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The Problem of Determinism and Free Will Is Not the Problem of Determinism and Free Will
... according to which the problem of free will and determinism is a narrow debate about whether causal-relation luck-perhaps in conjunction with circumstantial luck 5 -precludes free will (cf. Hartman 2017, Latus 2001, Nelkin 2019, Sartorio 2019. 6 It also implies that we need a noncausal explanation for what makes it impossible-at least for beings like us-to act freely when determinism is true. ...
... Aristotle's buck-stops-here account of human action is appealing, for it suggests that when we are called upon to account for human action, the 43. Carolina Sartorio (2015) comes close to suggesting this position with her discussion of backward-moving time travelers, for she suggests that their causal control over the past might allow them to be free even though we (non-time-travelers) are not. ...
... We'll focus onFischer (1994) and van Inwagen (2008) for reasons of symmetry, but seeHunt & Zagzebski (2022) for a more thorough overview. 4Merricks (2009), Zagzebski (2014,Sartorio (2015),Swenson (2016), andLaw & Tognazzini (2019) are particularly lucid statements of this sentiment. ...
When Peter van Inwagen first formulated his version(s) of the consequence argument for the incompatibility of determinism and freedom in An Essay on Free Will, he went out of his way to avoid using causal or explanatory notions, utilizing solely modal ones instead. Plenty of authors followed suit and extended this purely modal approach to other issues in free will, such as the arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and freedom. Recently, several authors have argued that this was a mistake: that we cannot adequately appreciate the various problems surrounding free will if we restrict ourselves to solely (or even primarily) modal notions. This paper offers further reason to think so. It is argued that on a purely modal approach, it is easier to answer the most serious arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and freedom than the most serious arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and freedom. Since that is exactly the opposite of what we should expect, this gives us good reason to think the modal approach fails. Finally, an alternative approach is suggested, one that makes causal and explanatory notions front and center. This alternative approach not only restores the intuitive asymmetry between determinism and divine foreknowledge, but helps us make progress in these debates that are notorious for dialectical stalemates.
... This conclusion fits with a broader shift in the literature, where the threat of determinism is now often framed in terms of prevention, control, or sourcehood, rather than non-causal notions like logical entailment. See, for example,Sartorio (2014), who also mentions the relevance of time travel to this issue (see, especially, pages 260-2). ...
This is a paper about time travel and what it teaches us about freedom. I argue that cases of time travel bring out an important difference between two ways of thinking about “the past”—either in terms of time itself, or in terms of causation. This ambiguity naturally transfers over to our talk about things like fixity, determinism, and incompatibilism. Moreover, certain cases of time travel suggest that our freedom is not constrained by the temporal past per se, but by our own causal histories. This, in turn, raises a number of interesting questions about the formulation of incompatibilism and the broader debate over freedom.
... 6 By contrast, Mele contends that he is "following standard practice" when he uses this term to name nothing beyond a mere incompossibility solution to the correlation problem. He also proclaims (without 5 Carolina Sartorio (2015) comes close to proposing a strict circumstantial-luck solution in her discussion of backward-moving time travelers insofar as she suggests that their causal control over the past might allow them to be free even though we (as non-time-travelers) are not. 6 Lehrer has confirmed (in conversation and correspondence) that incompatibilism (as he understands it) is an explanatory view according to which the truth of determinism is relevant to the falsity of the free-will thesis in worlds at which determinism is true. ...
In “The Zygote Argument is Invalid: Now What?”, Kristin Mickelson argues that Alfred Mele’s original Zygote Argument is invalid: its two premises tell us merely that the truth of determinism is (perhaps spuriously) correlated with the absence of free human agents, but the argument nonetheless concludes with a specific explanation for that correlation, namely that deterministic laws (of the sort described by determinism) preclude—rule out, destroy, undermine, make impossible, rob us of—free will. In a recent essay, Gabriel De Marco grants that the original Zygote Argument is invalid for the reasons that Mickelson has identified, and claims that he has developed two new solutions to her invalidity objection. In this essay, I argue that both of his proposed solutions are nonstarters, the first fails as a “rescue” because it simply restates an extant solution in new jargon and the second fails because it consists in another invalid variant of the original Zygote Argument.
... Second, he does not spend adequate time considering alternative explanations of this asymmetry (or related ones). 11 Many have discussed this claim, but a particularly insightful and pertinent discussion is in Sartorio (2015). ...
There is an old but powerful argument for the claim that exhaustive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A crucial ingredient in this argument is the principle of the “Fixity of the Past” (FP). A seemingly new response to this argument has emerged, the so-called “dependence response,” which involves, among other things, abandoning FP for an alternative principle, the principle of the “Fixity of the Independent” (FI). This paper presents three arguments for the claim that FI ought to be preferred to FP.
... 3 Bailey (2012), Campbell (2007), Cutter (2017), and Warfield (2000) advance versions of this general objection. 4 See Campbell (2007) and Sartorio (2015) for objections to this auxiliary premise. See also Bailey (2012), who points out that Campbell's "no past" objection applies to most arguments for incompatibilism, including most other versions of the consequence argument, since these other arguments, no less than the Third Formal Argument, rely in one way or another on the assumption that there is a remote past over which we have no control. ...
The consequence argument is among the most influential arguments for the conclusion that free will and determinism are incompatible. Recently, however, it has become increasingly clear that the argument fails to establish that particular incompatibilist conclusion. Even so, a version of the argument can be formulated that supports a different incompatibilist conclusion, according to which free will is incompatible with our behavior being predetermined by factors beyond our control. This conclusion, though not equivalent to the traditional incompatibilist thesis that determinism strictly precludes free will, is something many incompatibilists have had in mind all along and, indeed, is arguably the more central incompatibilist position. The consequence argument thus remains philosophically important, even if, as several of its critics have argued, it can't be used to establish the strict incompatibility of free will and determinism.
... Incompatibilists hold that causal determination is incompatible with basic desert moral responsibility and with the sort of free will required for it. (Carolina Sartorio (2014) convincingly argues that causal determination of factors involving the agent, by contrast with causal determinism per se, poses the threat). However, rejecting the possibility of moral responsibility in this sense leaves other senses intact. ...
Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts of issues. For illustration, we discuss an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy Nahmias and colleagues, the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, and the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases.
Contemporary compatibilists, united in the view that freedom and determinism are compatible, are nevertheless divided. Leeway compatibilists maintain that freedom is characterized by the ability to do otherwise, whereas source compatibilists hold that freedom consists in the actual sequence of events issuing in the action. In this article, I offer a hybrid account drawing on insights from both camps. My account hinges on a distinction between free agency and free action. I suggest that one should employ the leeway model when theorizing about free agency, and the source model when theorizing about free action. This enables compatibilists to resolve an apparent conflict: Frankfurt-style cases suggest that freedom does not require alternative possibilities but this goes strongly against our common-sense conception of freedom. In addition, my account helps compatibilists to gain a more complete and coherent understanding of human freedom.
This is the eighth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (OSAR), and the sixth drawn from papers presented at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR, held in March 2022). The OSAR series is devoted to publishing cutting edge, interdisciplinary work on the wide array of topics falling under the general rubric of “agency and responsibility.” This volume dramatically illustrates that aim, as it brings together work in free will, ethics, metaethics, feminist theory, disability studies, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The theme for both the workshop and these papers was “Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility,” and in these essays, our authors take a number of different and creative angles on this theme. Roughly half of the essays fall under the rubric of non-ideal agency. They discuss ways in which our agency is impacted by inherent psychological limitations, by the social contexts in which we act, or by different ways in which our abilities can break down. The other half fall under the rubric of non-ideal responsibility. They discuss both the modes by which we assess imperfect exercises of our agency and the ways in which common forms of assessment are themselves imperfect. In what follows, we give a brief overview of the essays, as well as how they hang together under the general theme of the volume.
There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into the debate by appealing to a levels ontology. Recently, Christian List and others have considered how the notion of levels could be relevant to the free will debate. Invariably, however, the focus is on the significance of facts at lower levels. The threats come from below , from fundamental physics or neuroscience. Here, I aim to show how we can frame many interesting concerns about free will in terms of threats from above . After arguing that determination from above is no less threatening, I catalogue such concerns that might constitute threats to our freedom. Doing this not only allows us to show how these concerns relate to those standardly discussed, but it pushes us to expand our conception of freedom.
Moore’s Mechanical Choices is ripe with interesting ideas. Here I’ll focus on a particularly intriguing one that intersects with some aspects of my own work. It’s the suggestion that causalism should be amended in a way that doesn’t require causation. At first, this suggestion may sound absurd: How can causalism survive without causation, of all things? But I think that Moore is actually right about the main suggestion. I don’t think he’s right for the right reasons, but he’s still right about the main idea. So, the aim of this paper is to explain how causalism can survive without causation, and how it may not.
Libertarian views of freedom claim that, although determinism would rule out our freedom, we are nevertheless free on some occasions. An odd implication of such views (to put it mildly) seems to be that indeterminism somehow enhances or contributes to our agency. But how could that be so? What does indeterminism have to offer to agency? This paper develops a novel answer, centred around the notion of explanation. In short, it is argued that, if indeterminism holds in the right places, then the best explanation of the history of the world necessarily cites facts about our agency. Along the way, alternative proposals regarding the significance of indeterminism are considered and, ultimately, rejected in favour of the one developed in this paper.
This essay begins by dividing the traditional problem of free will and determinism into a “correlation” problem and an “explanation” problem. I then focus on the explanation problem, and argue that a standard form of abductive reasoning (that is, inference to the best explanation) may be useful in solving it. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of the abductive approach, I apply it to three standard accounts of free will. While each account implies the same solution to the correlation problem, each implies a unique solution to the explanationproblem. For example, all libertarian-friendly accounts of free will imply that it is impossible to act freely when determinism is true. However, only a narrow subset of libertarians have the theoretical resources to defend the incompatibilist claim that deterministic laws ( qua deterministic) undermine free will, while other libertarians must reject this traditional incompatibilist view.
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