9 - Metaphysics III: free will and retribution

Summary

Introduction

Traditionally free will has been associated with responsibility, for how can we be morally responsible for something if we are not free? Discussions of it therefore straddle the line between metaphysics (or perhaps philosophy of mind) and ethics. Chapter 4 of Philosophical Explanations duly includes both metaphysics and ethics, but with a difference. Nozick treats free will not so much as a prerequisite for responsibility but as an intrinsically valuable feature of our status as human beings. The ethical discussion of punishment that ends the chapter is strictly therefore a side issue, although an important one (PE: 291).

Critics have tended to play down this chapter, not so much because of this awkwardness of its structure as because its metaphysical part in particular is inconclusive and, as Nozick himself admits (PE: 293), contains more “thrashing about” than the other chapters. However, this in itself need not disqualify it from having philosophical interest. Good philosophy can be done by asking the right questions as well as by giving the right answers, and this would fit comfortably enough with Nozick's attitude to philosophy that we discussed in our first chapter, where we also saw that an interest in the free will problem antedated his first serious work in political philosophy. In fact (as PE: 293 tells us), he has spent more time “banging [his] head against” this problem than against any other except perhaps the foundations of ethics.