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Agent Causation, Or, How to Be a Soft Libertarian

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Agent Causation, Or, How to Be a Soft Libertarian Agent Causation, or, How to Be a Soft Libertarian Steve W. Lemke New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for the Southwest Regional meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society A Soft Libertarian View of Agent Causation Why do people do what they do? I am not asking about motives per se, but about how we account for human action. For example, why did John X enroll as a student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary? If we trust John’s account, he suggests that he made his decision at the end of a lengthy process of deliberation. He sought the advice of trusted ministers, he consulted family and friends, he visited four seminaries, and he sought God’s guidance through prayer. Ultimately, he said that he felt led to choose this seminary over the others he had visited because our seminary had some features that the other seminaries did not. However, others cast John’s decision in a profoundly different light. A friend who serves as Dean at one of the other seminaries John considered happens to be strongly Calvinistic. His take on John’s coming to our seminary was that it had nothing to do with the relative strengths of our faculties or student enlistment personnel. God had simply predestined and decreed that John come to our seminary from before the foundation of the world, and no human actions could mitigate this decree without God sacrificing His sovereignty.1 The Dean asserted that “not one drop of rain falls without God’s sure command,”2 and that “God by His secret bridle so holds and governs (persons) 1 John Frame defines “God’s decretive will” as His “highly mysterious” purpose that “governs whatever comes to pass.” John Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction (Phillipsburg: P & R Publishing, 1994), 175. 2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, The Library of Christian Classics 20, 21 (London: SCM Press, 1960), I.16.4-5. Calvin also asserts God’s meticulous providence in 1 2 that they cannot move even one of their fingers without accomplishing the work of God much more than their own.”3 As my friend put it, “God controls all persons and events equally” through divine providence and predestination, and this control is necessary because “God could hardly exercise care over them without having control over it.”4 John’s coming to NOBTS was not against his will, however; he freely assented to come to our seminary because it lined up with his desires and other previous events and states of affairs. As the Dean put it, “He [God] exercises his control, as far as men and women are concerned, not apart from what they want to do, or (generally speaking) by compelling them to do what they do not want to do, but through their wills.” However, my Dean friend asserted, John literally could not have chosen any of the other seminaries he visited. A third seminary that John visited has a radically postmodernist Dean. His perspective was also that John himself had little to do with coming to our seminary. John’s coming to our seminary was simply the causal result of the contingent prior events and states of affairs in John’s life (his genetic, social, economic, and psychological background). The postmodernist Dean claimed that John’s choice was just as much “a contingency, as much a result of thousands of small mutations finding niches (and millions of others finding no niches), as are the orchids and the anthropoids.”5 In matters such as which mothers have milk and others do not (Institutes, I.16.3). 3John Calvin, A Defence (sic) of the Secret Providence of God, by which He Executes His Eternal Decrees, trans. Henry Cole (London: Sovereign Grace Union, 1927), 238. 4 Paul Helm, The Providence of God, Contours of Christian Theology series, ed. Gerald Bray (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994), 5 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16. Rorty makes this claim not merely about a particular human action, but all human language and culture. Ironically, some Calvinists also subscribe to this doctrine of radical contingency. Fore example, Pollard argues that the illusion of free choice between viable alternatives is dispelled when we recognize that “[T]he I, too, is seen to be controlled by things and instincts, the product of its given heredity and environment.” William G. Pollard, Chance 3 fact, my postmodernist friend asserted, what John described as a choice was actually the result of “cosmic rays scrambling the fine structure of some crucial neurons” in his brain or of “some odd episodes in infancy--some obsessional kinks left in these brains by idiosyncratic traumata.”6 Which of these accounts of John coming to seminary do you believe? Does the behavior of persons result from deliberate decisions or from antecedent causes? Your answer to that question expresses your action theory. I believe that John was essentially correct in his self-description of his actions, and after his seminary career (if he takes some Philosophy classes) perhaps he would know that this expresses an action theory of agent causation. In this paper, I would like to propose that agent causation is not only an essential component of a coherent action theory, but it is also consistent with biblical anthropology. In particular, I shall argue that agent causation is compatible with a high view of the sovereignty of God, while allowing a significant and meaningful human freedom of choice (namely, a soft libertarian position in which persons exhibit creaturely freedom). Agent causation is a voluntaristic action theory that accounts for deliberately chosen human actions (i.e., not under compulsion) as the result of an intention formation and execution process in which the choice/decision7 of a person/self/agent8 is both the necessary and determinative causal and Providence: God’s Action in the World Governed by Scientific Law (London: Feber and Faber, 1959), 66. So while some Calvinists who may parade under the banner of compatibilism, in fact they are hard determinists. 6 Ibid., 17. The specific reference Rorty makes in this citation is to Aristotle’s metaphorical use of ousia, Saint Paul’s metaphorical use of agape, and Newton’s metaphorical use of gravitas. 7 In this paper I will (as much as possible) refer to freedom of choice rather that freewill, simply because the term “freewill” has its own baggage. The issue of will is vitally related to agent causation and soft libertarian freedom, but space does not permit a detailed exposition of this connection. As John Locke said it so aptly, “the question is not “whether the will be free” but “whether a man be free.” John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. ii, ch. 21, sect. 14, “Liberty belongs not to the will,” an online version of this book is accessible at http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Locke/echu/. However, for an excellent survey on 4 element of action.9 Agent causation is often contrasted with event causation,10 in which antecedent events or states of affairs cause other events or states of affairs.11 In event causation, prior events or views of free will, see Ilham Dilman, Free Will: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1999). For how human freedom interacts with divine sovereignty, see Terrance Tiessen, Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in the World? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000); and Basinger, David and Randall, eds. Predestination and Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom by John Feinberg, Norman Geisler, Bruce Reichenbach, and Clark Pinnock (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1986). 8 Although person, self, and agent are clearly distinguishable terms in various linguistic contexts, for this paper I am going to take them as synonymous. Space does not permit the development of a thoroughgoing anthropology, so for this paper I will simply utilize “person/self/agent” as a course-grained broad designation for a personal self. 9 I agree largely with the action theory proposed by Hugh McCann in The Works of Agency: On Human Action, Will, and Freedom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); c.f. McCann’s “Intrinsic Intentionality,” Theory and Decision 20 (1986), 247-273; “Rationality and the Range of Intention,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1986), 191-211; “Settled Objectives and Rational Constraints,” American Philosophical Quarterly 28, no. 1 (January 1991), 25-36; “Trying, Paralysis, and Volition,” The Review of Metaphysics 28, no. 3 (March 1975), 423-442; and “Volition and Basic Action,” The Philosophical Review 83 (October 1974), 451-473. 10 The most definitive problem with event causation when applied to human action is its assertion of nomic causal determinism. Causal determinism is the doctrine that all events can be explained by causal antecedents. As Roderick Chisholm reminds us, the concept of causation is nomological, presupposing “physical necessity, a concept that is usually expressed by reference to the laws of nature.” Roderick Chisolm, “Agents, Causes, and Events: The Problem of Free Will,” in Agents, Causes, and Events, ed. Timothy O'Connor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 97. Chisholm distinguishes two types of necessity--laws of logic (in every possible world, if a then b), and the laws of nature. While the laws of nature obviously affect humans, they do not govern human decisions. Reducing all explanation to physical causation is a leap of categories and epistemic imperialism. 11 The definitions of “event” and “causation” are not agreed to universally, introducing some ambiguity to this discussion. Events can be seen as course-grained types broadly described by general non-rigid designators, or as fine-grained tokens described narrowly and precisely by a rigid designator.
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