Abstract
It is widely believed that (1) if theological determinism were true, in virtue of God’s role in determining created agents to perform evil actions, created agents would be neither free nor morally responsible for their evil actions and God would not be perfectly good; (2) if metaphysical compatibilism were true, the free-will defense against the deductive problem of evil would fail; and (3) on the assumption of metaphysical compatibilism, God could have actualized just any one of those myriad possible worlds that are populated only by compatibilist free creatures. The primary thesis of this essay is that none of these propositions is true. This thesis is defended by appealing to a recently proposed novel, acausal, composite, unified theory of free action – the Theory of Middle Freedom – that evades the central problems plaguing traditional theories of metaphysical compatibilism.
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Notes
Antony Flew, ‘Splitting Hairs Before Starting Hares’, The Personalist 53 (1972), pp. 84–93, p. 91. Elsewhere, Flew referred to God under such circumstances as a ‘Great Manipulator’ who, Flew implies, is a mere pretender when it comes to being the ‘Great Justiciar’ in light of His alleged mass manipulation of humanity. See Antony Flew’s ‘Compatibilism, Free Will and God,’ Philosophy 48 (1973), pp. 231–244.
Cf. ‘Leibniz attacks the Dominican view...in claiming that it is open to serious challenge when it come [sic] to explaining evil in the world. If the specific nature of every causal event is determined by God’s causal contribution to the event, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that God is a direct and willing accomplice in every evil event that occurs’ (p. 81). See Michael J. Murray’s ‘Leibniz on Divine Foreknowledge of Future Contingents and Human Freedom’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1995), pp. 75–108.
See Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 131–155; God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 7–55; and The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 164–190. Although I shall write (for ease of exposition) that it is Plantinga’s FWD that is or is not compatible with metaphysical compatibilism, I mean my comments to remain neutral between Plantinga’s and any other plausible version of the free-will defense.
James F. Sennett, ‘The Free Will Defense and Determinism’, Faith and Philosophy 8 (1991), pp. 340–353, is here responding to Edward Wierenga’s 1985 review of the book Alvin Plantinga (eds. James E. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1985) in which Wierenga argues that Plantinga’s free-will defense is compatible with the truth of metaphysical compatibilism. See Wierenga’s ‘Review of Alvin Plantinga,’ Faith and Philosophy 5 (1988): 214–219.
This perceived libertarian chauvinism on Plantinga’s part has also troubled, among others, Antony Flew. Flew suspects that libertarian freedom does not accord with our ordinary usage of what it means to act freely, whereas compatibilist freedom does. See Flew’s ‘Compatibilism, Free Will and God’ (1973). It is of interest to note that some philosophers and theologians also find compatibilism to be at the core of Aquinas’ teaching on free will. See, for example, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The One God, translated by Dom. Bede Rose (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1944).
See Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,’ Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971), pp. 5–20.
John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control (Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell, 1994).
This is not at all meant to imply that Frankfurt-style cases are uncontroversial. They clearly are not. For representative criticisms of Frankfurt-style ‘counterexamples’ to the ‘Principle of Alternate Possibilities’, see Robert Francis Allen, ‘Re-examining Frankfurt Cases,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXXVII (Fall 1999), pp. 363-376, David Copp, ‘Defending the Principle of Alternate Possibilities: Blameworthiness and Moral Responsibility,’ Nous, 31 (1997), pp. 441–456, and Stewart Goetz, ‘Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples and Begging the Question,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 39 (2005), pp. 83–105.
Some authors, for example, Keith Yandell, have mistakenly attributed to Frankfurt’s intervener knowledge about certain relevant counterfactuals of creaturely freedom:
Suppose that I can make you do, or refrain from doing, anything I like, and that I always know what you are up to. Being benevolent, when you face a choice between good action G and bad action B, I let you do G if that is what you choose yourself but make you do G if I know that unattended you will do B. You are then my puppet, but you are a puppet who never does bad things (p.177). See Yandell’s ‘Some Problems for Thomistic Incarnationalists,’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 30 (1991), pp. 169–182.
Middle knowledge is a category of divine knowledge posited by the sixteenth century Jesuit, Luis de Molina – a kind of knowledge situated midway between God’s free knowledge (i.e., God’s postvolitional knowledge of contingent truths) and God’s natural knowledge (i.e., God’s prevolitional knowledge of necessary truths). God’s middle knowledge is that category of knowledge involving those events that are both contingent and not under God’s control, including (but not limited to) the knowledge of what libertarian free creatures would freely do if placed in various possible circumstances. Middle knowledge, therefore, includes knowledge concerning those subjunctive conditionals that are termed ‘counterfactuals of creaturely freedom.’ For a rigorous explication of the value of middle knowledge for philosophical theology, see Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). Not all metaphysical libertarians, however, believe that such counterfactuals of creaturely freedom possess truth value. For those who deny the possibility of middle knowledge, see Timothy O’Connor, ‘The Impossibility of Middle Knowledge,’ Philosophical Studies, 66 (1992), pp. 139–166, and Robert Merrihew Adams, “An Anti-Molinist Argument,” Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), pp. 344–353.
I am assuming here two principles of action theory, one that is widely held and relatively uncontroversial, and the other that, although not widely held and more controversial, appears to me to be plausible. The first principle is that, possibly, voluntary actions in general can arise from multiple different sources: such actions can be determined, be agent-caused, or be simply indetermined. The second principle is that it is possible for the very same voluntary action to arise from any of these different sources, for example, it is possible that one voluntary action A, performed by agent S in possible world W, was causally determined, whereas that very same voluntary action A performed by agent S in another possible world W* was simply indetermined. Actions, on this view, are not individuated by their sources, but by other (primarily intentional and structural) properties.
A. A. Howsepian, ‘A Libertarian-Friendly Theory of Compatibilist Free Action,’ The Southern Journal of Philosophy XLII (4), 2004, pp. 453–480.
‘Traditional compatibilism,’ as I use this term, is any version of compatibilism that entails the ‘demarcation thesis,’ where the demarcation thesis is the thesis that only some determinants in the set of all possible determinants of voluntary action are capable of providing sufficient conditions for an agent’s acting freely. For a more detailed explanation of PMF, how precisely it performs this revealing function, and how the Theory of Middle Freedom evades extant criticisms of traditional compatibilism, see Howsepian (2004).
A reviewer for this journal raised the following two objections to the Theory of Middle Freedom. First objection: ‘The conditions cited are consistent with its being the case that the continuing correlation between what the agent is determined to do and what he would have done had he been permitted to exercise his libertarian powers is entirely due to the arbitrary decision of I*, quite independently of the agent’s values and the agent’s likely reaction if he were to discover what is going on. Hence, the agent is under the domination of I*. Hence, despite the correlation, the agent is not, after all, in control of his life and actions.’ Response: Of course, in those instances in which some decision, arbitrary or not, by I* determines the agent to act in a way that is independent of the agent’s values - in ways in which the agent would not have chosen to act in those circumstances - then the agent would not, in those instances, be in control of those aspects of his life. It is precisely those actions that are in accord with the agent’s deep values (in virtue of being those actions that would be performed libertarian freely by the agent at that time in those circumstances, if he were at that time allowed to act libertarian freely) that the intervener does not interfere with simply by changing the source or mechanism of the action in question. Second objection: ‘Suppose that God causally determines my doing A in circumstances C if and only if his middle knowledge reveals that if I were in C and God did not act, then I would do A libertarian-freely. If God determines my doing A in C, and the foregoing condition is fulfilled, and nevertheless my doing A is not under my control, then surely my doing A freely is not under my control. For the Theory of Middle Freedom does not specify any way in which I could effectively decide whether to do A freely or instead to do A unfreely.’ Response: First, one need not endorse the Theory of Middle Knowledge in order to endorse the Theory of Middle Freedom; these theories are independent. Theism is not a prerequisite for the Theory of Middle Freedom, but it is for the Theory of Middle Knowledge. What is needed for the Theory of Middle Freedom is that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are truth-valued. Second, according to the Theory of Middle Freedom, these truth-valued counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, as noted by Thomas P. Flint (1998), make reference not directly ‘to creatures, but rather to the individual essences of such creatures, where the essence of a creature is simply the set of properties essential to it.’ (p. 47) The truth-values of those counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that comprise a creature’s individual essence, therefore, are not up to God or up to any other agent or entity; rather they are grounded in, or dependent on, or originate from, a creature’s individual essence. Of course, the agent herself could not possibly directly and straightforwardly control the truth values of her counterfactuals of creaturely freedom prior to her existence. (And, in fact, some individual essences might not be instantiated at all and, hence, there would never exist an agent that controls the truth values of these counterfactuals.) It is, rather, in virtue of the (non-causal) relation between an agent S and S’s individual essence, that an existing agent with agent-libertarian free powers - whether or not these powers are ever exercised - thereby controls which of her acts, whatever their source, are free or unfree, by being such that the agent would libertarian-freely perform that specific action, A. if S were placed in circumstance C. If there is mystery here (and, clearly there is) there does not appear to me to be any significantly greater mystery than can be found in the standard manner of understanding the relationship between creatures and counterfactuals of creaturely freedom in standard Molinist accounts, nor, for that matter, any significantly greater mystery than can be found at the very heart of libertarian freedom (or compatibilist freedom, or any theory of metaphysical freedom) itself (or themselves).
Sennett, ‘The Free Will Defense and Determinism,’ p. 346.
Ibid.
Ibid.
John L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64 (1955), reprinted in God and Evil, edited by Nelson Pike (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), pp. 46–60.
According to Thomas Flint (in conversation), the most illuminating way to understand Frankfurt’s scenario is to say that although S cannot do other than perform action A, S can choose whether or not to perform A libertarian freely, i.e., the mode (or what I am calling the valence) of A is up to S, although the doing of A is not. Likewise, in the Theory of Middle Freedom theological determinist model, the valence of A depends upon S, but S’s doing A does not; rather, S’s doing A depends upon God.
Sennett, ‘The Free Will Defense and Determinism,’ p. 346.
Plantinga’s doctrine of transworld depravity states that it is possible that every creaturely essence is transworldly depraved where, ‘An essence E suffers from transworld depravity if and only if for every world W such that E contains the properties is significantly free in W and always does what is right in W, there is an action A and a maximal world segment S′ such that
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1.
S′ includes E’s being instantiated and E’s instantiation’s being free with respect to A and A’s being morally significant for E’s instantiation.
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S′ is included in W but includes neither E’s instantiation’s performing A nor E’s instantiation’s refraining from performing A.
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If S″ were actual, then the instantiation of E would have gone wrong with respect to A. See God, Freedom, and Evil, pp. 52–53.
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1.
Sennett, ‘The Free Will Defense and Determinism,’ p. 346.
In God and Other Minds, p.135.
More precisely, Plantinga states that unfettered actions are actions that are either ‘free in [Antony] Flew’s sense’ (i.e., compatibilist free) or ‘causally undetermined[.]’ God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 135. I am taking Plantinga’s term ‘causally undetermined’ to mean undetermined simpliciter.
Jerry L. Walls, ‘Why Plantinga Must Move From Defense to Theodicy,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (1991), pp. 375–378.
Again, see Plantinga’s God and Other Minds.
Walls, ‘Why Plantinga Must Move From Defense to Theodicy,’ p. 376.
Ibid.
Ibid. Walls also turns this argument around in a way that, he claims, shows that if no humans in the actual world are free in the libertarian sense, then it is false that Anselmianism is true. More specifically, he claims that if no humans in the actual world are free in the libertarian sense, then it is false that God is necessarily good.
Ibid., p. 377. John Bishop appears to concur: ‘Perhaps God can ensure that all created free beings always freely do right - certainly, this would seem to be so if compatibilism is true.’ (p. 15, footnote 12), ‘Evil and the Concept of God’, Philosophical Papers 22 (1993), pp. 1-15. Elsewhere Bishop states that ‘Free Will Defenders can be compatibilists – but only provided they upgrade the Defence[.]’ (p.115) In fact, what Bishop means in this passage is that free-will defenders can be only soft compatibilists (where soft compatibilism entails that only some free actions are determined). He argues later that what I have been calling ‘hard compatibilism’ (where hard compatibilism, let us say, is the view that, necessarily, all free actions are determined actions) is a metaphysical view that is not open to free-will defenders. See Bishop’s ‘Compatibilism and the Free Will Defence’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (1993), pp. 104–120. Although it might initially appear that the Theory of Middle Freedom is incompatible with the truth of hard compatibilism, the PMF is fashioned in such a way that it attempts to provide conceptual space for the compatibility of hard compatibilism and middle freedom. Suppose, for example, that fatalism is true and, hence, that there is only one possible world WF. In that case determinism is true in WF and, furthermore, there are no possible worlds in which agents perform libertarian free actions. Therefore, in WF, if agents perform any free acts at all then, necessarily, hard compatibilism is true. Might any of those (hard) compatibilist acts performed in WF also be middle free? Perhaps. But only if there are non-actual, albeit not possible, worlds in which some agents act libertarian freely. I believe there are such worlds and, hence, that the FWD would be viable even if hard compatibilism – to wit, even if fatalism – were true. A thoroughgoing defense of this claim must wait for another day.
Fischer explicitly discusses the potential threat that his theory of free will is to the FWD (in The Metaphysics of Free Will, p. 183):
Now it might be that the proponent of the free will defense thinks that acting freely requires freedom to do otherwise...But I have severed this connection. And, given the separation of acting freely from freedom to do otherwise, I do not see why God could not have set things up so that human beings always choose the right thing as a result of a weakly reasons-responsive mechanism. That is, I do not see why God could not have ensured in advance that agents have guidance control of their actions and yet always choose and do the right thing. Of course, a world in which there is no evil caused by humans acting freely may not be the best of all possible worlds for some reason apart from considerations of free will, but I do not see how one could argue for this conclusion based upon considerations relevant to free will. This admittedly sketchy presentation at least casts doubt on the free will defense.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., pp. 166–167.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., p. 243, footnote 8.
Ibid., p. 209.
Fischer believes that the sole plausible reason for holding that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility is that deterministic causes deprive agents of alternative possibilities. But this, I have argued, is false. According to the Theory of Middle Freedom, the reason that some deterministic causes undermine free and morally responsible actions is not in virtue of depriving agents of alternative possible routes of action, but because some such causes compel agents to act in ways that are not really up to them, in ways that they really do not want to act.
This quote is taken from Kandri Vihvelin’s careful critical review of Fischer’s book (p. 480). See Vihvelin’s ‘John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)’, Nous 32 (1998), pp. 406–420.
John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, S.J. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Although sophisticated and thoughtful, even Fischer and Ravizza concede that they have not produced a decisive defense of the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility, only that they “have rendered the compatibility claim highly attractive” (p. 236). I do not believe they have done even this much. It is, I contend, only a theory of compatibilism that includes libertarian elements that has any hope of successfully fending off the usual, and to my mind decisive, manipulation objections (whether this manipulation be by agents, artifacts, or natural determinants) to traditional compatibilist theories of free will or moral responsibility.
Also see John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, “Responsibility and History,” in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, and Howard K. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19: Philosophical Naturalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 430–451.
Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p.170.
Ibid., p.184.
Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’; ‘Three Concepts of Free Action: II,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl., 49 (1975), pp. 113–125; and ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness,’ in Ferdinand Schoeman, Ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 27–45.
Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p. 184.
Frankfurt, ‘Three Concepts of Free Action,’ pp.121–122. Quoted in Fischer and Ravizza, ibid., p. 185.
Gary Watson, ‘Free Agency,’ Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), pp. 205–220.
Richard Brandt, ‘Blameworthiness and Obligation,’ in A.I. Melden, ed., Essays in Moral Philosophy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), pp. 3–39.
Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 186–187.
Ibid., p.187.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 196.
Ibid., p. 197.
Ibid., p. 197.
The qualification is critical here. In fact, I do not believe that all actions for which one is morally responsible are free actions. It seems plausible that, on their view, a free action or, more likely, a pattern of free actions, could result in voluntary actions that are not free yet for which one is morally responsible nonetheless.
Fischer and Ravizza at least appear to suggest that the relata of the mesh relation are essentially “elements of one’s mental economy” (Fisher and Ravizza, Control and Responsibility: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p. 185), whether occurrent or dispositional. The relata of the mesh relation in the Theory of Middle Freedom are on the one hand, agent A’s voluntary actions, and on the other hand (to a first approximation) A’s counterfactuals of freedom. More precisely, the second relatum in the mesh relation in the Theory of Middle Freedom is some mere propensity (or as Suarez has termed it, a habitude) of A – specifically a ‘dispositional’ property of A’s essence – that itself corresponds to a certain subjunctive conditional of creaturely (libertarian) freedom true of A. Either the counterfactual conditional or the agent’s mere propensity to act in that manner specified by the counterfactual conditional (in virtue of the fact that there exists a unique mere propensity to action for every unique counterfactual of freedom true of an agent) could be used to bridge the mesh, however in virtue of the fact that A has the counterfactuals of freedom that A in fact has because of the (contingent) mere propensities of its essence, not the other way around, it might be more proper to specify the relata of the mesh relation in the Theory of Middle Freedom as a voluntary action and a mere propensity to libertarian free action in the circumstance under which one acts.
Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p. 236.
Ibid.
Ibid.
It is epistemically possible that at least some divinely determined human actions – depending critically on how they were divinely determined – might just meet Fischer and Ravizza’s conditions for morally responsible action. However, again, without knowing precisely what the notion of appropriateness amounts to in their theoretical framework, this possibility must remain merely epistemic.
It is of interest to note that Hugh J. McCann has recently proposed an intriguing theory concerning God’s relationship to creation in which God is the first cause of voluntary human action (including evil action) and in which God is completely sovereign over creation, but in which God’s complete causal sovereignty is compatible both with divine impeccability and with moral authenticity on the part of created agents. McCann’s view involves an understanding of God’s relationship to his creation as being analogous to an author’s relationship to his characters in a novel. Although I confess both to being intrigued with McCann’s account and to finding it unconvincing on its face, I must also confess to not fully understanding it. See his ‘The Author of Sin?’ Faith and Philosophy, 22 (2), (April 2005), pp. 144–159.
I am most grateful to Alvin C. Plantinga and Thomas P. Flint for comments on previous versions of this essay.
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Howsepian, A.A. Compatibilism, Evil, and the Free-Will Defense. SOPHIA 46, 217–236 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0042-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0042-3