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THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM: AN ABDUCTIVE APPROACH
Abstract
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.
... Even if sound, ZA-2013 and ZA-2019 do nothing to adjudicate between the rival candidate explanations for the incompossibility of deterministic laws and free human agents. I have motivated this point by demonstrating that ZA-2013 may be used as a foundation for a more sweeping generalization argument which concludes that free will is impossible due entirely to constitutive luck, from which it follows that a strict constitutive luck solution to (E2) is true, that the causal luck solution to (E2) promoted by ZA-2012 is false, and that the conclusion of ZA-2013 expresses a true but metaphysically arbitrary claim (Mickelson 2015b; see also Mickelson 2017Mickelson , 2019aMickelson , and 2019b. To be clear, I have never proposed that ZA-2013 is invalid, unimportant, or otherwise uninteresting; I have simply pointed out the generally overlooked fact that the premises of ZA-2012 fall short of delivering a broadly causal luck solution, or any solution whatever, to (E2). ...
... By extension, how one defines the aforementioned terms is also irrelevant when assessing which of these manipulation arguments is vulnerable to an explanatory gap objection. It is irrelevant, then, that De Marco refers to the incompossibility thesis stated in the conclusion of Easy Fix by using the phrase "compatibilism is false" while I prefer the phrase "incompossibilism is true" (for reasons that I provide in Mickelson 2015aMickelson , 2017Mickelson , 2019aMickelson , 2019b ...
... This is important, for some philosophers have suggested that a being who is not subject to the laws may act freely even though beings who are subject to the laws cannot (cf. Pereboom 2001Pereboom , 2014Stone 1998;Mickelson 2019a and "Hard Times for Hard Incompatibilism," manuscript). My "subject to the laws" restriction was a charitable way to restrict the conclusion of my restatements of the Zygote Argument so that they did not suggest that (apparently) miracleworking beings like Diana lack free will, while sidestepping a discussion of Mele's definition of the term 'determinism' and the meaning of the related phrase "deterministic laws." ...
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.
... The Manipulation Argument aims to establish the incompatibility of determinism and free will by showing that actions causally determined by a manipulator are not free and there is no relevant difference between such manipulation and determinism (Pereboom, 2001(Pereboom, , 2014Mele, 2006Mele, , 2013Mele, , 2019. Here, we will follow Derk Pereboom (2014: 2) in understanding the relevant notion of free will (and acting freely) to be the type of control in acting that would make an agent morally responsible for actions in the "basic desert" sense. ...
Determinism is frequently understood as implying the possibility of perfect prediction. This possibility then functions as an assumption in the Manipulation Argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Yet this assumption is mistaken. As a result, arguments that rely on it fail to show that determinism would rule out human free will. We explain why determinism does not imply the possibility of perfect prediction in any world with laws of nature like ours, since it would be impossible for an agent to predict with certainty any future event that is causally influenced by events outside her own backward light cone yet inside the backward light cone of the future event. This is the light-cone limit and it undermines the Manipulation Argument or limits what this argument can tell us about the relevance of determinism to free will. We also respond to objections that the light-cone limit is irrelevant to the Manipulation Argument.
... Laplace's ideas about determinism gave rise to a spirited debate over the possibility of free will in a deterministic universe which has continued to this day [60][61][62]. The possibility of global determinism certainly raises new questions in this debate. ...
Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it manifestly unsuited to the diverse range of research programmes in modern physics. In this article, we use a constraint-based framework to set out a generalization of determinism which does not presuppose temporal directedness, distinguishing between strong, weak and hole-free global determinism. We discuss some interesting consequences of these generalized notions of determinism, and we show that this approach sheds new light on the long-standing debate surrounding the nature of objective chance.
In light of the advancement in cognitive neuroscientific investigations of free will, from rCBF to EEG scan techniques and eventually fMRI scan techniques, such advanced studies on free will arguing for human determinism centre their research on the works of Libet and Wegner. The neurobiological experiment of Libet and the cognitive assessment by Wegner could be argued to eliminate the possibility of free will but Libet and Wegner's views are in tandem, non-identical and intolerant of human freedom. This article exposes the incoherency intercepting Libet and Wegner's studies and the philosophical imports that make them not coherent.
Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet many popular definitions of determinism are still predicated on a time-evolution picture, making them manifestly unsuited to the diverse range of research programmes in modern physics. In this article, we use a constraint-based framework to set out a generalization of determinism which does not presuppose temporal evolution, distinguishing between strong, weak and delocalised holistic determinism. We discuss some interesting consequences of these generalized notions of determinism, and we show that this approach sheds new light on the long-standing debate surrounding the nature of objective chance.
Philosophy is concerned with questioning and understanding the common ideas that we take for granted. In his book, Thomas Nagel makes an analysis of interesting topics on How do we know Anything? Free Will and the Meaning of Life. This essay seeks to answer the above questions from the perspective of critical thinking. The author cautions the reader not to rely on her conclusions but to think through the questions using their own reasoning.
In An Essay on Free Will (1983), Peter van Inwagen offers three formal versions of the Consequence Argument (1983: 56). I critique the Third Argument (1983: 93–105; 1989: 223–24; 2000: 2–10). My criticism centers on premiss (4), which claims that the past is necessary in some sense.
I consider two arguments for premise (4) – arguments (a) and (b). I show that argument (a) is invalid (§ 2). I then note that if premiss (4) is supported by argument (b) – which requires a remote or pre-human past – the Third Argument does not establish incompatibilism. Having a remote past is not essential to deterministic worlds (§ 3). I extend these considerations to the First Argument (1975; 1983: 68–78), and close with some brief comments (§4).
The compatibility question lies at the center of the free will problem. Compatibilists think that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility and the concomitant notions, while incompatibilists think that it is not. The topic of this paper is a particular form of charge against compatibilism: that it is shallow. This is not the typical sort of argument against compatibilism: most of the debate has attempted to discredit compatibilism completely. The Argument From Shallowness maintains that the compatibilists do have a case. However, this case is only partial, and shallow. This limited aim proves itself more powerful against compatibilists than previous all-or-nothing attempts. It connects to the valid instincts of compatibilists, making room for them, and hence is harder for compatibilists to ignore.
In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts (or states of affairs, as the author calls them) the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy.
The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. This book develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. It argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, event-causal and agent-causal, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to luck than is compatibilism. But the book also argues that compatibilist accounts of luck are themselves vulnerable to a powerful luck objection. Historical compatibilisms cannot satisfactorily explain how agents can take responsibility for their constitutive luck. Non-historical compatibilisms run into insurmountable difficulties with the epistemic condition on control over action. Because a failure to satisfy the epistemic condition on control is excusing, the book argues, if there are any actions for which agents are responsible, they are akratic actions; for non-akratic actions, agents either fail to satisfy the epistemic condition on moral responsibility or lack control in some other way. But akratic actions are themselves unacceptably subject to luck. The book ends with a discussion of recent non-historical compatibilisms. Some of these new compatibilisms hold that agents are morally responsible for actions just in case these actions express the agent's attitudes. The book argues that accounts of this type do not offer a viable alternative to control-based compatibilisms. Finally, the book argues that other kinds of non-historical compatibilism have no resources to deploy against the hard luck view because the latter does not entail that instant agents have a different degree of moral responsibility than agents who have a history.
How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility; citation_author=Levy, Neil
- Luck