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Revisionism about free will: a statement & defense

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Abstract

This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distinctiveness of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism, and (4) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about moral responsibility.

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Notes

  1. As I will use the term, ‘free will’ is the distinctive power or ability required for moral responsibility. As I read the history of philosophy, this usage, one that links free will with moral responsibility is consistent with the bulk of at least the post-Cartesian philosophical tradition, including such figures as Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I do not wish to deny that there are other conceptual roles that have been played by this term, and indeed, I will say a bit about those alternative roles later in the paper.

  2. My thanks to V. Alan White for coming up with the much-needed collective noun term for philosophers. It is clearly superior to James Lipton’s earlier suggestion of a wrangle of philosophers, which despite its not insignificant charms, strikes me as inadequate to the linguistic task, for it has failed to catch on as a linguistic convention, even among philosophers and those who despise them.

  3. This point can be accepted by someone who thinks, for example, that a Lewis-style counterfactual account is the best way to properly understand the involved abilities claims, and that given this, Consequence Argument-style arguments fail to show the advertised metaphysical conclusion. The matter is somewhat delicate, however. One could think that the failure of the Consequence Argument on a Lewisian account of counterfactuals shows that Lewis’ account fails to capture some important features of ordinary thinking about abilities. The significance of this result would depend on the extent to which existing folk patterns of ability talk are a constraint on the adequacy of the Lewisian story. However, if a Lewis-style account of ability claims is not so constrained, then one might advocate a revisionist conception of free will on the basis of our ordinary thinking failing to reflect the proper (Lewis-style) analysis of ability.

  4. Given the diversity of theological views on these matters, one might wonder why it is that a specifically incompatibilist conception of these things might have taken root. An admittedly speculative reply: there are a variety of confusions about our agential powers that easily arise from reflection on our phenomenology of decision making, and these confusions provided the fertile soil for reception of incompatibilist and not compatibilist strands of the theological tradition.

  5. For some of the issues involved, see Nelkin (2007), Doris et al. (2007), and Knobe and Doris (in press).

  6. Of course, one could accept this basic point and go on to argue that we would do well to excise those incompatibilist elements. So, perhaps the fragmentation of the folk requires a repair in a uniformly compatibilist way. I find this solution a compelling one, but it does not help the compatibilist on the matter of whether or not some of ascriptions of free will and moral responsibility really do, as matter of folk conceptual ontology, appeal to incompatibilist commitments.

  7. Of course, internal to incompatibilists one might argue over whether the concept of free will has enough content to specify a particular type of libertarianism. So, for example, I take it that Tim O’Connor thinks that Kane’s libertarianism is revisionist precisely because he thinks that Kane conception of free will in fact fails to capture a genuine feature of the concept of free will. I’ve discussed this issue in more detail elsewhere, in Vargas (2005a, esp. pp. 418–419).

  8. Here, I am ignoring some complexities concerning the principal of alternative possibilities and the numerous purported counterexamples to it, as well as the myriad of replies and counter-replies to those examples. Suffice it to say that I am not persuaded by Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). In brief: the only examples that are not dialectically problematic are either unpersuasive or so complex as to make clear intuitions impossible (at least for me). However, even if PAP must ultimately be abandoned I think it is likely that there is very likely a nearby principle that is best rendered in incompatibilist terms. Moreover, on the account of folk thinking I have suggested, the existence of counterexamples to a general principle of alternative possibilities would not show that there are never conditions under which folk thinking about free will and moral responsibility genuinely do invoke a principle of alternative possibilities understood in some libertarian-friendly way. But if I am wrong about both of the preceding, I still think the strength of independent arguments for incompatibilism is such that all this would show is that I’ve misidentified the dominant incompatibilist element in folk thinking (i.e., “leeway” instead of “source” incompatibilist intuitions), not that folk thinking does not have strongly incompatibilist elements.

  9. Much of the neuroscientific literature on these matters tends to be conceptually flat-footed, failing to recognize some rudimentary distinctions about deliberation, considerations, and the like. And, more often than not, neuroscientists are simply blind to the possibility of non-incompatibilist understandings of agency. So, I hesitate to lean too heavily on this literature. Still, I think it is notable that few if any neuroscientists seem sanguine about the picture Kane advocates.

  10. I have focused on the ideas of praise, blame, and punishment, but it is worth reminding ourselves that our conception of free will may have consequences that extend considerably further than these familiar notions, considered in themselves. I take it that, for example, attitudes towards homeless people, and drug addiction of some stripes, may reflect judgments about the freedom or responsibility of the considered agents for these conditions. If one thinks that free will is pervasive and the kind of thing that represents an unassailable ability to always transcend local motivational inputs, and we have reason to think this picture is false, this could conceivably alter how at least some people regard some conditions of homelessness and alcoholism.

    One might also think that these considerations suggest that there are important strands of our thinking about agency that go beyond the alternative possibilities requirement that I have discussed, such as “source” incompatibilist intuitions, or intuitions grounded in our being at least partly non-physical substances. All of these are possibilities to which I am sympathetic. If these strands really are substantially present in our ordinary thinking, they point to further reasons for the kind of moderate revisionism I favor.

  11. Honderich and Smilansky have separately argued that compatibilism and incompatibilism both only tell part of the story about free will and moral responsibility (Honderich 1988; Smilansky 2000). My account is different than their respective discussions of the dialectical disconnect in an important way. They have focused on differences in the content of different conceptual strands. In addition to this difference, I have emphasized the importance of distinct foci (metaphysical versus normative) and the attendant methodological presuppositions.

  12. See work by Nahmias et al. (2006).

  13. We might also understand the system as “aiming at” (i.e., being justified in its operations, as a whole, to the extent to which it achieves the following results) the enhancement of agent’s sensitivity to considerations where such agency already exists, as well as expanding the number of contexts in which we are considerations-sensitive agents (Vargas, in progress).

  14. This account is not meant to preclude the possibility of other, overlapping accounts of the justification of moral responsibility. Rather, it is meant to provide a minimal justificatory story that can be widely accepted on a range of independently plausible accounts of normative ethics. Moreover, I take it that this justificatory story gives us an analysis of what would justify the desert claims that are platitudinously invoked in responsibility ascriptions, even if (again), the correct account of the “real” normative structure of those desert claims turns out to be somewhat different than we ordinarily suppose. Thus, for example, I reject Pereboom’s conception of “basic desert” if, by that, he means a substantive account of desert that requires that desert is warranted by nothing more than the agent and the action, devoid of any further normative facts including social context and the broader normative significance of that act in a system of human practices. However, if Pereboom just means by “basic desert” the actual property of desert (or the best candidate properties) picked out by successful platitudinous usages of full-blooded desert attributions in the context of responsibility, then I take it that the two-tiered justificatory story I have offered just is a candidate account for the sense of basic desert involved in responsibility. In either case, my account cannot be rejected simply on the grounds that one favors an alternative conception of desert. What is needed is an argument for why, if basic term is not meant as piece of substantive stipulation, this account cannot be an account of basic desert; alternately, if ‘basic desert’ is meant to pick out a substantive stipulation, we need an argument why we should think basic desert, as opposed to the “successful platitudinous referent of fundamental desert attributions” sense of desert is the with which we are rightly concerned in discussions of responsibility. That the former has a pithier label is hardly a reason for thinking it is the sense of desert with which we are rightly concerned.

  15. Elsewhere, I have offered a taxonomy of a wide range of possible varieties of revisionism, and distinguished my own brand of moderate revisionism from several alternative varieties, including several possibilities I do not mention here (Vargas 2005a). For usefully related discussions, see also recent work by Nichols (2007).

  16. How this rendering of my account would intersect with talk on the freedom or ability condition of responsibility, i.e., free will, is a complicated matter. One might think responsibility talk is noncognitive even if, for example, it appeals to a (perhaps) truth-functional concept of free will. And, of course, there is the further matter of how we should understand the semantics of free will, something that on my account may yet turn out to be internalist or externalist in its semantics (Vargas 2005a).

  17. One virtue of my account is that it just is the application of a much broader story about how to think about the rational constraints on language use. It is not as though we suddenly ignore general rules about concept usage or the achievements we’ve made in understanding philosophical issues about language. Nor do we commit ourselves to a picture where we treat the concept as unique and sacrosanct, off in its own insulated space of conceptual and logical constraints, detached from the world and our purposes. I have said more about this picture in Vargas (2004), although there I do not there emphasize the preservation of characteristic patterns of inference and licensing of normative judgments, partly because I was assuming (rightly or wrongly) that such things would automatically embedded in the structure of platitudinous ascriptions of freedom and responsibility.

  18. I wish to thank Joseph Campbell for organizing the APA session that led to this paper. Thanks also to my co-authors of Four Views on Free Will, as well as Richard Holton, Michael McKenna, and the indefatigable Dan Speak for fruitful discussions and exchanges about the material in this paper. I also wish to acknowledge the feedback from audience members at the 2008 Pacific Division Meeting of the APA. And, I am grateful for the generous support of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where I completed work on this paper.

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Vargas, M. Revisionism about free will: a statement & defense. Philos Stud 144, 45–62 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9366-x

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