OK. The basic problem of free will comes down to the notion of moral responsibility. We think of people as morally responsible for what they do freely. We don't blame them for what they're forced to do, or at least we blame them. Typically, a great deal less than we will often say. They're not free. They have no choice in the matter. So that's a very commonsensical way of thinking about things. You can only be morally responsible for what you do freely of your own choice.
But then with the rise of science, it becomes more and more plausible to see ourselves as causally determined that what we do actually has underlying causes in our brains, etc., that such that a being who knew everything about us would be able to predict in advance exactly what we were going to do. Well, if what I do is causally necessary, can I probably be blamed for that? Am I in effect, not free if I'm determined? So determinism is the thesis that all events are determined by prior causes.
So take any event, let's call it E! Given the calls laws that govern the universe, whatever they are, given the prior state of the world, the state of everything in the world before it occurred, then it was inevitable. That's one way of understanding the the notion of determinism. So here's a quotation from Hume's enquiry. It is agreed that matter in all its operations is actuated by unnecessary force and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause.
That no other effect in such particular circumstances could possibly have resulted from it. So Hume there is saying that this is something that philosophers generally agree when it comes to the behaviour of physical things, material objects. But Hume wanted to argue that it's also true of human actions, and that is the thesis of universal determinism, that it's true not only of things in the physical world, but things in what one might call the moral world, the world of people and actions.
Well, there are a number of different positions here, and it's very important to understand how they fit together. So first of all, we need to ask, is the thesis that we have genuine free will compatible with determinism? Now, when I say genuine free will. What I take that to mean is the kind of free will that is required for moral responsibility. Is that compatible with determinism? Well, some people say no. Some people say yes. If you say no, then you're an incompatible ist.
And it follows that at most one of the two theses can be true. Because neither of them might be. But that most one of them can be. So those who say that we do have freewill of the morally significant kind, but that determinism is false. They are called libertarians. So if you hear the word libertarian in the context of the free will debate, that's what it means. Someone who thinks that free will is incompatible with determinism. But we do have free will and therefore determinism is false.
On the other side, you get hard determinist. So a hard determinist is someone who says everything is determined and it follows from that, that we are not free, that we don't have morally significant freedom. So that's one side of the debate. Now, you might think of the libertarians and hard determinists as being fundamentally opposed, but actually in some ways their positions are quite close together because they agree on the conceptual point that determinism and freedom are incompatible.
And that's a pretty fundamental agreement between them. They simply disagree on, as it were, the fact of the matter, whether determinism is true or not. So on the other side of the debate are compatible ists and compatible ists. Let's say that we can have free will at even if determinism is true, determinism and free will are compatible. Now, you can be a compatibles without being a determinist. You can that I'm probably I probably fall into that position myself.
I think freewill and determinism are compatible. But actually, I don't believe in determinism because certain things to do with modern physics. But those who take a compatibles position and all determinists, which is certainly the vast majority of compatibly down the ages, they are called soft determinists. Now, the consequence argument is a very well-known argument, particularly pushed by Peter Van Wagon, an argument for the claim that determinism is incompatible with free will.
It goes like this, if determinism is true, then all human actions are causally determined consequences of the laws of nature and prior conditions. That's just what determinism says. Hence, I cannot do otherwise than I actually do, except by falsifying the laws of nature or changing past conditions.
If what I do inevitably comes about, given those initial conditions and given the laws, then the only way I could do something different is by changing the prior conditions, which obviously I can't get past. They're gone or by changing the laws. And I clearly can't do that either. But if I can't do otherwise than I actually do, then I don't have free will. So if determinism is true, we lack free will. I've given it there in a very sketchy form, of course.
It can be filled out in various ways, but it looks quite a persuasive argument. The fundamental thrust of it is that if everything I do was, as it were, inevitable from before I was born, how can I possibly be said to be free? There's nothing I could have done different.
Well, the traditional way of opposing this kind of argument, not just the consequent argument in its modern formulations, but generally the idea that that freewill is incompatible with determinism on the ground that I couldn't do otherwise if determinism is true. The standard ways to interpret. I could do otherwise or I couldn't do otherwise.
Differently. So the incompatible IST is saying that I can only be said to do to be able to do otherwise if it's causally possible in that exact situation for me to do otherwise. So being incompatible is. Wants to say that I'm only really free if put in that exact situation with the state of my brain and everything being exactly what it was. Something different could have happened. Otherwise I cannot be said to be able to do otherwise.
Now, the compatibles will take a quite different view. The compatibles will prefer something like this. It would be possible for me to do otherwise. In a similar but not identical situation in which I chose to do so. So the compatibilities says, well, I chose ice cream rather than fruit. It was a free choice. I could have done otherwise. I could have chosen fruit. Of course, in that situation where I had a preference for ice cream, it was inevitable that I was going to juice the ice cream.
Sure. But had I preferred the fruit, I would have taken the fruit. So I was entirely free to do as I chose. So that's a very different reading of could do otherwise. Now, Harry, Frankfurt has argued that quite apart from this issue of interpretation. Freedom doesn't even require the possibility of doing either doing otherwise. In either of these senses. So that's a rather more radical way of opposing the incompatible position. So here's an example. Suppose I go through door A.
Maybe I am. I need to get out of the building. Maybe there's some emergency or something like that. And there's two doors. Doray dhobi. I choose to go through Doray. Now, that is a free action, I freely chose A rather than door B, but I suppose, in fact, B is locked. Suppose in fact, had I tried. Door B, I would have found I couldn't go that way and had to go through door. Anyway. In that case, we have an example where I have in a sense, I had no choice.
It was inevitable that I would go through Door A. I couldn't do otherwise. But yet, in the circumstances where I chose to do door a remaining completely ignorant about the state of Dobi, I it seems plausible to say that I've done it freely. So therefore it's possible to do something freely, even when you couldn't have done otherwise. And this illustrates that what makes an action inevitable doesn't always bring it about. What makes this action inevitable is that Door B is locked.
So in those circumstances, it was inevitable I was going to go through door A rather than be. But Dalby's being locked didn't actually bring it about. What I went through. And Frank, that give some other examples, the usual kind of mad scientist crops up, somebody who is able to predict in advance what I'm going to choose.
And this person decides that if I choose to do what he doesn't want me to do, then he's going to interfere with my brain in some clever way and make sure that I actually do what he wants. Now, suppose in those circumstances I actually freely do what he wants me to do anyway. In that case, he doesn't have to take any action. I do what I do freely, but in fact, I couldn't have done otherwise, I couldn't have done otherwise because he would have intervened.
Well, there's a lot of interesting discussion about these cases. I mean, just to make one obvious objection, one can say, well, OK, maybe it was inevitable that I went through door A rather than B, but I did actually have a choice. I could have done otherwise. I could have tried Dalby before going through DoRight, and that would be doing otherwise than I did. In the case of the evil scientist.
I could have embarked on the course of thought that would have led me to action B, in which case he would have intervened. But that would have been me doing otherwise than I did, which was quite freely to choose a. So the argument, as you can imagine, can get quite complex. Well, a couple of times in talking about freedom, the word choice has naturally appeared. I've been talking about choosing one thing rather than another. Choosing freely and so on.
And I suspect that this close connexion between freedom and choice lies behind the. The intuition that is the natural thought that to be free, it has to be possible for you to do otherwise. In cases like the Frankfurt examples with Dorian Dalby, you can see that I do make a choice. I choose to go through Doré in another sense. I do not have a choice. I do not have a choice which door to go through, because, in fact, Doray is the only one that I could go through.
So you can see that there are subtle nuances here in the notion of choice. The notion of choice is also slippery in other ways. Suppose, for example, I'm walking along the road, my phone goes. I pull it out of my pocket. And then some apparently agitated guy comes up to me with a gun, holds the gun to me and says, Give me your mobile phone or I'll shoot you. Right. Do I have a choice? A case where it's absolutely blindingly obvious what I'm going to do.
I'm going to give him the mobile phone. You could. It's tempting to say I don't have a choice. On the other hand, you can see that there's a sense in which I do have a choice. I could if I thought he was bluffing or I thought his gun was just a replica gun or something like that, or if I felt suicidal, I could refuse to give him the phone. So there is a sense in which I have a choice, a sense in which I don't. Suppose we're having some Raoh and perhaps in some.
In some laboratory where I'm wired up and some clever neuropsychologist is deliberately putting me in a situation where I get very angry. He's able to look at the brain scans and say, are Milliken's going to hit him? Well, suppose he can suppose he can predict that. Does it mean I don't have a choice? Well, you could say in a sense, maybe it does. But in another sense, it doesn't. Maybe the neuro psychologist can say, are Milliken's going to choose to hit him?
In which case, he's predicting that I will choose. Well, doesn't that mean that I do have a choice? So the notion is very slippery. It's very easy for the word choice to be bandied about in these discussions with no clear concept of choice in play. So be very wary when you come across discussions in the free will debate. Do not allow words like choice to be used without clarification of exactly what is meant by it.
So let's distinguish various ways in which one might. Well, various things that one might intend in saying I had no choice. Well, one could mean that what happened was in no way dependent on my decisions or actions. One could mean that my actions were physically forced on me. I had no choice but to open the door. He was holding my hand and forcing it. We could mean that my actions were predetermined in some way by non rational factors.
Perhaps drugs, perhaps brainwashing. We could mean that my actions were predetermined by my own desires and consequent reasoning. Now, that's a very odd sense of I had no choice. If, in fact, what I do is determined by my own desires and reasoning, I work out what I want to do. I work out how to achieve what I want. And then I make the decision based on those preferences and that reasoning. It's very odd to say there that I have no choice. But you will find that some people will say that.
Finally, it might mean it was blindingly obvious what I should do. I suppose in the first round of the effort, the third round of the FIA cup, say Manchester United, are playing some very weak team that amazingly has managed to get through. And you might say it was no contest, 20 nil. It was no contest. You don't actually mean it was no contest. You mean it wasn't a meaningful contest in the same way.
Sometimes it can be so obvious what to do as in the case of the mobile phone and the gun that we say. I had no choice. Actually, what we mean is I had a blindingly obvious choice. Now, an argument that can be brought to bear here, I think quite powerfully, is called the paradigm case argument. This is an argument that was extremely popular in the heyday of Oxford, ordinary language philosophy. It's far less popular now. But I think in this particular case, it has very considerable force.
Let's ask what we mean by choice. How do we learn the use of the word choice? Typical example might be as a child, your mother offers you. A choice of puddings. Ice cream, cake, fruit. Which would you like? You make a choice. That's how we learn the meaning of the word choice, don't we? Go on, dear, it's up to you. You choose. That's where we get the notion of choice from.
Now, if that's right, if that's, as it were, a paradigm case, a standard example of choice, the kind of case that we used to learn the meaning of the word, then how can it possibly be said that in such a circumstance we don't have a choice? It's very peculiar to say that. Now, all this does is sort out meanings of words. I mean, anyone who claims that this kind of argument can settle deep philosophical issues is probably deluding themselves.
So my aim here is just to say it isn't. Or at least to suggest that it's an abuse of the word choice. If you deny that that kind of circumstance involves a choice, you're detaching your use of the word choice from its normal meaning so far that it's hard to use it and keep any grip on what we mean by it.