"no harm, no foul"
Sunday, September 14, 2003
 
AN ARGUMENT FOR FREE WILL … NOT: There’s an argument for free will that, on its face, seems very convincing – but it also seems to be too much of a good think. So if you’re a philosopher, you immediately suspect some trick or another. That’s the rule: if you get a substantive conclusions out of minimal premises, somehow, somewhere, the substance has been illicitly smuggled in.

So here’s the argument for free will. Suppose that determinism is false (odd way to start an argument for free will, but still). Now, does the fact of determinism make a difference in how you go about deciding what to do. That is, does the truth of determinism figure into your deliberations about what to do next? How could it? Deciding to do things doesn’t work that way – in that respect, it’s different than prediction. And I can’t just predict what I’m going to do and then do it. It seems I have to actually decide to do something. From the first person perspective, I can’t help viewing myself as a free being, faced with the necessity of making a chose. The truth of determinism doesn’t make me passive, or remove from me the burden of having to make a choice.

The argument, in more fancy lingo, questions our ability to look at our own lives “from sideways on.” That view, as I understand it, might be the view of an omniscience scientist, who, from his third-person perspective, might be able to look at our lives and, given the truth of determinism, tell us what was going to happen next. But the point is that we don’t inhabit that third person point of view; we are condemned to the first person point of view. And from that perspective, we do have to choose – even if determinism is true.

Robert Pippin, in his essay in “Reading McDowell,” refers to this as the “I don’t know how freedom is possible but as agents we are simply stuck with the assumption” approach. I like this name, although it is rather long. And the argument does have its superficial plausibility – it feels like we are “stuck” with the fact of our freedom, something which doesn’t change even if we admit the truth of determinism. Korsgaard briefly makes this argument in her Sources of Normativity, and Hilary Bok’s book “Freedom and Responsibility” is an extended defense of it.

Let me make two broad claims about the argument. We should first note how very narrow the scope of this argument is. It, first of all, only applies to you and your freedom. From your perspective, only you can know that you are free (because you have to decide what to do, you can just let things happen to you). It doesn’t entail that anyone else besides you is free. At the very least, we need another argument to show that other people are free – because for all we know, only we are free (we can look on other people from the third person perspective).

It gets worse. For what it shows is that you are free only at this moment, making this decision. After you make the decision, you can look back at your past life and see that it was determined. You are stuck with the assumption of freedom only in the present, but once you get past the present, you are no longer bound by the assumption – you can look at all your past choices as determined ones.

So the actual conclusion of the argument isn’t very robust – it seems just to show us a weird fact about us, that we seem stuck with the perception (illusion?) that we are free in making our moment-to-moment decisions. We don’t have to ascribe this freedom to others, or ever to our past selves.

I want to make a second broad claim about the “I don’t know how freedom is possible but as agents we are simply stuck with the assumption” approach, which makes me wonder even about our moment-to-moment freedom. I wonder if this is just something we have learned to think about ourselves, rather than something that is forced on us by the supposed necessity of the first person perspective.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty suggests that the idea that our reporting on our own mental states is incorrigible (we can’t be wrong about them) is not an intrinsic fact about them, but rather a cultural artifact. He makes a comparison with the supposed authoritativeness of the Supreme Court as to what the Constitution says. The Court is not final because it’s authoritative, rather, it’s authoritative because it’s final. And it’s finality is an institutional fact, a power we collectively have conferred to the Court.

I wonder if this sort of freedom, the freedom we are stuck with, is also conferred on us – that we are treated by others, as being free in making this choice, of having free will when faced with a decision about what we are to do. Freedom here isn’t a matter of what we can do, but a matter of what people allow us to do, and consider us to be “authors” of. To step back a bit, why couldn’t we take a third person perspective on our own wills, and view our decision making as a matter of prediction? Is there really an intrinsic limitation on looking at ourselves “sideways on” or is it more a cultural construct?

I don’t know how far I can push this point. But I think I can make it a bit more modest, and in so doing, make it a little more convincing. If all we can get (as my first broad claim suggested) from the “we’re stuck with this assumption” approach is the freedom of the moment, then it seems clear that this isn’t the kind of free will we want. It doesn’t seem thick enough for us to ascribe responsibility, say (remember: what you get with moment by moment freedom is just a decision; and once you’ve made that decision you can go back and see that it was determined, at least if determinism is true). Yet we do want to say that your responsibility extends beyond your choices in a given moment.

And this extension of responsibility, of what we hold other people accountable for, is a matter of cultural construction – because we can’t get it from the “we’re stuck with it” argument. That argument turns out to be just too narrow for any useful ends.

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