Compatibilism

I wanted to debate this topic for a long time now, so I thank kasmic for giving me the opportunity He gives a fair presentation of both the issue and my position. It should be noted however that compatibilism does not entail a belief in determinism (which fortunately does not affect his arguments). I for once think determinism is most likely false. Yet I am not a libertarian, why is that? One reason is that so far I have not encountered a possible decision making process that is neither determined by antecedent causes, nor random and arbitrary. This is usually referred to as agent causation, about which we will talk again later. Should someone (Con) find a way to make sense of such a process, then compatibilism would be significantly weakened. Con presents two arguments, that under Determinism we are not the ultimate source of our actions and that Determinism deprives us of the ability to do otherwise. I am going to address them in reverse order. The second argument Free will (FW) is, as Con acknowledges, a necessary condition for moral responsibility. This, prima facie, does not entail the ability to do otherwise. For p to entail q there has to be no possible situation in which p obtains, but q does not. Or in other words, there is no possible situation, in which an agent S has moral responsibility, but lacks the ability to do otherwise. To see whether this is true, let us consider a famous thought experiment by Harry Frankfurt: Allison is contemplating whether to walk her dog or not. Unbeknown to Allison, her father, Lloyd, wants to insure that that she does decide to walk the dog. He has therefore implanted a computer chip in her head such that if she is about to decide not to walk the dog, the chip will activate and coerce her into deciding to take the dog for a walk. Given the presence of the chip, Allison is unable not to decide to walk her dog, and she lacks the ability to do otherwise. However, Allison does decide to walk the dog on her own. (1) This is one of the so called “Frankfurt-cases”, cases in which someone’s choice is free but the outcome is deterministic. So, it seems there are at least some possible situations in which the agent does have moral responsibility, but lacks the ability to do otherwise. Therefore, it is not the case that we can assert an entailment relation here. The first argument The reason I addressed the second argument first, is that it represents a special case of the more general first argument. What does the ability to do otherwise entail? To me “to do otherwise” seems to mean: in any given situation, where there are multiple choices open to an agent, it is not the case that the beginning of the causal chain leading up to her choice lies anywhere outside herself. In other words, to do otherwise an agent has to be the ultimate source of her choices. This is what is referred to as agent causation. As I said, so far I don’t know any sensible account of agent causation and although I do appreciate the rhetoric force the cursive bit above has, I do not believe it is something we should want to have. To illustrate why, imagine a case where S has clearly overriding reason to perform some act, but does not act in accordance with this reason. Say some rational agent S knows for a fact that before a race horse H1 was doped to outperform horses H2-Hn. Let’s assume further the odds of H1 winning to be 99:1. Ignoring moral issues, it seems very clear that if S wants to win the betting, the most rational thing to do is to bet on H1. In a deterministic world S bets on H1 every time, no matter how often we run the scenario. But what about an indeterministic world? H1 being doped is clearly external to S and clearly provides/ should provide an overriding reason for S. Why should this not determine S’s choice? On one hand, if agent causation implies in some cases S was to bet on any other horse, S would make clearly irrational decisions and agent causation would thus NOT be worth wanting as a necessary condition for free will (accountability). On the other hand, if agent causation implies S was to make the same (rational) decision every time, her actual ability to do otherwise is no different to the hypothetical freedom she has under determinism, that is she could have done otherwise had she wanted to do so at that time. Thus, agent causation is either not something we should want to have or it is vacuous. If I make choices, I want them to depend or rather be determined by what I want to do, what I have most reason to do and what I desire, which does not at all sound unreasonable to me, yet all of these things depend on external influences. A compatibilist account Until now I have merely objected my opponent’s arguments, so even if I am successful in defeating them, some might bite the bullet and declare free will to be a nonsensical concept to begin with. Therefore, I will present a simple hierarchical-mesh model of free will, on order to illustrate that even under determinism we can be responsible for our actions. As stated earlier, it just seems reasonable for us to want our choices to be influenced by our desires. Some of these desires count in favor of performing certain actions, like desiring to eat when you are hungry or to rescue the kid drowning in a pond a few meters away from you. We may call these desires 1st order desires. Other desires are about such 1st order desires. For example, you might desire to be the kind of person who does the morally good thing and thus “desires to desire” rescuing the kid, even though you also may not (1st order) desire to get your clothes dirty and as a result being late for work. We may call these desires 2nd order desires. In principle there is no limit to the order of desires we introduce, however two are already sufficient to demonstrate how we can have responsibility without referencing the notion of causal ultimacy.To do so, let us consider a scenario where it seems the agent bears no or at least diminished responsibility for her actions. I limit myself to only one as I believe readers are able to see how this generalizes to other scenarios. Imagine Kate is a kleptomaniac. She does not want to feel this constant urge to take other people’s possessions. Thus she has the 2nd order desire to not be a kleptomaniac. Nonetheless she inevitably encounters a situation in which her kleptomania makes her desire (1st order) to steal and further makes her act on this desire. Although stealing is clearly wrong, it seems only reasonable to assign diminished responsibility to kleptomaniacs, at least in certain situations. Thus, I propose an agent bears moral responsibility, that is free will, if (and only if) she acts on 1st order desires which align with her 2nd order desires. (1) http://www.iep.utm.edu...