Causation is a morass in which I for one refuse to set foot. Or not unless I am pushed.
—Peter van Inwagen (1983: 65)
… man is the source and begetter of his actions as a father is of his children… If we cannot trace back our actions to starting points other than those within ourselves, all actions in which the initiative lies in ourselves are in our power.
—Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics III: 5)
Abstract
We use recent interventionist theories of causation to develop a compatibilist account of causal sourcehood, which provides a response to Manipulation Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Our account explains the difference between manipulation and determinism, against the claim of Manipulation Arguments that there is no relevant difference. Interventionism allows us to see that causal determinism does not mean that variables outside of the agent causally explain her actions better than variables within the agent, whereas the causal source of a manipulated agent’s actions instead lies outside of the agent in the intentions of the manipulator. As a result, determined agents can have free will and be morally responsible in a way that manipulated agents cannot, contrary to what Manipulation Arguments conclude. In this way, our account demonstrates not only how Manipulation Arguments fail but also how compatibilism can be strengthened by means of a plausible account of causal sourcehood.
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Notes
Determinism is sometimes defined in terms of entailment: a description of the universe at a time, in conjunction with the laws of nature, entails descriptions of the universe at other times (e.g., van Inwagen 1983).
We will accept for the sake of argument the stipulation that Diana, as described, is nomologically possible, despite its being questionable whether she is.
We use “Manipulation Argument” broadly to include Mele’s Zygote Argument. Debates have raged about whose intuitions are relevant to these arguments (e.g., McKenna 2014b, 2008; Mele 2013; Pereboom 2008). We take the consensus view that our audience is well-informed readers who are undecided (or neutral) about the compatibility of determinism and free will.
McKenna defends the hard-line response, yet maintains that the compatibilist “needs to hold that an agent can be the ultimate source of her will and her acts even if there is a deterministic explanation for them that traces back to factors for which she is not ultimately responsible” (2014a: 85). We agree that determinism does not rule out the sort of sourcehood relevant to free will. If McKenna came to agree with us that some forms of intentional manipulation do rule out this sort of sourcehood, perhaps he would agree that our soft-line response should be deployed against arguments that appeal to such forms of manipulation.
We do not take a stand on whether Manny lacks free will entirely or whether he has less or a lesser sort than Danny. We maintain that the Manipulation Argument fails if the NoDif Premise is false, and, contra Todd (2011), that offering a principled difference between manipulation and determinism that is relevant to the degree to which an agent is free or responsible is enough to show that this premise is false. For discussions of degrees of moral responsibility, see Nelkin (2016), Khoury (2014), Capes (2013), Coates and Swenson (2013) and Tierney (2013).
See footnote 10, below, for an explanation of why this is so.
We are defining causal sourcehood in terms of the causal variable that has the strongest invariance relation to the effect variable. However, because strength of invariance allows for relative comparisons between causal variables, we could also define relative causal sourcehood among selected causal variables (see also footnote 13). In cases in which the strength of invariance obtaining between Diana’s decision and Manny’s stealing is equal to that obtaining between the output of Manny’s CAS and his stealing, Diana and Manny may share equal responsibility. Similarly, different causal contributions may result in assignments of different degrees of responsibility to Diana and Manny (see footnote 6). This feature of our view enables us to deal with cases in which Diana’s decision is, for instance, only slightly more or less invariant as a cause of Manny’s stealing than the output of Manny’s own CAS is.
The examples of Romeo and the iron filings are drawn from James (1890: 20).
This is why the second of our two conditions on strength of causal invariance is important. In the case of Diana and Manny, condition (1) alone cannot explain whether DD or instead Manny is more strongly invariant regarding Steal. Yet in cases of “online” manipulation, where things do not work out as Diana had intended, such that she has to remain online and ready to step in again to ensure the outcome, condition (1) always shows that DD is more strongly invariant. The Manipulation Argument, however, is about “offline” manipulation—Diana makes an initial change to ensure that Steal takes a specific value (via Manny), after which she goes offline and allows events to unfold without stepping in again. As we will show, condition (2) explains why, in offline manipulation, DD is more strongly invariant regarding Steal than Manny is.
Or imagine that Zeus, a more powerful deity than Diana, does not care about whether Manny steals the wallet. Yet he is settled on this: Either Diana decides to create Manny’s zygote in a particular way (which, as it happens, will result in Manny’s stealing the wallet) or Zeus will interfere to make Diana do so (i.e., Zeus is a Frankfurt-style intervener). In the actual case, Diana decides on her own; Zeus does nothing. Is Zeus the causal source of Manny’s stealing? No. Zeus’s deciding to do nothing is not an actual cause of Steal = s. So it is not the causal source of Steal = s, even though had Diana decided differently, it would have been. (Thanks to Al Mele for suggesting this case.) Similar reasoning indicates how our view offers a parsimonious account of Frankfurt (1969) cases. In such cases, the Frankfurt intervener (Black) can ensure what an agent (Jones) decides, but when we consider whether Jones is morally responsible in the actual case where Black does nothing, Black is not an actual cause of Jones’ decision, and hence Black is not the causal source of that decision. Instead, Jones is.
The same is true in Pereboom’s cases 1 and 2, where neuroscientists can ensure, by manipulating Plum’s brain, that his action is caused by their relevant intentions. In case 3, it is less clear how the community that raises Plum could ensure his action. To respond to soft-line responses that reference the manipulator’s intentions, Pereboom introduces alterations to his cases involving a spontaneously generated machine or force field that produces the same outcome in Plum. Pereboom suggests these alterations are irrelevant to his argument (e.g., 2014: 79), but in these cases the causal invariance relation collapses, since those causes will not produce the action across different background conditions (our condition 2), nor would interventions on the values of the relevant variables (e.g., on the force field) cause systematic changes to Plum’s actions (our condition 1) (See Sect. 5 below.).
We noted earlier (footnote 8) that since strength of invariance allows for relative comparisons among causal variables, we could also define relative causal sourcehood among selected causal variables. Doing so would alter some of the preceding presentation, but it would still support the conclusion that Diana’s decision is a relatively stronger causal source of Manny’s stealing than any variable in Manny’s CAS, whereas there is no causal source in Danny’s distant past that is a relatively stronger causal source of his decision than variables in his CAS.
Recent studies indicate that ordinary causal judgments track the distinctions that our causal sourcehood condition suggests. In studies about manipulation cases, when people read that a manipulator causes another agent to do what she intends, they judge her to be the cause of, and responsible for, the relevant action (or to be more so than the manipulated agent), whereas people do not make those judgments (or not as strongly) when the manipulator causes another agent to do the same thing, but without the manipulator intending it (e.g., Murray and Lombrozo 2016; Phillips and Shaw 2014; Sripada 2012).
An exception, of course, is for causal variables like Diana’s decision, since Diana is stipulated to be capable of controlling for a maximally wide range of possible changes to the background conditions (something we doubt is nomologically possible).
In fact, there may be need for explicit contrastivity (Deery 2013); however, we do not have space to develop that point here.
Even if a suitable invariance relation could be identified between some event(s), X, in the distant past and Danny’s decision (Danny), our conditions on strength of causal invariance would show that there would rarely, if ever, be a strong causal invariance relation between X and Danny, since X = x would not cause Danny = d across a wide range of changes to C.
We also maintain that interventionism can be fruitfully applied to other debates about free will. For instance, it can explain why the agent in a Frankfurt case (1969) is the causal source of her action whereas the counterfactual intervener is not, offering a more parsimonious explanation of the lessons of those cases (see footnote 11). Additionally, interventionism can help to explain away features of our experience of free agency that appear to implicate indeterminism (Deery 2015). We hope to further develop these applications of interventionism in future work.
Versions of this paper were presented at Duke University (March 22, 2013), the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (June 18, 2013), the Flickers of Freedom blog (July 2013), the University of Montreal (November 29, 2013), the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (June 20, 2014), and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (October 24, 2014). Thanks to audiences at those venues for helpful comments. We also thank Terry Horgan, Derk Pereboom, Al Mele, Michael McKenna, Jenann Ismael, Carolina Sartorio, Adina Roskies, Paul Russell, Jonathan Phillips, Dylan Murray, Bryan Chambliss, Alex Von Stein, Yael Lowenstein, and several anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Oisín Deery and Eddy Nahmias: Authorship is equal.
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Deery, O., Nahmias, E. Defeating Manipulation Arguments: Interventionist causation and compatibilist sourcehood. Philos Stud 174, 1255–1276 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0754-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0754-8