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Free Will and the Burden of Proof

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

William G. Lycan
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Extract

Here are some things that are widely believed about free will and determinism.

(1) Free will is prima facie incompatible with determinism.

(2) The incompatibility is logical or at least conceptual or a priori.

(3) A compatibilist needs to explain how free will can co-exist with determinism, paradigmatically by offering an analysis of ‘free’ action that is demonstrably compatible with determinism. (Here is the late Roderick Chisholm, in defence of irreducible or libertarian agent-causation: ‘Now if you can analyse such statements as “Jones killed his uncle” into eventcausation statements, then you may have earned the right to make jokes about the agent as cause. But if you haven't done this, and if all the same you do believe such things as that I raised my arm and that Jolns [sic] killed his uncle, and if moreover you still think it's a joke to talk about the agent as cause, then, I'm afraid, the joke is entirely on you.’)

(4) Free will is not impugned by quantum indeterminism, at least not in the same decisive way that it is impugned by determinism. To reconcile free will with quantum indeterminism takes work, but the work comes under the heading of metaphysical business-as-usual; to reconcile free will with determinism requires a conceptual breakthrough.

And listen to Laura Waddell Ekstrom on the burden of proof.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 53 , September 2003 , pp. 107 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2003

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References

1 ‘Comments and Replies,’ Philosophia 7, Nos. 3–4 (07 1978), 597–636, p. 623Google Scholar.

2 Free Will (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), p. 57.Google Scholar

3 How Free Are You? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; ‘Determinism as True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as Both False, and the Real Problem’ (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousHonderichKanebook.htm/).

4 For example, Ekstrom (op. cit., p. 8) eschews it, arguing plausibly that the exact relation between freedom and moral responsibility is unclear and disputable. But the alternative seems to be either metaphor or characterization vapid enough to be all too obviously available to the compatibilist (‘our actions are truly attributable to our selves…, ultimately up to us’ (Ekstrom, p. 3)).

5 Consciousness (Cambridge: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1987), Chapter 9.Google Scholar

6 N.B., I will not contend, as some compatibilists have in attacking incompatibilist arguments, that the principle begs the question.

7 ‘Whither Compatibilism? A Query for Lycan’, Philosophical Papers 17, No. 2 (08 1988), 127–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 ‘Compatibilism Now and Forever: A Reply to Tomberlin’, Philosophical Papers 17, No. 2 (08 1988), 133–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 In the sense of David Lewis' ‘Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow’, Noûs 13, No. 4 (11 1979), 455–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The idea derives originally from Downing, P. B., ‘Subjunctive Conditionals, Time Order, and Causation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1959), 125–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Michael Kremer, ‘How Not to Argue for Incompatibilism’, MS, University of Notre Dame.

12 Stace, W. T., Religion and the Modern Mind (New York: Lippincott/Harper and Row, 1952)Google Scholar; Ayer, A. J., ‘Freedom and Necessity’, in Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1954), 271–84Google Scholar.

13 Austin, J. L., ‘Ifs and Cans’, Proceedings of the British Academy 42 (1956), 109–32Google Scholar, reprinted in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Chisholm, R. M., ‘J. L. Austin's Philosophical Papers’, Mind 73, No. 289 (01 1964), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lehrer, K., ‘Preferences, Conditionals and Freedom’, in Time and Cause, van Inwagen, P. (ed.) (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), 187–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’, Philosophical Review 68, No. 2 (04 1959), 141–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussion of the ‘topic-neutrality problem’ generally, see Chapter 2 of my Consciousness, loc. cit.

15 Lewis, D. K., ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’, Journal of Philosophy 63, No. 1 (01 1966), 17–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Armstrong, D. M., A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)Google Scholar; Bradley, M. C., ‘Sensations, Brain-Processes, and Colours’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 41, No. 4 (12 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, F., Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

16 The strategy is more fully expounded and defended in my ‘Moore Against the New Skeptics’, Philosophical Studies 103, No. 1 (03 2001), 35–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Judgement and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter 6.Google Scholar

18 In saying this, I am not assuming a clear distinction between theoretical science and metaphysics, nor do I believe in any such distinction. But that is to say only that there are borderline cases.

19 Lehrer, Keith, ‘Why Not Skepticism?’, Philosophical Forum 2, No. 3 (Spring 1971), 283–98Google Scholar (quoting Thomas Reid).

20 ‘Moore Against the New Skeptics’, loc. cit.

21 Which is not to say that I don't have such a theory, see Judgement and Justification, loc. cit. Chapter 7.

22 Consciousness, loc. cit., pp. 113–14.

23 Op. cit., pp. 56–57.

24 Hobart, R. E., ‘Free Will as Involving Determinism and Inconceivable Without It,’ Mind 43, No. 169 (01 1934), 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newell-Smith, P. H., ‘Free Will and Moral Responsibility’, Mind 57, No. 225 (01 1948), 45–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smart, J. J. C., ‘Free-Will, Praise and Blame’, Mind 70, No. 279 (07 1961), 291–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also, Ayer, op. cit. I believe the term ‘the Mind argument’ was coined by van Inwagen, Peter, in An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)Google Scholar; he distinguishes three different ‘forms’ or ‘strands’ of it.

25 Ginet, C., ‘Might We Have No Choice?’ in Freedom and Determinism, Lehrer, K. (ed.) (New York: Random House, 1966), 87–104Google Scholar; Wiggins, D., ‘Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism’, in Essays on Freedom of Action, Honderich, T. (ed.) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 31–61Google Scholar; van Inwagen, P., ‘The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism’, Philosophical Studies 27, No. 3 (03, 1975), 185–199CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and An Essay on Free Will, loc. cit.; Lamb, J., ‘On a Proof of Incompatibilism’, Philosophical Review 86, No. 1 (01, 1977), 20–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 There are now a number of interestingly different versions of the Consequence argument, subject to somewhat different sets of objections. These are nicely catalogued and discussed by Ekstrom, op. cit., Chapter 2. I criticize van Inwagen's version more extensively in Chapter 8 of Modality and Meaning (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1994)Google Scholar, though that discussion is marred by some vicious copy-editing errors.

27 ‘Selective Necessity and the Free-Will Problem’, Journal of Philosophy 79, No. 1 (01 1982), 5–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Van Inwagen did reply to Slote essentially in that way, in an unpublished note, ‘Modal Inference and the Free-Will Problems.’

29 ‘Reply to Christopher Hill’, Analysis 52, No. 2 (04 1992), 56–61, p. 58Google Scholar.

30 I thank Jim Tomberlin for his stimulating article cited above. Thanks also to Fritz Warfield for the talk and subsequent conversation that inspired this paper. I am grateful to Anthony O'Hear and Tim Crane for putting together ‘Free Will day’ at University College London, and to the Royal Institute audience for spirited and helpful discussion.