Abstract
There is an argument for incompatibilism that is based on the experience of agency. Authors who endorse this argument place pro tanto evidential weight on one or more of two putative aspects of the experience of being an agent: i) the experience of being the causal source of our actions; ii) the experience of having robust alternative possibilities available to one. With some exceptions, these authors and their critics alike neglect a third significant aspect of the experience of agency: iii) the experience of the future as being modally open. This aspect is either neglected or conflated with (i) or (ii). In this paper I rehabilitate (iii) as a notable aspect in its own right, and demonstrate that it is a good candidate for having the same pro tanto evidential weight in the experiential argument for incompatibilism. Then, I go on to assess the prospects of this revised argument in the face of central compatibilist objections that are central to the literature. I find that it fares just as well, if not better, than the original argument.
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Notes
There are arguments for the agent-causal theory of action which do not derive from agentive experience, for example, the idea that event-causal agency implies a “vanishing agent” or considerations arising from deviant causal chains. I will not be discussing these. Steward (2012) contains a good discussion of these from an agent-causal and non-phenomenological standpoint.
If they indeed do so; this has been disputed, see Nahmias et al. (2004). But even if the folk do not, an error theory can nonetheless be applied in order to explain the libertarian interpretation made by experts.
A colleague has offered me a similar anecdote: after moving to a new city for work he would take two different paths to his university campus—one when on foot and another when cycling. It was only after a week of this that he realised that part of these two paths were in fact identical, despite seeing them every day. Until then he saw that part of his environment completely differently, on account the different ways he was able to traverse it.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this issue.
There’s one clear sense in which it doesn’t indicate libertarianism, which should be flagged. That is, there are a number of additional conditions that most people think are required for free will—the ability to plan beyond the next few seconds, say—and which Openness lacks. But I’m not claiming that Openness is an experience of free will: I’m claiming it is an agentive experience that is in prima facie contradiction with determinism. So it’s prima facie libertarian in just this wider sense.
This paper was never published; it was withdrawn from the volume in which it was to appear after parts of its content had been published elsewhere. Unfortunately, the evolutionary argument that is alluded to did not survive the division of the original piece, and the original manuscript is not citeable.
This echoes the point made by Sartre (1977, p. 482): “Even if the [mountain] crag is revealed as ‘too difficult to climb’ and if we must give up the ascent, let us note that the crag is revealed as such only because it was originally grasped as ‘climbable’; it is therefore our freedom which constitutes the limits which it will subsequently encounter.”
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Sims, A. On a Neglected Aspect of Agentive Experience. Philosophia 47, 1313–1330 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0037-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0037-z