Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Question · Open

Question of the day: could you have done otherwise?

The Editors Contributor
· 4 replies
Free willAnalyticGreek & RomanStoicismChrysippusDavid HumeDerk PereboomHarry Frankfurt#alternative-possibilities#determinism#free-will#question-of-the-day
Follow

Its coordinates: 1.7 Free Will and Determinism

Today's question comes from the card on free will and determinism: could you have done otherwise?

Take something small from this week: you snapped at someone, or took the last slice of cake. Afterwards you think: I could have done otherwise. Much of our blame and regret rests on that thought. But suppose everything you did followed from the state of the world a moment before, together with the laws of nature. Was the other path ever really open?

The main answers:

  • Yes, genuinely. At the moment of choice more than one future was possible, and it was up to you which one happened. This is the libertarian view; it must explain why an undetermined choice is yours rather than luck.
  • Yes, in the sense that matters. You could have done otherwise if you had wanted to, or had attended to other reasons, and that is compatible with determinism. The Stoic Chrysippus defended a version of this, and Hume another.
  • The question is a red herring. Harry Frankfurt argued that you can be responsible even when you could not have done otherwise, as long as you acted for your own reasons.
  • No, and we should admit it. Hard incompatibilists such as Derk Pereboom say that blame in the sense of deserving to suffer does not survive, though much else can.

The card sets out the rival answers and the people behind them: 1.7 Free Will and Determinism.

Answer in your own terms. A case from your own week is as welcome as a theory.

LikeAnswer
Follow4 answers

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

4 answers

  1. Emeka Anyaoha

    Fellow

    A note from someone who teaches physics, because the question often gets framed as if physics had already ruled.

    It hasn't. Classical mechanics is mostly deterministic, though even there people argue about odd cases like Norton's dome. Quantum mechanics, on the standard reading, is not deterministic at all. But that doesn't rescue the first answer. If a random event in my neurons tipped the decision, the result is no more mine than if it had been fixed in advance.

    So physics can't settle this for or against. Whichever way the equations go, the real argument is about the second bullet: what "up to you" means.

  2. Abdulrahman Al-Bassam

    Fellow

    There is an answer the list leaves out, and it is the one I grew up with.

    For the Ash'arites, God creates every act, including mine, and I acquire it (kasb). The act is mine because it comes with my intention and my sense of choosing, not because I am its independent cause. On this view "could you have done otherwise?" is slightly the wrong question. The right one is whether the act was acquired by you, knowingly and willingly.

    Al-Māturīdī, the other great Sunni theologian, gave human choice more weight. People who reduce kalām to "fatalism" usually haven't noticed that the two schools argued about exactly this.

  3. Serkan Aydoğdu

    Fellow

    Frankfurt's argument works for me best with a bus.

    Suppose the depot fitted my bus with a device that would force it onto the 413 route if I ever tried to turn off it. I never try. I drive the 413 because it is my route and I want to. Am I responsible for driving it? Yes. Could I have done otherwise? No, the device would have stopped me.

    But here is my doubt. In every version of the story there must be a moment where I start to turn the wheel, and that is when the device acts. Isn't that small start the "otherwise"? I think I have read that philosophers call it the flicker of freedom. It's a small flicker, but it might be the whole question.

  4. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Spinoza is firmly with the fourth answer, but without the gloom. In the Ethics, Part II, the scholium to Proposition 35, he says people think themselves free because they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes that determine them.

    What I like is that he doesn't then say blame is pointless. He says hatred and mockery are pointless, and that understanding the causes is what actually frees you, in the only sense of freedom worth having.

    Professionally I find it easy to believe. Nobody asks whether my model could have produced a different output. We ask what in its training made it produce this one, and we change that.