Free Will Is Not a Mystery

FREE WILL IS NOT A MYSTERY laura w. ekstrom This essay aims centrally to defend two claims. First, the nature of free will is not mysterious. Certainly, it is contentious, but it is not mysterious. I defend this claim by illustrating the fact that a range of philosophical accounts of the nature of freedom—including those of historical and contemporary writers—are plausibly interpreted as aiming to capture both an autonomy and an alternative possibilities component. Second, a prominent argument aiming to press us to the view of “free will mysterianism” can reasonably be resisted. According to the view of mysterianism concerning free will, there is a powerful, unanswered case for the impossibility of free will, yet free will undeniably does exist. By recommending a particular event- causal indeterminist account of free action and by distinguishing various senses of the term “chance,” I argue that mysterianism concerning free will is not well founded. Two Features of Freedom More than twenty years ago, in an overview of the modern literature on free agency that remains valuable today, Gary Watson (1987 a ) structured the discussion by way of the “two different features of freedom that must be captured in any reasonable conception—namely self-determination (or autonomy) and the availability of alternative possibilities” (145). The fi rst feature is meant to capture the idea that a free act derives from, and is governed by, the self, not from or by heteronomous 00001252190.INDD001252190.INDD 336666 22/10/2011/10/2011 88:19:06:19:06 PPMM free will is not a mystery 367 sources. The second condition expresses the idea that free acts are traditionally regarded as ones chosen from among options, however these options are to be conceived. Watson continues: “Any adequate notion of free agency must provide for possibility and autonomy in some sense, and, in my view, the traditional conceptions that are still taken seriously were meant to do so” (145). Contemporary free agency theorists would do well to return to Watson’s (1987 a ) instructive article. The structure it gives to debates among writers ranging from Hobbes to van Inwagen, through Bramhall, Kant, Reid, Ayer, Chisholm, Frankfurt, Dennett, and Davidson, makes sense of a wide array of literature on the free will problem and can be applied to understanding more recent literature, including some that has diverged in disparate directions into subfi elds that exist in relative isolation from each other. Consider these as freedom’s central features: (i) self-determination, or autonomy; and (ii) the availability of alternative possibilities. An early suggestion of both of these features is in Aristotle’s discussion of the voluntary in Nicomachean Ethics (1973): the voluntary has its origin “in” the agent— “A human being originates his own actions . as he fathers his own children” (1113b6)— and it involves a dual ability—“where it is in our power to act it is also in our power not to act” (1113b6). 1 Many philosophers from diverse periods make note of the alternative possibilities condition of freedom. David Hume (1748 /1977 ) defi nes liberty as “a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may” (sec. 8) Thomas Reid (1983 , 523) claims that the “power to produce any effect implies the power not to produce it.” Kant (1960 , 45) likewise proposes that for an act to be truly free, “the act as well as its opposite must be within the power of the subject at the moment of its taking place.” According to A. J. Ayer (1982 , 15) , “When I am said to have done something of my own free will it is implied that I could have acted otherwise.” Bernard Williams (1995 a , 5) describes the claim that free will exists as consisting in “something to the effect that agents sometimes act voluntarily, and that when they do so they have a real choice between more than one course of action; or more than one course is open to them; or it is up to them which of sev- eral actions they perform.” The interest in capturing the notion of autonomy in an account of freedom is clear in Hobbes (1969 ) , who stresses the idea that external limits on one’s agency, such as coercion by another agent, hinder freedom of action, whereas what is internal to the actor himself cannot be an impediment: “Liberty is the absence of all impediments to action that are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent” (47). Locke’s (1975 /1847 ) interest in providing for a notion of self-determination is also plain: “. every man is put under a necessity, by his constitution as an intelligent being, to be determined in willing by his own thought and judgment what is best for him to do, else he would be under the determination 00001252190.INDD001252190.INDD 336767 22/10/2011/10/2011 88:19:07:19:07 PPMM 368 libertarian perspectives on free agency and free will of some other than himself, which is want of liberty” (II. 21. 48). Free action derives from the agent’s will and intelligence, not from something other than himself. Dispute over the right interpretation of both of these conditions—self-determination and the availability of alternative possibilities—has fueled debates between those who view determinism as a threat to freedom and those who do not, as well as among theorists who stand on the same side of that debate. Traditional compatibilist conceptions of freedom, inspired by the intuition that free action lacks external obstacles and is dependent on, and derivative from, what is internal to the self, interpret the relevant alternative possibilities counterfactually, in terms of what the agent would have done had she willed, desired, or chosen otherwise. Incompatibilists have tended to view conditional accounts of alternative possibilities as lacking: They have insisted instead on an interpretation that requires suitable causal indetermin- ism and “forking pathways” into the future that are, at least sometimes, each acces- sible to the free agent as extensions of the actual past. Self-determination, too, is open to incompatibilist and compatibilist readings. Determination of action by the self may be alleged to be, in the end, heteronomous, if the self is, itself, determined to be as it is by prior factors and natural laws. In recent philosophical literature on free agency, we fi nd concern with both of these features, alternatives and autonomy. Some discussions have focused more on one feature than the other, leaving us with current bodies of literature that do not always intermingle. We have literature, on the one hand, commonly conceived as work in contemporary metaphysics, on issues centrally concerning alternative possibilities (whether these are to be understood “conditionally” or “dispositionally” or “categorically,” and in what senses of these terms) and their relations to causal determinism, causation, natural laws, and what is called “free will.” 2 We fi nd in this “free will literature” discussions of the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism, its refi nements, and the modal principles used therein, as well as continuing debates over what is, or is not, shown by counterfactual intervention (“Frankfurt-style”) cases concerning the relations between morally responsible action and the availability of alternative possibilities, and the implication of these debates, if any, on the question of freedom’s compatibility with causal determinism. On the other hand, we have current literature considered by many as work in moral psychology, action theory, and practical reason—some might say, broadly speaking, ethics—on the notion of personal autonomy and related issues concerning wholeheartedness, identifi cation with and alienation from desire, on being “true to one’s self,” and on some actions’ being more “one’s own” or more “full-blooded” than others.3 Much of this recent literature on personal autonomy, identifi cation, and related notions has sprung from attraction to proposals in the early 1970s by Dworkin (1970 , 1976 ) and Frankfurt (1971 ) , and a suggestive response to their approach by Watson (1975 ) , which are discussed a bit further below. These debates derive from recognition that the Hobbesian view provides a shallow account of the self, over- looking the fact that desires themselves can be external in a sense that makes them impedimental. The aim of recent work in this area is to give a more plausible and expansive account of the self and hence a richer account of self-determination. 00001252190.INDD001252190.INDD 336868 22/10/2011/10/2011 88:19:07:19:07 PPMM free will is not a mystery 369 Literature of this second sort, which tends to be collected into anthologies with such titles as Personal Autonomy (J. S. Taylor 2005 ) ,4 is often not included in anthologies or handbooks such as the present one, though many of the issues in this literature bear on concerns of free will theorists and should be more widely recognized as important and overlapping. Although we have seen some subspecialization in recent literature, nonetheless, various contemporary conceptions of free agency may be understood as sensibly aiming to capture both features of freedom: autonomy and alternative possibilities. For instance, John Martin Fischer’s compatibilist account of the freedom required for moral responsibility includes both a “reasons-responsiveness” requirement as well as an “ownership” requirement, and it is plausible to construe the fi rst of these as an attempt to capture a relevant sense of alternative possibilities and the second as an attempt to capture an autonomy condition. Fischer’s requirement that the mechanism producing a free action must be suitably “reasons-responsive” is, as I view it, a complex and highly developed way of stating that, in acting in a free and responsible way, it must be the case that the agent would have done otherwise, if .

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