The Significance of Free Will

I've recently purchased The Significance of Free Will, by Robert Kane (1998).

I had heard that Kane is one of the few remaining free-willist/incompatibilists among contemporary academic philosophers. As to his academic credentials: he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and editor of a widely respected collection of essays on the broad subject, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will.

Compatibilism in philosophy is the view that freedom in any important sense of the word is perfectly compatible with the deterministic character of human thoughts, will, and actions. This is, of late, the view for example of Daniel Dennett.

Those who reject that, then, are incompatibilists. Among incompatibilists, there are those who say that since the ideas of freedom and determinism are incompatible -- since determinism is true -- we'll have to learn to live without outdated notions of freedom. That seems to be B.F. Skinner's view in Walden Two for example. On the other hand, there are incompatibilists who agree that the two are incompatible but contend that it is determinism we have to learn to live without.

Regular readers will know that I am of the view that William James got these matters more-or-less right.

James was a compatibilist in one sense. He did believe that determinism is compatible with notions of moral worth or blame: "instinct and utility between them can safely be entrusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" in any event, he wrote.

But he was an incompatibilist in another, and to him a more important, sense. He believed determinism incompatible with a deep human desire for a world with a plurality of forces, and one in which novelties come about through the relations and contentions of those forces.  Furthermore, his reaction to that incompatibility was the free-willist one: we aren't so determined, after all.

"The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect, -- an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinsim with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral reality through and through."

Isaiah Berlin adopted a position much like James' in his Four Essays on Liberty (1969). Indeed, Berlin was if anything a more thorough incompatibilist than James. He wrote that if he were convinced that acts of human choice "were themselves wholly determined by factors not within the individual's control ... I should certainly not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. In such circumstances the concept of worth and desert, as these terms are now used, would become empty for me."  

Most philosophers who have written about the subject recently take a compatibilist stance. The dissenters adopt the determinist sort of incompatibilism. Free-willist incompatibilists -- outside the ranks of those working from a specific theological/ecclesiological program -- are quite few.  So I was happy to discover that Robert Kane exists.  I will have to see if the particulars of his argument warrant my happiness.

Free Will

The admirable philosophical blog "Rationally Speaking" has taken on the issue of free will.

Jerry Coyne's recent op-ed piece for USA Today was the catalyst. Coyne said that although there is "no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances," he considers the claim that we can, very dubious. Further, there is "not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will."

Massimo Pigliucci argues, in "Rationally Speaking," that Coyne is confused. He is working fromn a definition of free will (the possibility of inconsistent choices given identical circumstances) that by his own admission -- see the quote above -- can never be tested. Since (Pigliucci tells us) science is "about empirically testable hypotheses," science can not be about free will in the sense Coyne is discussing. So Coyne isn't entitled to draw upon arguments from neurobiology to try to make his case. That case is metaphysical, not neurological.

Pigliucci's column on the subject has in turn draw abundant comment from readers. One reader, Tom, cites a paper called, "The Pointsman: Maxwell's Demon, Victorian Free Will, and the Boundaries of Science" from the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Pigliucci's reply to his readers is largely concerned with those readers who have accused him of being a "crypto-dualist." The impression amongst much of the consuming public for philosophical arguments is that free will only makes sense if we first believe in a sort of Cartesian ghost in the machine.

To this Pigliucci replies, "that line of argument is somewhat question-begging: we are trying to find out how chunks of matter can behave in such drastically different ways from other chunks of matter, so to point out the obvious (that they are all chunks of matter) hardly helps move the debate forward."

Happy Birthday, Thomas Carlyle

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle was born on this day, more than two hundred years ago: 213, to be exact.

His reputation as a philosopher and a man of letters has suffered something of an eclipse in recent decades. He's probably best remembered today as a name to attach to the "great man theory of history," because of this book: http://www.questia.com/read/1444983#|

Carlyle's examples of history-defining heroes in that book?

Mohammed (the hero as prophet), Dante and Shakespeare (the hero as poet), Martin Luther, John Knox (the hero as priest); Johnson, Rousseau, Burns (the hero as man of letters); Cromwell, Napoleon (the hero as King).

Notice the back-and-forth structure there. Carlyle's book starts with religion, proceeds to literature, returns to religion, returns to literature, and only at the end arrives what his first readers may have been impatiently awaiting throughout -- European political history.

But of that another day.

At the peak of his influence, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Carlyle was chiefly thought of as the author of an odd book called Sartor Resartus (the tailor re-tailored), in which Carlyle poses as an editor trying to reconstruct the life and work of a German "philosopher of clothes" named Diogenes Teufelsdrockh.

It was Carlyle as the author of Sartor that James often approvingly cited. In "The Dilemma of Determinism," for example, Carlyle figures as the great enemy of subjectivism, the voice ("so chaste and sane and strong" James calls it) for the view that it doesn't matter how you feel, what matters is what you do.

So toast Carlyle on his birthday. And tip a tailor.

William James

Here's a passage I like from one of the better-known of James' essays: The Dilemma of Determinism.

James has at this point established what he means by "indeterminism," in contradiction to both the hard and the soft forms of determinism.

But, he asks, is indeterminism compatible with theism? If we are the creatures of an all-knowing Creator, then the knowledge of that creator of what we will do next Tuesday surely implies that on next Tuesday we will do something now already determined, doesn't it?

James replies:

"Suppose two men before a chessboard, -- the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what any one move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the novice's king."

Likewise, then, even an infinitely powerful mind could be working through time and despite indeterminist elements in a situation to achieve that Mind's end.

In a footnote, he acknowledges that this (the sort of idea that long after James' death became known as "process theology") may well be considered heterodox.

"This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I have no reply to make....To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying that there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be its form."

Determinisms: Hard and Soft?

William James once drew a distinction between hard and soft determinism, in an essay often cited these days in discussions of what is nowadays called compatibilism. But I'll get to that.

Let's first understand James on his own terms. Early in an essay on the human will, on whether and to what extent its expressions are all fated, determined since forever ... early on he addresses the question of terminology. The word "freedom" is such a nice word, used so ringingly in anthems and in the course of orations on patriotic holidays, that everybody on every side of an argument will want to be standing up for "freedom rightly understood."

Old-fashioned determinism is the sort that disdains such nice words. Hard determinists don't shrink "from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, neccessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism, which abhors harsh words...." The word both sorts of determinists abhor is "chance," which stands for the simple notion that the parts of the universe "have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be."

James is writing in order to defend indeterminism, not to take sides between the two sorts of determinists, so he accepts the word "chance" as a statement of what he believes in, and abandons the word "freedom" to the grubbers after nice words.

The issue of things (as distinct from the issue of words) is between determinists and indeterminists, between believers in chance and believers in fate.

Now, the debate as James understood it has gone the way of all flesh. On the one hand, quantum mechanics, Godel's theorem, chaos theory and such developments have acclimated everybody to the reality of chance in the world. On the other hand, the fact that everybody now believes in chance makes chance seem less important.

Debate does continue over compatibilism. This is the view that moral responsibility and human autonomy in some valuable sense is consistent with a mechanical/materialistic theory of the universe and of our place in it.

The contrary of compatibilism of course is incompatibilism, which comes in two varieties. Incompatibilists can either say, "No, such a view is incompatible with moral responsibility, which is a good reasons for looking for flaws in such a view, because we ought to work to keep the idea of moral responsibility." We can call this the II position (incompatible, thus immaterialism)!

Another set of incompatibilists can say, "No, such a view is incompatible with moral responsibility. So much the worse for our notions of moral responsibility though -- we're going to have to learn to live without them." Call that the IA position (incompatible, thus amorality)!

James' words on the different sorts of determinists with whom he was contending have been shanghied into this debate, so that "soft determinism" is sometimes used to describe compatibilism (we can have materialism and morality too). "Hard determinist" is used to describe the IA position. This implicitly equates James' sort of indeterminism with the II position.

I don't think that's fair to him, though. Were he alive today, and up to date on contemporary science and philosophic debates, my own suspicion is that he'd still believe in immaterial aspects of the cosmos, as he did, but he wouldn't link that notion tightly to the foundations of morality. Just as he didn't want to chase after exclusive title to the word "freedom" and was happy to grant it to the determinists if they wanted it.

He would likely be a compatibilist, but he probably wouldn't regard compatibilism as all that important a point to make, because the reasons/motives that would impel him to keep looking for the immaterial would be quite different from those to which the II position appeals.