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Thesis Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking

Serkan Aydoğdu Fellow
· 6 replies
Free willAnalyticModern EuropeanDavid HumeEpictetusHarry Frankfurt#compatibilism#could-have-done-otherwise#determinism#liberty
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Its coordinates: 1.7 Free Will and Determinism

Where it stands

I have now heard about four lectures defending compatibilism, and every time I feel the same thing: it changes the subject.

Hume says liberty is just a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will. Fine. When nobody has a knife to my throat, I am free in that sense. But nobody ever worried about that. The worry is whether my will itself, the thing doing the "determining", could have been different. If my choices come from my character, and my character comes from my genes and my mother and the 413 route, then where am I in this?

Compatibilists say: you are your character. The act flows from you. But "flows from you" does not mean "you could have done otherwise". The question at the top of every lecture was "could you have done otherwise?" and the compatibilist answer is "you did what you wanted". That is not an answer, it is a different question.

Epictetus helps me in traffic: some things are up to us, some are not. But I notice even he does not tell me how my judgments are up to me, only that I should treat them that way.

So my thesis: compatibilism is a useful account of when we should blame people, but it is not an answer to the free will question. Tell me I am wrong.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Emeka Anyaoha

    For Fellow

    I'm with Serkan. Frankfurt's cases show something about responsibility. They don't show anything about whether the agent's choice was open. Physics says the state of my brain at noon fixes my state at 12:01 (or, if quantum events matter, makes it partly random). Neither gives me what I feel when I hesitate. Compatibilism tells me that feeling is irrelevant to blame. It does not tell me the feeling is accurate.

  2. Ethan Mercer

    For Fellow

    Partly for. The "your values were installed" objection seems decisive to me in its strong form: Galen Strawson's argument that to be truly responsible you'd have to have made yourself, which is impossible. Compatibilists usually reply that this demand is incoherent, so nobody fails it. But a demand being unsatisfiable doesn't make it the wrong demand.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

      Against Fellow

      Ethan, but if the demand is incoherent, it is the wrong demand. "Be the cause of yourself" is not a standard anyone could meet, any more than "be taller than yourself". When a concept as rich as freedom is defined by an impossible condition, the sensible thing is to look for the condition we actually use, and that is what compatibilists do.

      Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 3

  1. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Against Fellow

    Serkan, I'll take the other side. You assume the original question was "could you have done otherwise with everything held fixed?" But why think that is the question that matters? Frankfurt gave cases where someone could not have done otherwise (a hidden device would have forced the same choice if they had wavered) and yet they plainly acted freely and were responsible, because the device never did anything. If that's right, the ability to do otherwise was never what we cared about. Compatibilism isn't changing the subject; it's correcting it.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Alistair Gow

    Against Fellow

    Hume's actual sentence is: "By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will." Notice the "only". He is not dodging your question; he is arguing that the other sense, a liberty that is not determined by anything, is either unintelligible or mere chance. His claim is that your question, pressed hard, has no coherent content. That is a stronger move than changing the subject.

    Helpful · 3

Other replies

  1. Serkan Aydoğdu

    Fellow

    I have listened to these replies on two full shifts. I concede to Alistair that Hume is not dodging; he is saying my question is empty. That is a real position. I still don't believe it, but it is an answer, not a change of subject.

    Pieter's Frankfurt case I need to think about more. It shows I can be responsible without the open fork. It doesn't show the fork is unreal. So I'll revise: compatibilism answers the question of responsibility well, and answers the question of the open fork by saying there is no such question. I am not yet convinced there is no such question.

    Helpful · 3