Abstract
Among challenges to libertarians, the Mind Argument has loomed large. Believing that this challenge cannot be met, Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, concludes that free will is a mystery. Recently, the Mind Argument has drawn a number of criticisms. Here I seek to add to its woes. Quite apart from its other problems, I argue, the Mind Argument does a poor job of isolating the important concern for libertarians that it raises. Once this concern has been clarified, however, another argument serves to renew the challenge. The Assimilation Argument challenges libertarians to explain how ostensible exercises of free will are relevantly different from other causally undetermined outcomes, outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. In particular, libertarians must explain how agents can have the power to settle which of two causally possible futures becomes the actual future. This will require them to distinguish cases where this power is supposedly present from similar cases where it’s clearly absent.
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Notes
The Mind Argument gets its name from the journal Mind, where several prominent versions of the argument have appeared (see, for example, Hobart 1934).
The other, closely related, challenge has come to be known as the Luck Argument. According to the Luck Argument, causally undetermined actions are a matter of luck or chance, and thus do not provide a basis for holding the agent morally responsible (see Mele 2006, Chap. 3, for an important discussion of this argument). Here I leave the Luck Argument to one side.
I defend an earlier version of the Assimilation Argument in Shabo (2011a).
But see Finch and Warfield (1998) for an attempt to replace β with a principle that supports the Consequence Argument but not the Mind Argument.
Graham (op. cit., pp. 288–289) has also questioned whether the Mind Argument really depends on β; however, Graham’s basis for doing so is somewhat different from mine.
McKay and Johnson (op. cit.) present a convincing counterexample to β; since my concern isn’t with β, I won’t review this counterexample. As will be seen, however, the concern I raise for van Inwagen’s version of the Mind Argument also applies to Nelkin’s (2001) version, which forgoes β (see note 9).
The same point applies, mutatis mutandis, to Nelkin’s (2001) version of the Mind Argument, which derives N(R occurred) from the substantive premise N[DB occurred & (DB occurred ⊃ R occurred)], and the tautology, □{[DB occurred & (DB occurred ⊃ R occurred)] ⊃ R occurred}. If the agent had a choice about whether R occurred—something this argument gives us no reason to deny—the first premise is false.
Indeed, van Inwagen (2008, p. 338) expressly draws this modal conclusion from the Mind Argument. However, he doesn’t make it clear how the necessity claim (necessarily, if a prospective action is causally undetermined by the past and the laws, the agent lacks the ability to perform it) is supposed to follow from the premises of the Mind Argument, given that some of the statements that occur after the assumption for conditional proof are contingent statements.
When searching for a previous reference in the literature to “the power to settle” which of two causally possible actions one performs, I came across Steward (2009). While I do not share Steward’s view that this power is required for action, I believe that she has struck upon an especially promising way of expressing the main concern about free will and undetermined actions. Other ways of expressing this (or a related) concern are in terms of whether the agent has the power to ensure that one undetermined outcome or the other ensues (Haji 2001, p. 190), or whether the agent has “antecedent-determining control” of the undetermined outcome (Kane 1996, p. 144). I believe that the settling formulation has advantages over these other characterizations.
We might put this by saying that, according to van Inwagen, Alice cannot have well-founded confidence that she will tell the truth in full recognition of these antecedent probabilities. If Alice did not suspect that the outcome is subject to these probabilities, her confidence that she will tell the truth might be such that she could sincerely promise to do so; however, this confidence wouldn’t be well founded. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
Franklin (forthcoming) suggests—incorrectly, in my view—that this claim is incoherent.
In an intriguing recent discussion of the Rollback Argument, Fischer (2011) considers a case in which the device implanted is doubly randomizing: it is a matter of chance whether it activates or remains inoperative; and, if it does activate, it randomizes the agent’s choice. I discuss such a doubly randomizing device in support of the Rollback Argument in Shabo (2011a); Fischer, however, shows how such a case can be used to challenge the Rollback Argument. I plan to address Fischer’s argument in future work.
Why is it difficult to see the choice (or “choice”) in Case 4 as based on Alice’s reasons, notwithstanding that a “snapshot” of her brain immediately before this event is indistinguishable from a snapshot of her brain in Case 5 at the same instant, and notwithstanding that her choices in the Case 4 replays will make sense to her just as their counterparts in the Case 5 replays do? Presumably, this is because her actions in the Case 4 replays, where the device operates, have deviant causal histories, ones that preclude those actions from being appropriately based on her reasons.
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Acknowledgments
I presented a draft of Sects. 2–4 at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and the University of Delaware. I would like to thank audiences at both places for thoughtful and engaging discussion. Special thanks to E.J. Coffman for valuable conversation and correspondence on some of the key issues raised here. Thanks also to John Nolt for a very helpful discussion of the role of probability in these arguments. I would also like to thank John Martin Fischer and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies.
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Shabo, S. Free will and mystery: looking past the Mind Argument. Philos Stud 162, 291–307 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9760-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9760-z