Abstract
In saying that it was up to someone whether or not she acted as she did, we are attributing a distinctive sort of power to her. Understanding such power attributions is of broad importance for contemporary discussions of free will. Yet the ‘is up to…whether’ locution and its cognates have largely escaped close examination. This article aims to elucidate one of its unnoticed features, namely that such power attributions introduce intensional contexts, something that is easily overlooked because the sentences that express these attributions admit of both intensional and extensional readings. I argue that this kind of power attribution should inform discussions of Frankfurt’s counterexample strategy, in that an alternative possibility should not be considered robust unless it’s up to the agent whether or not it’s realized. I argue, as well, that understanding robust alternatives in this way sheds light on the relationship between the Frankfurt literature and the Luck Objection to libertarianism.
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Notes
This condition of adequacy was first proposed in Fischer (1982). See also Fischer (1994, Chap. 7; 1999, pp. 109–123; 2003); Fischer and Tognazzini (2009). Fischer terms alternative possibilities that don’t confer an ability to do otherwise—and thus that fail to render an action avoidable an interesting sense—mere “flickers of freedom” (1994, Chap. 7).
Pereboom provides a helpful elaboration of Fischer’s concern about robustness. As Pereboom puts it (2003, pp. 186–88), an adequate defense of the avoidability requirement must secure an alternative possibility that is relevant per se to the agent’s moral responsibility, as opposed to merely being an indicator that the action isn’t deterministically caused, and hence that some incompatibilist condition other than avoidability (such as being the “ultimate source” of one’s action) may be met. Cf. Fischer (2003, pp. 34–35).
See for example Almeida and Bernstein (2003), Ginet (2007), Clarke (2011), Franklin (2011), Shabo (2011a, b), Steward (2012), and Clarke and Capes (2013). As I understand the statement that it’s up to someone which action she performs, it’s equivalent to other statements whose truth is necessary and sufficient to answer the Luck Objection, including the statements that the agent “has a choice about” about what she does (or about the truth of a true proposition about what she does) (van Inwagen 1983, pp. 127–147); that the agent has the “power to settle” which action she performs (Steward 2009a, 2012, Shabo 2011a, 2013); and that the action is an exercise of the “dual power” of free will. I contend that these expressions require closer scrutiny than they have received so far. Since I began work on this manuscript, however, Steward (2012, pp. 36–42) has provided a helpful look at some of the semantic features of the ‘up to’ locution.
In Sect. 6, I provide examples of invalid inferences from premises about someone’s ability to act to the conclusion that it’s up to the agent whether she acts in that way.
Pereboom (2001, p. 26; 2003; 2005, pp. 186–188; 2012, p. 301) has done the most to defend an epistemic requirement for robustness. (Cf. Schnall 2010, p. 274). Michael McKenna has suggested that an epistemic constraint on robust alternatives arises from considerations about what an agent can reasonably be expected to take into account in deliberating about what to do (McKenna 2003, p. 208). For another look at the epistemic condition for robustness, see Hunt and Shabo (2013, pp. 616–625). While the epistemic requirement has its defenders, most writers on the topic seem to sidestep it. For this reason, it’s worth examining other ways of supporting it. The way I propose involves seeing this requirement as implicit in the right kind of power attribution rather than as a further requirement alongside the need for the power to do otherwise. By contrast, other writers, including Pereboom, leave open the relationship between the epistemic requirement and the ability requirement. I discuss Pereboom’s most recent (2012) proposal in Sect. 7.
But see Steward (2012, pp. 36–42), for a recent exception.
There are importantly different ways of developing this response. For examples of one main genus, which arguably stresses the possibility of a different outcome, and thus fails to secure a robust alternative, see van Inwagen (1978), Naylor (1984), McKenna (1997), Wyma (1997), Otsuka (1998). For examples of the other genus, which contends that Jones retains the ability to decide to do otherwise, and thus that he has a robust alternative, see Kane (1985, p. 51; 1996, pp. 142–143, 191–192), Widerker (1995), Ginet (1996).
Here we might think of an agent for whom there exists only this possible deviation from the actual course of events: it’s possible that she experiences an involuntary inclination, one that she could suppress if she really wanted to, which triggers Black’s intervention. Or we might think of someone for whom the possibility exists of voluntarily letting her mind return to her original reasons for adopting her plan of action (a plan she follows through on without hesitation in the actual course of events), with the result that she would have performed that action under Black’s impetus. In both of these cases, the trigger is subject to some degree of voluntary control on the agent’s part, as opposed to being a mere neurological glitch (as in Chris’s case). Even so, it would be a stretch to say that the agent has the power or ability to avoid performing the action on her own in these cases. As I argue in the next section, there are cases where it clearly is plausible to attribute some such ability to the agent, but where it remains implausible to say that she has a robust alternative.
In Fischer’s parlance, these alternative possibilities are ‘mere flickers of freedom’.
This is a variant of a scenario that Pereboom (2003, p. 194) uses to support his epistemic requirement for robust alternatives.
If Lois Lane has no idea that the gift-box she’s holding contains kryptonite, it may be true that she can give a gift-box full of kryptonite to Superman, even though she doesn’t know that she can do this. But it won’t be true that she can choose to give a gift-box full of kryptonite to Superman if she has no idea that the box contains kryptonite.
Notably, the conclusion of van Inwagen’s Mind Argument, an influential version of the Luck Objection, is that for any true proposition about a causally undetermined action, “nobody has (or ever had) a choice about” the truth of that proposition (1983, p. 147). See note 3.
In a related vein, Goldman (1970, pp. 203–204) distinguishes epistemic from non-epistemic uses of ‘can’.
For example, I believe that this is a fair criticism of Steward (2009b, 2012, pp. 190–95) and Alvarez’s (2009) recent responses to the counterexample strategy. These responses are noteworthy in part because, unlike many other such responses, they expressly aim to secure an agential power to refrain from acting as the agent does (as opposed to the power to perform a different “positive” action instead). I discuss Alvarez’s response in detail in a manuscript under consideration. Elsewhere I have argued—on different grounds—that the Alvarez-Steward strategy doesn’t help incompatibilist defenders of PAP (Shabo 2011b). Cf. Capes (2012).
In a related vein, Ira Schnall writes, of the Frankfurt example he is discussing: “Presumably, it is up Jones whether his deliberative process is leading toward or away from deciding to break his promise; so, in a sense, it is up to him whether” his deliberative process exhibits the sign that would trigger Black’s intervention (Schnall 2010, p. 274, italics added).
In work in progress, I argue that this locution has another distinctive and unnoticed feature, one that bears on the Problem of Luck. At the least, it isn’t clear that the “dual power” of free will, which is expressed with the ‘is up to…whether’ locution and its cognates, is reducible to the ability to voluntarily and intentionally do something and the ability to voluntarily and intentionally do something else instead. (I briefly touch on this issue in Shabo 2011a, b, p. 121 no. 4.) The present manuscript is part of a larger effort to better understand this kind of power attribution and what makes its instances true when they are true.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks are owed to Torin Alter, Randy Clarke, John Fischer, and Derk Pereboom for helpful comments on an early draft (or predecessor) of this manuscript. I presented a more recent version of portions of the manuscript at the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society, where I benefited from audience feedback. I would also like to thank my colleagues Jeremy Cushing, Richard Hanley, Jeff Jordan, Kate Rogers, and Fred Schueler for a valuable discussion session. And I’m grateful to Torin Alter (again) and Chase Wrenn for helpful feedback on a later draft. Finally, I’d like to thank an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies.
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Shabo, S. It wasn’t up to Jones: unavoidable actions and intensional contexts in Frankfurt examples. Philos Stud 169, 379–399 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0187-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0187-6