Abstract
The consequence argument for the incompatibility of free action and determinism has long been under attack, but two important objections have only recently emerged: Warfield’s modal fallacy objection and Campbell’s no past objection. In this paper, I explain the significance of these objections and defend the consequence argument against them. First, I present a novel formulation of the argument that withstands their force. Next, I argue for the one controversial claim on which this formulation relies: the trans-temporality thesis. This thesis implies that an agent acts freely only if there is one time at which she is able to perform an action and a distinct time at which she actually performs it. I then point out that determinism, too, is a thesis about trans-temporal relations. I conclude that it is precisely because my formulation of the consequence argument emphasizes trans-temporality that it prevails against the modal fallacy and no past objections.
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Notes
That is, the freedom of finite persons who are temporally bound, where an object is temporally bound if it exists in time.
I will offer more precise characterizations of incompatibilism and determinism in what follows.
Van Inwagen (1983) provides this informal and popular presentation of the argument.
Of course, I am not the first philosopher to respond to these objections. For responses to Warfield, see Kremer (2004) and Nelkin and Rickless (2002). It is noteworthy that Kremer anticipates Campbell’s objection in fn. 5. For responses to Campbell, see Bailey (2011), Brueckner (2008), Loss (2009, 2010), Nagashima (manuscript). Bailey offers a new argument for incompatibilism, while the others reformulate the consequence argument itself.
Throughout this paper, I will use ‘incompatibilism’ to refer to the thesis expressed in (INC); moreover, I will use ‘□’ as a modal operator that expresses broad logical necessity.
Warfield phrases the thesis differently: “Necessarily, if determinism is true then there is no freedom.”
Throughout this paper, I will use masculine pronouns to refer to hypothetical philosophers and feminine pronouns to refer to hypothetical agents.
Throughout the paper, I will construe t′ < t in this way.
This modality is related to the modalities of accidental necessity and accidental impossibility. These modalities ought to be familiar to anyone who has studied fatalism and, in particular, to anyone who has considered “Ockham’s way out.” See Plantinga (1986) for a discussion of this response for arguments to fatalism.
I am using the terms ‘act’ and ‘action’ broadly, so that events like forming an intention, beginning a deliberation, arriving a conclusion by way of deliberation, forming an act of will, making a decision, endeavoring to perform an act, and the like count as actions. While there are clearly some contexts in which it is important to distinguish, say, an act from the intention to perform the act, this is not such a context.
There are at least two objections that someone might raise to this definition of free action. First, someone might object here that if S performs A freely, then it is no longer up to her whether she A’s. In other words, one might object that either (i) it is up to S whether S A’s or (ii) S A’s and it was up to S whether S A’s, but it is never the case that both S A’s and it is up to her whether she A’s. This is the precisely the point that I will argue for in this paper. For now, I am simply offering a minimal definition of free action. Second, someone might object that its being up to S whether S A’s does not imply that S A’s: isn’t it possible that it is up to S whether S A’s, but before she gets around to A-ing or not, the world ends? My contention is that if the world ends before S gets the chance to do one or the other, then it was never really up to S whether she A’d or not: given that the non-existence of the world makes it impossible for her to do either, it wasn’t really up to her whether she did one or the other. But the truth of this claim is irrelevant in the present context, so I will simply issue a promissory note for the moment.
It is important to emphasize that the formulation in terms of ‘has a choice about’ is equivalent to the others. It is relatively common for people to say that FWCH asserts that there is a mental event—a choice—that precedes every free action. This is not the case. Both ‘S has a choice about whether’ and ‘It is up to S whether’ are terms of art, and they are synonymous.
Some participants in the free will debate deny FWCH, FWA, and FWC while affirming FWU. They claim that as long as an agent is, in some sense, the “source” of her action, it does not matter whether she “has the ability to do otherwise.” It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider this debate. I will simply stipulate that the debate I am considering is that between the many compatibilists and incompatibilists who affirm not only FWU but also FWCH, FWA, and FWC. This is the debate to which the consequence argument is relevant, and it is a debate that has raged for centuries, going at least as far back as Hume and arguably as far back as Augustine.
The notion is obviously not clear in other contexts.
(i) and (ii) are slight variations on statements that van Inwagen makes in his (1983).
Indeterminism = df. The thesis that (i) For every instant of time, there is a proposition that expresses the state of the world at that instant; (ii) If p and q are any propositions that express the state of the world at some instants, then the conjunction of p and the laws of nature does not entail q.
Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to present them, there are reasons to think that the “no control over” rendering is unsatisfactory. For a discussion of this issue, see Dennett (1984).
I will treat ‘to be able to’ as the to-infinitival of ‘can.’
See McKay and Johnson (1996).
This principle is often called ‘principle beta’ because Peter van Inwagen baptized it as such. I am assuming that there are many variations of just one principle, but one might just as well imagine that there are many members of the family of such principles.
I am here making the assumption that even if there is a formulation of the consequence argument that does not explicitly rely on this inference principle, it relies upon it implicitly. Van Inwagen (1983) argues persuasively for this thesis.
Many transfer principles have been introduced into the free will literature, some of which are demonstrably invalid (see McKay and Johnson (1996)). No such demonstration has plagued the principle that I have dubbed ‘Transfer’ nor any transfer principle that flanks the conditional premise with the □-operator. Such transfer principles were introduced into the literature by Widerker (1987). See Finch and Warfield (1998) for further discussion of such transfer principles.
Campbell presents this case in his (2007).
Campbell introduces the case of Oscillating Adam in his (2010).
Although Campbell does not explicitly reject (TT′), the considerations he raises in (2010) make his opposition clear.
See Lewis (1981) for a discussion of the fixity of the laws and the consequence argument.
See Kapitan (2002) for a discussion of objections to the transfer principle.
In his response to the no past objection, Roberto Loss commits himself to the trans-temporality thesis by committing himself to inference principles that he dubs (γ) and (δ). He stipulates that: t = any time; t < t′ = time t is earlier than t′; pt is a proposition that describes the state of the world at time t; Ntp = p and it is not up to anyone at t whether p. He then offers: (γ)∀t(pt → Ntpt) and (δ) ∀t∀t′ (t < t′ → (pt′ → Nt′pt)) and formulates the consequence argument in terms of these inference principles. Although I am in broad agreement with Loss, and although we are both committed to both (γ) and the trans-temporality thesis, our responses to the no past objection are importantly different. For one thing, I do not use either of Loss’s inference principles to formulate the consequence argument; with respect to my formulation, its validity depends on nothing other than Transfer**. Moreover, my formulation of the argument does not depend on (δ), a principle that is based on the assumption that no one has a choice about the past; this assumption is called into question by the case of Oscillating Adam. Another difference: Loss does not explicitly articulate the trans-temporality thesis and, hence, he does not argue for it. While he does argue for (γ), his arguments are extremely brief (indeed, they are mostly confined to footnotes). My argument for the trans-temporality thesis is far more extensive. And so while I agree with everything that Loss says in defense of (γ), I take it that there is much more to say on (γ)’s behalf. Indeed, I hope that my argument for the trans-temporality thesis makes it clear just how high the price of denying (γ) is.
As I stipulated in fn. 1.
I note here the limitations of the English language: English grammar allows us to say that an agent is able to do something; it allows us to say that an agent was able to do something; it allows us to say that an agent does one thing or another. But it provides no way of referring to the relevant transition insofar as it is a transition: in the cases under consideration, the agent changes from being able to do something to not being able to do it, and she undergoes this change precisely because she does something that she was able to do. We cannot say that she "ables" or "cans" or "up-to's" at the point of transition; this makes it difficult to speak of the transition itself.
Any textbook of English grammar tells us this much. For an excellent discussion of mood and modality in English grammar, see Huddleston and Pullman (2002, pp. 172–208).
In my discussion of accidental possibility and related notions, I will ignore the relevant similarities between these modalities and those that are similar—for instance, Luis de Molina’s ‘causal possibility’. Although there are some contexts in which it is crucial to consider the differences between such modalities, this context is not one of them.
I will not discuss other modalities, but it will become clear that a proposition is accidentally possible only if it is logically possible that it is true. Moreover, it will become clear that a proposition is accidentally possible only if it is nomologically possible, provided that nomological possibility is understood correctly. See Lewis (1981) for discussion of the proper construal of nomological possibility in the context of the free will debate.
The distinction between truth and accidental necessity is sometimes articulated in terms of “hard facts” and “soft facts.” Soft facts correspond to the former; hard facts correspond to the latter.
This is so whether the A-theory or the B-theory of time is correct. If the A-theory is correct, then there is something “ontologically privileged” about whatever time happens to be present; if the B-theory is correct, the “the present time” is an indexical. But in either case, there are events that are “earlier than” the present time; and events that are “later than” the present time. Whichever view of time one holds, one may say that some events are earlier than time t, and some events are later than t. And the idea here is that those events that occur earlier than a time t are accidentally necessary at that time.
Condition (iv) is somewhat controversial. However, I will not rely on (iv) in any of the arguments that follow.
Both the incompatibilist and the compatibilist may accept this, provided that the laws of nature are not accidentally necessary. I will assume that they are not.
As I stipulated in fn. 1, we are here considering the free actions of non-divine persons. To question (FT), then, is to suggest that it is possible that there are finite beings who act freely outside of time. It is beyond the scope of this paper to argue against this suggestion. But there are plenty of arguments to choose from; indeed, there are so many arguments that the dialectical burden is squarely on the shoulders of anyone who insists that there are finite beings acting freely outside of time.
He makes this perfectly clear in his (2010).
Where ‘◊’ is a modal operator representing broad logical possibility.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Andrew Bailey, David Buller, Mary Beth Finch, Jennifer Lackey, Geoff Pynn, Baron Reed, Mike Rea, and Kevin Timpe for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Jonah Nagashima for valuable discussion of the topic and to Aaron Schroeder for his assistance in editing the manuscript.
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Finch, A. On behalf of the consequence argument: time, modality, and the nature of free action. Philos Stud 163, 151–170 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9791-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9791-5