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Introduction, Wiley Companion to Free Will
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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.
Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.
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).
Humean compatibilism is the combination of a Humean position on laws of nature and the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. This article aim is to situate Humean compatibilism in the current debate among libertarians, traditional compatibilists, and semicompatibilists about free will, We argue that a Humean about laws can hold that there is a sense in which the laws of nature are 'up to us' and hence that the leading style of argument for incompatibilism--the consequence argument--has a false premiss. We also display some striking similarities between Humean compatibilism and libertarianism, an incompatibilist view. For example, standard libertarians face a problem about luck, and we show that Humean compatibilists face a very similar problem.
Libertarian accounts of free will face objections that the indeterminism they require would leave behavior random, inexplicable, and beyond agents' control. This book examines three main types of libertarian views-noncausal, event-causal, and agent-causal-to see how well they can meet such challenges. Noncausal accounts are found not to offer satisfactory views of action and reason-explanation. Event-causal and agent-causal accounts are defended against a number of objections. But if both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism, then there is no adequate account of free will.
Philosophers working in the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy' have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of surveying people's prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research.
The dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists must be one of the most persistent and heated deadlocks in Western philosophy. Incompatibilists maintain that people are not fully morally responsible if determinism is true, i.e., if every event is an inevitable consequence of the prior conditions and the natural laws. By contrast
The recordable cerebral activity (readiness-potential, RP) that precedes a freely voluntary, fully endogenous motor act was directly compared with the reportable time (W) for appearance of the subjective experience of ‘wanting’ or intending to act. The onset of cerebral activity clearly preceded by at least several hundred milliseconds the reported time of conscious intention to act. This relationship held even for those series (with ‘type II’ RPs) in which subjects reported that all of the 40 self-initiated movements in the series appeared ‘spontaneously’ and capriciously.
Data were obtained in at least 6 different experimental sessions with each of 5 subjects. In series with type II RPs, onset of the main negative shift in each RP preceded the corresponding mean W value by an average of about 350 ms, and by a minimum of about 150 ms. In series with type I RPs, in which an experience of preplanning occurred in some of the 40 self-initiated acts, onset of RP preceded W by an average of about 800 ms (or by 500 ms, taking onset of RP at 90 per cent of its area).
Reports of W time depended upon the subject’s recall of the spatial ‘clock-position’ of a revolving spot at the time of his initial awareness of wanting or intending to move. Two different modes of recall produced similar values. Subjects distinguished awareness of wanting to move (W) from awareness of actually moving (M). W times were consistently and substantially negative to, in advance of, mean times reported for M and also those for S, the sensation elicited by a task-related skin stimulus delivered at irregular times that were unknown to the subject.
It is concluded that cerebral initiation of a spontaneous, freely voluntary act .can begin unconsciously, that is, before there is any (at least recallable) subjective awareness that a ‘decision’ to act has already been initiated cerebrally. This introduces certain constraints on the potentiality for conscious initiation and control of voluntary acts.
This is a selection of essays on moral responsibility that represent the major components of John Martin Fischer’s overall approach to freedom of the will and moral responsibility. The collection exhibits the overall structure of Fischer’s view and shows how the various elements fit together to form a comprehensive framework for analyzing free will and moral responsibility. The topics include deliberation and practical reasoning, freedom of the will, freedom of action, various notions of control, and moral accountability. The essays seek to provide a foundation for our practices of holding each other (and ourselves) morally and legally accountable for our behavior. A crucial move is the distinction between two kinds of control. According to Fischer, “regulative control” involves freedom to choose and do otherwise (“alternative possibilities”), whereas “guidance control” does not. Fischer contends that guidance control is all the freedom we need to be morally responsible agents. Further, he contends that such control is fully compatible with causal determinism. Additionally, Fischer argues that we do not need genuine access to alternative possibilities in order for there to be a legitimate point to practical reasoning. Fischer’s overall framework contains an argument for the contention that guidance control, and not regulative control, is associated with moral responsibility, a sketch of a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility (that ties together responsibility for actions, omissions, consequences, and character), and an account of the value of moral responsibility. On this account, the value of exhibiting freedom (of the relevant sort) and thus being morally responsible for one’s behavior is a species of the value of artistic self-expression.
This volume assembles nine of the author’s essays on determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility in Western antiquity, ranging from Aristotle via the Epicureans and Stoics to the third century. It is representative of the author’s overall scholarship on the topic, much of which emphasizes that what commonly counts as ‘the problem of free will and determinism’ is noticeably distinct from the issues the ancients discussed. It is true that one main component of the ancient discourse concerned the question how moral accountability can be consistently combined with certain causal factors that impact human behaviour. However, it is not true that the ancient problems involved the questions of the compatibility of causal determinism with our ability to do otherwise or with free will. Instead, we encounter questions about human rational and autonomous agency and their compatibility with preceding causes, external or internal; with external impediments; with divine predetermination and theological questions; with physical theories like atomism and continuum theory, and with sciences more generally; with elements that determine character development from childhood, such as nature and nurture; with epistemic features such as ignorance of circumstances; with necessity and modal theories generally; with folk theories of fatalism; and also with questions of how human autonomous agency is related to moral development, to virtue and wisdom, to blame and praise. In Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, these questions were all debated without reference to freedom to do otherwise or free will—. This volume considers all of these questions to some extent.
For many decades, the proponents of `artificial intelligence' have maintained that computers will soon be able to do everything that a human can do. In his bestselling work of popular science, Sir Roger Penrose takes us on a fascinating tour through the basic principles of physics, cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy to show that human thinking can never be emulated by a machine. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.
This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on 'guidance control'. This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops an account of both components. The authors go on to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism.
This book aims to help readers think more clearly about free will. It identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to the justified belief in the existence of free will, and meets them head on. It also clarifies the central concepts in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will: one for readers who are convinced that free will is incompatible with determinism (incompatibilists), and another for readers who are convinced of the opposite (compatibilists). Luck poses problems for all believers in free will, and this book offers novel solutions. One chapter explains influential neuroscientific studies of free will, and debunks some extravagant interpretations of the data. Other featured topics include abilities and alternative possibilities, control and decision-making, the bearing of manipulation on free will, and the development of human infants into free agents.
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.
Thought experiments featuring manipulated agents and designed agents have played a significant role in the literature on moral responsibility. What can we learn from thought experiments of this kind about the nature of moral responsibility? That is this book’s primary question. An important lesson lies at the core of its answer: Moral responsibility for actions has a historical dimension of a certain kind. A pair of agents whose current nonhistorical properties are very similar and who perform deeds of the same kind may nevertheless be such that one is morally responsible for the deed whereas the other is not, and what makes the difference is a difference in how they came to be as they are at that time—that is, a historical difference. Imagine that each of these agents attempts to assassinate someone. Depending on the details of the cases, it may be that one of these agents is morally responsible for the attempt whereas the other is not, because one of them was manipulated in a certain way into being in the psychological state that issues in the behavior whereas the other agent came to be in that state under his own steam. A variety of thought experiments are considered. They include stories about agents whose value systems are radically altered by manipulators, vignettes featuring agents who are built from scratch, and scenarios in which agents magically come into being with full psychological profiles.
Humean compatibilism combines a Humean conception of laws of nature with a strong dual-ability condition for free will that requires that agents possess the ability to decide differently when they make a free decision. On the Humean view of laws of nature, laws of nature are taken to be contingent non-governing descriptions of significant regularities that obtain in the entire history of the universe. On Humean compatibilism, agents are taken to possess dual ability when making free decisions because what the laws of nature will finally be is (at least partially) dependent upon how an agent decides. In this paper, I argue that the tenability of Humean compatibilism depends in part upon what theory of time is correct. More specifically, I argue that Humean compatibilism is untenable in a deterministic universe if eternalism is true.
This article is organized into two parts. The first restates and reaffirms a formal version of the Consequence Argument first presented in van Inwagen (1983) and then defends this version against a recent objection by Thomas McKay and David Johnson (1996). The second part defends the conclusion that the concept of agent causation is useless to the philosopher who wants to maintain that free will and indeterminism are compatible. But it does not attempt to show that the concept of agent causation is incoherent or that the real existence of agent causation should be rejected for scientific reasons. It assumes-for the sake of argument-that agent causation is possible and that it in fact exists. It presents an argument for the conclusion that free will and indeterminism are incompatible even if our acts or their causal antecedents are products of agent causation. The article concludes that free will remains a mystery-that is, free will undeniably exists and there is a strong and unanswered prima facie case for its impossibility.
Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory dependence, we can replace the Fixity of the Past with a principle that does not generate this difficulty. I develop such an account and defend it from objections. I also explore some of the account's implications, including whether the account is consistent with presentism.
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.
In this essay, I argue for the rejection of Vihvelin's ‘Three-fold Classification’ (3-FC), a nonstandard taxonomy of free-will compatibilism, incompatibilism, and impossibilism. Vihvelin is right that the standard taxonomy of these views is inadequate, and that a new taxonomy is needed to clarify the free-will debate. Significantly, Vihvelin notes that the standard formal definition of ‘incompatibilism’ does not capture the historically popular view that deterministic laws pose a threat to free will. Vihvelin's proposed solution is to redefine ‘incompatibilism.’ However, Vihvelin's formal definition of ‘incompatibilism’ is flawed according to her own arguments. In addition, Vihvelin's characterization of ‘compatibilism’ is (at best) incomplete, and at least two important free-will views are missing from her proposed taxonomy. Given the problems with Vihvelin's arguments for 3-FC, her novel view of the dialectic between the major free-will views lacks support.
Alfred Mele’s original Zygote Argument is invalid. At most, its premises entail the negative thesis that free action is incompossible with deterministic laws, but its conclusion asserts the positive thesis that deterministic laws preclude (make impossible, undermine) free action. The original, explanatory conclusion of the Zygote Argument can be defended only by supplementing it with a best-explanation argument that identifies deterministic laws as menacing. (By the same reasoning, it follows that every manipulation argument pinpointing a specific threat to free will requires a best-explanation argument). Arguably, though, the best explanation for the manipulation victim’s lack of freedom and responsibility is his constitutive luck, which is a problem irrespective of the natural laws that obtain. This proposed explanation leads to a new “diagnostic” version of the Zygote Argument which concludes that free action is impossible even though deterministic laws pose no threat whatsoever to free will.
This article’s guiding question is about bullet biting: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility? Featured stories are vignettes in which agents’ systems of values are radically reversed by means of brainwashing and the story behind the zygote argument. The malady known as “intuition deficit disorder” is also discussed.
Most people assume that, even though some degenerative or criminal behavior may be caused by influences beyond our control, ordinary human actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them. A less popular and more radical claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform. It is this hard determinist stance that Derk Pereboom articulates in Living Without Free Will. Pereboom argues that our best scientific theories have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not morally responsible for any of them. He seeks to defend the view that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible, and furthermore, that adopting this perspective would provide significant benefit for our lives.
Kadri Vihvelin has recently argued that between compatibilists and incompatibilists, the incompatibilists have a greater dialectical burden than compatibilists. According to her, both must show that free will is possible, but beyond this the incompatibilists must also show that no deterministic worlds are free will worlds. Thus, according to Vihvelin, so long as it is established that free will is possible, all the compatibilist must do is show that the incompatibilists' arguments are ineffective. I resist Vihvelin's assessment of the dialectical burdens of compatibilists and incompatibilists, as well as her assessment of the best arguments for incompatibilism.
Peter van Inwagen has developed two highly influential strategies for establishing incompatibilism about causal determinism
and moral responsibility. These have come to be known as ‘the Direct Argument’ and ‘the Indirect Argument,’ respectively.
In recent years, the two arguments have attracted closely related criticisms. In each case, it is claimed, the argument does
not provide a fully general defense of the incompatibilist’s conclusion. While the critics are right to notice these arguments’
limitations, they have not made it clear what the problem with the arguments is supposed to be. I suggest three possibilities,
arguing that none proves to be well founded. I conclude that the scope of these arguments is fully adequate for their defenders’
purposes.
KeywordsIncompatibilism–Direct Argument–Indirect Argument–Campbell–Fischer