. For these people there arises the further question: If they cannot, on grounds of logical consistency, both be true, which is false? Libertarians maintain that we have free will, and that we must therefore conclude that the Principle of Determinism is false, or at any rate does not apply to human actions and decisions. Hard Determinists maintain that the Principle of Determinism is true, and that therefore we are making a metaphysical error when we assume that people have free will. 2 Representing the general structure of the debate diagramatically, this is how the parties stand: Fig 1: The relations between the Free Will Assumption, the Principle of Determinism, Libertarianism, Hard Determinism, and Soft Determinism/Compatibilism Can the Free Will Assumption and the Principle of Determinism both be true? Answer: Yes Answer: No = COMPATIBILISM = INCOMPATIBILISM So which is true? They are both true = SOFT DETERMINISM Answer: The Principle A nswer: The Free Will of Determinism Assumption = = HARD DETERMINISM LIBERTARIANISM In discussions of free will and causal determination conducted outside the confines of academic philosophy compatibilism still remains little known and largely ignored. Indeed, non-philosophers and undergraduate beginners in philosophy seem to find compatibilism highly paradoxical, when first introduced to it. But within the history of philosophy the compatibilists can point to a dynasty of champions stretching from Hobbes through Hume to Ayer. For example, in one of his papers Donald Davidson announces that: "Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Moore, Schlick, Ayer, 3 Stevenson, and a host of others have done what can be done, or ought ever to have been needed, to remove the confusions that can make determinism seem to frustrate freedom."1 With such a tradition behind it, it is only natural to assume there has been some cumulative development in the compatibilist case, that it did not spring complete and perfectly formed from the head of Thomas Hobbes. In fact I think it is preferable to think of the case for compatibilism as composed of a battery of arguments, some much more forceful than others. Yet if one were looking for a single main argument that might be strengthened, the obvious and most popular candidate is one that derives from the thought that (i) the concept of freedom is contrastive, since there is a genuine distinction to be drawn between actions that are freely performed and those that are not, but that (ii) it is a mistake to suppose that the contrast is with causation in general. I shall refer to this argument as the Contrastive Argument.2 The tricky bit, of course, is to say exactly what it is that acting freely is to be contrasted with. The favoured options are the other three ‘C’s – coercion, compulsion, and constraint. How exactly we are to capture this contrast – between, on the one hand, cases in which people may be said to act freely, or voluntarily, or of their own free will and, on the other hand, cases in which they do not – is something that may still, after all these years, need a bit of working up. However, there is a presumption that a Humean account of causation cannot but be helpful to the Contrastive Argument, if only on the grounds that the less we pack into the general causal relation, the more will be available for the purposes of distinguishing those special causes that do frustrate the freedom of an agent. Whether or not a Humean account of causation aids the Contrastive Argument, I want to make it quite clear that Hume himself does not advance that argument. If we look carefully at what Hume says on this subject, we will hesitate to think of him as fitting into a single overall case for compatibilism based on the Contrastive Argument.3 That will be just as well, not only in order to report Hume’s position correctly, but also in order to appreciate the strength of the case for compatibilism. The biggest question is whether compatibilism provides a solution to the traditional problem of free will and determinism. Many philosophers have maintained that it does, and have acknowledged that Hume made an important, if not decisive, contribution to the development of compatibilism. So the further question arises: What exactly was the contribution that Hume made to compatibilism? In attempting to answer this question we need to look closely at the two places where Hume wrote about "liberty and necessity" in the Treatise and the first Enquiry. On reading through these passages we will observe that although they are in many respects closely similar, there is one striking difference between them. So we are led on to the further questions: What accounts for that striking difference? And is it more, or less, 1 From ‘Freedom to Act’ in Davidson (1980), p.63. 2 Its most influential statements have been Hobbes (1651), ch.XXI: "Liberty, or Freedome, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition ..."; Schlick (1939), p.150: "Freedom means the opposite of compulsion; a man is free if he does not act under compulsion, and he is compelled or unfree when he is hindered from without in the realization of his natural desires." ; and Ayer (1954), p.278: "For it is not, I think, causality that freedom is to be contrasted with, but constraint." 3 Paul Russell (1983) has also emphasised this point. In his (1988) he even argues that a regularity account of causation weakens the Contrastive Argument (which he calls the "compulsion argument"). 4 important than the similarities? I shall start with the last two questions, by analysing the similarities and differences between Hume’s two treatments. Section I describes the major difference between what Hume has to say on the topic in the Treatise and in the Enquiry. Sections II and III examine the similarities. In section IV I shall explain why it is a mistake to attribute the Contrastive Argument to Hume. Finally, in section V I will offer an evaluation of Hume’s contribution to the development of compatibilism. I The Striking Difference The striking difference between Treatise II.III.I-II and Enquiry VIII is that in the former Hume is a partisan for the "doctrine of necessity" and against the "doctrine of liberty", whereas in the latter he presents himself as a peacemaker who will heal the breach between the two sides to this ancient dispute. In the Treatise he says that "there are always the same arguments against liberty or free-will" (p.407) and describes the doctrine of liberty as a "fantastical system" (p.404), as "absurd ... in one sense, and unintelligible in any other" (p.407), and as having "odious consequences" (p.412). His conclusion is that he "cannot doubt of an entire victory" – i.e., for necessity and against liberty.
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