Thinking about Free Will

Thinking about Free Will contains a selection of Peter van Inwagen's writings on free will and moral responsibility. In addition to several previously published essays, only one of which predates his landmark book (1983), the volume includes two new essays. To reread the classic articles is to be reminded not only of the unsurpassed rigor and clarity that van Inwagen has brought to these issues, but also of where he stands apart from mainstream views in a field he has done much to shape. One of the two new essays, “The Problem of Fr** W*ll,” draws together the main strands of van Inwagen's distinctive outlook.As the essay's title suggests, van Inwagen believes that the expression ‘free will’ has accumulated some unhelpful baggage. To shed this baggage, we should replace this expression with talk of agents' abilities. Thus, instead of asking whether free will is compatible with determinism, we should ask whether determinism is compatible with our sometimes being able to take one course of action and able to take a different course instead. And instead of asking whether “libertarian free will” is possible, we should ask whether we could have this same pair of abilities in performing causally undetermined actions.In terms of these two questions, van Inwagen formulates what he calls the Culpability Problem. The problem can be summarized this way. If it's never the case that someone is able to take one course of action and able to take another course instead, then no one is ever morally at fault for any actual state of affairs. And there are compelling reasons to believe that we never possess these abilities if determinism is true and other compelling reasons to believe that we never possess them if determinism is false. Thus it is difficult to see how anyone could ever be morally at fault for any actual state of affairs.1The Culpability Problem is van Inwagen's reframing of what is generally known as ‘the problem of moral responsibility’, the problem of how we could be morally responsible for our actions, given either the truth or the falsity of determinism. What distinguishes this reframing, above all, is van Inwagen's rejection of the standard assumption that moral responsibility attaches to choices, actions, omissions, and the resulting event-particulars. In van Inwagen's view, what we are morally responsible—or better, “at fault” or “to blame”—for are the states of affairs that are grounded in these event-particulars. Thus, for example, if a bridge ends up collapsing due to carelessness on the part of its designers, what the designers are at fault for is not the collapse of the bridge, an event-particular, but rather the bridge's having collapsed, a state of affairs that could have obtained in multiple ways.An interesting consequence of this position is that it allows van Inwagen to endorse Frankfurt's highly influential challenge to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) while pronouncing its success a hollow victory for compatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility. According to PAP, “Someone is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise” (Frankfurt 1969, 829). On the supposition that moral responsibility attaches to actions, van Inwagen holds, Frankfurt has shown that someone could be morally responsible for an unavoidable action, contrary to what PAP implies. (I will assume familiarity with Frankfurt's article in what follows.) If, however, we stand to be at fault only for states of affairs, the ability to do otherwise may still be relevant; for then we must ask whether someone could be at fault for a state of affairs if he or she is unable to avoid the action that leads to it. A negative answer to this question is one premise of van Inwagen's currently featured argument for the thesis that no one is ever at fault for anything if determinism is true. The other premise is his claim that we are never able to do otherwise if determinism is true, a claim that van Inwagen has done more than anyone else to establish as the dominant view.The first premise is a variant of van Inwagen's PPP2, which he defends in “Ability and Responsibility,” the earliest essay in the collection. PPP2 states that, “A person is morally responsible for a certain state of affairs only if (that state of affairs obtains and) he could have prevented it from obtaining” (28). Assuming that we are able to prevent an actual state of affairs from obtaining only if we are able to take a course of action other than the one we actually take, we get the argument's first premise by replacing ‘responsible’ in PPP2 with ‘at fault’. Since relatively few contemporary compatibilists dispute van Inwagen's second premise—that we are never able to do otherwise if determinism is true—the main burden falls on PPP2. Why accept this principle?As van Inwagen has long maintained, PPP2 is immune to the kind of counterexample that threatens PAP. To see why, suppose that a government official decides, for discreditable reasons, to delay dispatching an aid vessel to a stricken island. If the official is later overcome with remorse, he might take some comfort in learning that, due to unforeseen weather conditions, the vessel would have been forced to turn back anyway. “So then it wasn't really my fault that the supplies didn't arrive today,” we can imagine him concluding, with some relief. If we could credibly maintain that this state of affairs is nonetheless his fault, despite his inability to have prevented it, we would have a potential counterexample to PPP2 along the lines of Frankfurt's counterexample to PAP. In van Inwagen's view, however, PPP2 remains unscathed, since we cannot plausibly see such a state of affairs as the official's fault.Pace van Inwagen, it seems that compatibilists have room to challenge PPP2, albeit not via a counterexample strategy, for a reason that can be glimpsed in his more extended discussion of this principle (1983, 170–75). Let us grant that it isn't the official's fault that the supplies don't reach the island today, given that weather conditions would have forced the ship to turn back. As van Inwagen (1983, 174–75) observes, cases like this one have two features—(A) a state of affairs, S, would have obtained regardless of anything the agent did, and (B) the agent was unable to prevent S from obtaining—where (A) entails (B) but not vice versa. Now consider two further claims: (C) If S would have obtained regardless of anything the agent did, then the agent isn't morally at fault for S, and (D) if the agent was unable to prevent S, then the agent isn't morally at fault for S. I take (D) to be a paraphrase of PPP2. Note that because (A) is stronger than (B), (C) doesn't entail (D), and so responsibility-determinism compatibilists have room to accept (C) while resisting (D). It isn't the official's fault that the supplies don't arrive today, they can argue, not because the official was unable to prevent this state of affairs from obtaining, but because it would have obtained regardless of anything he did in the circumstances. That is, they can say that (A) and not (B) is doing the exculpatory work.In response, van Inwagen might maintain that PPP2 enjoys the same presumption of truth as PAP did before Frankfurt's counterexample, and that PPP2 is immune to such counterexamples, as the above scenario seems to show. However, if moral responsibility does attach to actions, responsibility-determinism compatibilists can counter as follows. If we are morally responsible for unavoidable actions under determinism, moral responsibility transfers from these actions to the event-particulars they cause, even if we are unable to prevent these event-particulars from occurring. And, the thought continues, if we are morally responsible for the resulting event-particulars, such as the collapse of the bridge, we can be at fault for the states of affairs that these event-particulars ground, such as the bridge's having collapsed. We can be morally at fault for such states of affairs even if we are unable to prevent them from obtaining, provided that they would not have obtained regardless of anything we did in the circumstances. Thus PPP2 can be rejected, despite its presumption of truth and its immunity to Frankfurt-type counterexamples.The point is not that this response should cause van Inwagen to doubt his argument from PPP2. The point is, rather, that he should recognize that responsibility-determinism compatibilists are entitled to their doubts. This response also provides responsibility-determinism compatibilists with an answer to van Inwagen's fallback defense of his view that we are never at fault for any state of affairs if determinism is true. Even if moral responsibility does attach to choices and actions after all, van Inwagen contends, people are never morally responsible for their choices and actions unless they are at least sometimes at fault for the resulting states of affairs, and the argument from PPP2 seems to show that we are never morally responsible for any actual state of affairs if determinism is true. Since responsibility-determinism compatibilists can resist PPP2 along the lines suggested above, they need not accept that we are never at fault for any actual state of affairs if determinism is true.Turning to the indeterministic half of the Culpability Problem, the other new essay in the collection, “Ability,” sets out van Inwagen's current thoughts on this topic. On the one hand, he remains dissatisfied with his Promising Argument, which is his latest formulation of an influential objection to libertarianism. On the other hand, he believes that this argument does successfully identify the relevant sense of ‘able’, the sense at issue when we ask whether someone is able to perform a causally undetermined action. If someone correctly believes that he or she will be able to take one course of action and able to take a different course instead, van Inwagen holds, then he or she will be in a position to promise to take one of the two courses in particular. And van Inwagen denies that people would be able in this sense to take a particular course of action when their actions are causally undetermined. I am sympathetic to van Inwagen's claim that libertarians must secure such ability attributions, and that their prospects for doing so aren't enviable. Yet these claims are unlikely to gain traction with contemporary libertarians unless van Inwagen is prepared to engage with their specific proposals, something for which he has shown little appetite. Still, much in this essay will be useful to critics of these proposals

Action (physics) · Blame · CLARITY · Compatibilism · Determinism · Epistemology · Expression (computer science) · Free will · Incompatibilism · Libertarianism · Mainstream · Physics · Theology · Computer Science · Free Will and Agency · Legal principles and applications · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · War, Ethics, and Justification

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