Abstract
According to the doxastic compatibilist, compatibilist criteria with respect to the freedom of action rule-in our having free beliefs. In Booth (Philosophical Papers 38:1–12, 2009), I challenged the doxastic compatibilist to either come up with an account of how doxastic attitudes can be intentional in the face of it very much seeming to many of us that they cannot. Or else, in rejecting that doxastic attitudes need to be voluntary in order to be free, to come up with a principled account of how her criteria of doxastic freedom are criteria of freedom. In two recent papers, Steup (Synthese 188:145–163, 2012; Dialectica 65(4):559–576, 2011) takes up the first disjunct of the challenge by proposing that even though beliefs cannot be practically intentional, they can be epistemically intentional. McHugh (McHugh forthcoming) instead takes up the second disjunct by proposing that the freedom of belief be modelled not on the freedom of action but on the freedom of intention. I argue that both Steup’s and McHugh’s strategies are problematic.
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Notes
In this paper, when I say that believing freely is impossible, I mean that it is at least psychologically (as opposed to conceptually) impossible.
Alternatively, the compatibilist could maintain that the criteria for freedom of belief and action are the same except with respect to the issue of intentionality. But then the compatiblist needs a principled way of establishing this exceptionalism.
In this paper, for ease of exposition, I’ll be using ‘beliefs’ and ‘doxastic attitudes’ interchangeably.
I’m using ‘intentional’ and ‘voluntary’ as synonyms: \(X\) is voluntary iff \(X\) is intentional.
Thanks to anonymous for this point.
Now, Fischer and Ravizza’s account is perfectly compatible with this, since they are trying to define free action. We can think that reason-responsiveness captures what it is for an action to be intentional without thinking that it captures what it is for a belief or other attitudes to be intentional. This is a worry specifically for Steup, since his opponent will not condone the assumption that belief is like action in this context, and not like other attitudes that can be reason-responsive but not intentional. In sum, from the fact that beliefs are responsive to reasons, it does not follow that they are intentional. They might be like other attitudes that are reason-responsive and not intentional.
Thanks to an anonymous referee at Synthese for raising this point.
Steup never explicitly says that epistemic reason responsiveness is sufficient for epistemic intentionality. However, he never explicitly says the obverse either. So it’s difficult to know exactly what he had in mind here. I hope to have shown that his account is problematic, either way we read him.
Kavka (1983). Here is McHugh’s paraphrase of the puzzle: “You are offered a large reward to intend today to drink a mild toxin tomorrow. The toxin’s effects are very unpleasant but short-lived and harmless. You are offered nothing to actually drink the toxin. Whether you win the reward or not depends entirely on whether you have the requisite intention today. Can you react to the prospect of the reward by intending to drink the toxin? It seems not. You cannot intend to drink it, knowing that when the time comes you will have no reason to drink it and strong reason against doing so. You would need some reason for actually drinking it, in order to be motivated to intend to drink it” (McHugh forthcoming, p. 14).
I should st+ress that there is no reason I can see for why compatibilists as regards freedom of action cannot hold this view too.
Note that I claim merely that the agents here act, they do not perform actions. One might insist that one cannot perform unintentional actions, but to insist that the agents here perform actions is somewhat question begging in this context.
As McHugh puts it: “The aim of belief is constitutive of belief-regulation as such. An episode does not count as a judging that p, for example, if it is not directed at this aim. That is why, when you judge that p, it is not true to say that you could have performed that action for any kind of reason you recognised. And that’s why freedom in the regulation of belief does not require reactivity to truth-irrelevant reasons. It is also why intentions are not involved in the regulation of belief.” McHugh forthcoming, p. 32.
This seems to be the interpretation offered by Shah and Velleman (2005).
References
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Conor McHugh, Rik Peels, Bob Lockie and two anonymous referees for Synthese for some exceptionally helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Booth, A.R. On some recent moves in defence of doxastic compatibilism. Synthese 191, 1867–1880 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0378-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0378-x