JOSEPH KEIM CAMPBELL:
COMPATIBILIST
ALTERNATIVES
-- The
Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website --
If
you were free in doing something and morally responsible for it, you
could have done otherwise. That has seemed a pretty firm proposition
among the old, new, clear, unclear and other propositions in the
philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism. If you were free
in what you did, there was an alternative. It is also at least natural
to think that if determinism is true, you can never do otherwise than
you do. G. E. Moore, that Cambridge reasoner in whose shadow
Wittgenstein ought to be standing, considered the matter. He pointed
out that even if determinism is true, there remains a sense in which
you can still do otherwise than you do: you will do otherwise if you so
choose. That, on reflection, is consistent with determinism. The
doctrine of the compatibility of freedom and determinism is saved.
Joseph Keim Campbell, strong philosopher at Washington State
University, provides the latest thinking on this seemingly unavoidable
dispute. You do not have to agree that either compatibilism or
incompatibilism must be true in order to appreciate the carefulness of
his reasoning in this piece of ongoing American philosophy. It requires
and repays attention. 1.
Introduction*
This is a defense of strong
compatibilism.
Roughly, strong compatibilism is the view that (a) free will is
essential to moral responsibility, (b) free will requires alternatives,
and (c) moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. The
expression ‘free will’ is intended to designate the freedom-relevant
condition necessary for moral responsibility, whatever that condition
may be (cf. McKenna 2003).1 Thus, (a) is true by definition.
Strong compatibilism is a version of the alternatives theory of free
will. According to the alternatives theory, a person S
performs an action a freely only if S has or had
alternatives to a. Moreover, S has alternatives
to a iff S can perform some contrary action a'
instead of a, where one act is contrary to another
provided that a person cannot simultaneously perform them both. Strong compatibilism has long
been challenged
by incompatibilists who endorse (b) but reject (c). More recently, both
semicompatibilists—who accept (c) but reject (b)—and free
will nihilists—who hold that no person has or ever had free
will—have offered criticisms of (b). This line of attack is motivated
by well-known examples offered first by Harry Frankfurt (1969) and then
by others. Here is a version of my own Frankfurt example, as
re-told by Michael McKenna. “Desperate
for money, Eleanor and her father Roscoe plan to rob a bank. Roscoe
fears that Eleanor might change her mind at an inopportune moment. To
insure that Eleanor will proceed with the plans, Roscoe secretly
implants a mechanism in Eleanor’s brain. Should Eleanor give any
indication that she is unwilling to go along with the bank robbery,
Roscoe will use the device to render Eleanor unable to do anything
other than rob the bank. As it happens, despite a splitting headache,
Eleanor willingly robs the bank with her father. The device is never
activated.” (McKenna 1998, 259) Eleanor is
apparently morally responsible for her actions even though she could
not have done otherwise. Thus, it seems that alternatives are not
essential to moral responsibility. In this
essay, I provide a new theory of alternatives, inspired by the work of
G.E. Moore (1912) and R. Jay Wallace (1994). I begin with a broad
framework for grasping most versions of the alternatives theory: the
relevant facts account (§2). The relevant facts account is helpful
in understanding both compatibilist and incompatibilist theories but I
am especially interested in using it to flesh out two varieties of
strong compatibilism: the two-‘cans’ view—according to which ‘can’ is
ambiguous like the word ‘odd’—and contextualism—according to which
‘can’ is context sensitive like ‘flat.’ Finally, I offer a version of
the two-‘cans’ view and show how my view differs from those of Moore
and Wallace (§ 3). 2. The Relevant Facts Account2
I begin by
restating strong compatibilism in more precise terms, e.g., as the
conjunction of the following three claims. 1.
A
person is
morally responsible for an action only if he does it freely. 2.
A
person
performs an action freely only if he has or had alternatives to the
action. 3.
That
someone
is morally responsible for some action is consistent with the thesis of
determinism. (1)–(3)
correspond, roughly and respectively, to items (a)–(c) in the
provisional definition of ‘strong compatibilism’ above.3 The principle of alternative
possibilities,
or PAP, is a consequence of (1) and (2). It is more succinctly
stated as follows: PAP: A person is morally
responsible for an
action only if he has or had alternatives to the action. Note that PAP fails to
distinguish between
the time of action—the time that an agent performs an
action—and the time of ability—the time that an agent had the
ability to perform an alternative action (Taylor 1965 and Lehrer and
Taylor 1965). Even if we agree that Eleanor could not do otherwise at
the time that she robbed the bank there is little reason to suppose
that she lacked alternatives to her actions prior to the implantation
of the bank-robbing device. Perhaps we should rephrase PAP so that it
implies that in order for a person to be morally responsible it is
“necessary that one could have done otherwise for some acts in
one’s lifetime” (Kane 2002, 697). Unfortunately
the above Frankfurt example can be altered to meet this new version of
PAP. Suppose that some god-like creature—call him ‘Harry’—has a full
life plan for Eleanor. He implants a device in Eleanor prior to her
birth. If Eleanor were about to something that Harry did not intend for
her to do, then the device would become activated. As it happens, she
does everything that Harry wants her to do. Now it seems that there is
nothing that Eleanor could have done otherwise. Similar comments may be
made about other responses to the Frankfurt examples (cf. Pereboom
2000). For every new version of PAP, there is another Frankfurt example
that apparently undermines it. In order to successfully defend PAP one
needs to adopt a new strategy. What we need is not a different version
of PAP but an altogether different understanding of alternatives. The relevant
facts account is well suited for grasping the standard incompatibilist
view of alternatives. What does it mean to say that William James has a
choice about which way to walk home after one of his lectures? Here is
James’s response: Note that the
incompatibilist criterion is not an analysis since it only
specifies a necessary condition for having alternatives. Nonetheless,
it does identify a condition that is central to most versions of the
argument for incompatibilism. As Peter van Inwagen writes: “it seems
that our freedom can only be the freedom to add to the actual past; it seems
that our freedom can only be the freedom to act in accordance with the
laws of nature” (2000, 167; cf. Ginet 1990, 102-3). Hence, the
incompatibilist claims that, given determinism, we lack the all-in
ability to do otherwise. Of course, the incompatibilist believes that
all-in ability is the only kind of ability, at least when considering
the ‘can’ of free will. “Lewis’s idea is that a
statement attributing
ability, like ‘Tim can kill Grandfather,’ is ambiguous. The statement
means ‘Tim’s killing Grandfather is compossible with a certain set of
facts,’ but the relevant set of facts may vary from one context of
utterance to another. When we say that Tim can kill Grandfather because
he has what it takes, we mean that his killing Grandfather is
compossible with a certain set of facts that includes only relatively
‘local’ facts about the killing situation; when we say that Tim can’t
kill Grandfather because Grandfather is Tim’s grandfather, we mean that
Tim’s killing Grandfather isn’t compossible with a more inclusive set
of facts that includes the fact that Grandfather survived his youth and
helped produce Tim.” (1997, 143) According to
both Lewis and Sider, the truth conditions of ability sentences vary
according to the context in which those sentences are uttered. Thus, an
utterance of the sentence ‘Tim can kill Grandfather’ may be true in one
context yet false in another. In the above quotations, Lewis
and Sider
suggest that the variance in the truth conditions of ability sentences
is due to a change in meaning. Lewis claims that “‘can’ is equivocal” (1976, 77) and Sider claims
that “a statement attributing ability ¼ is ambiguous” (1997, 143). Both
assertions are questionable and unnecessary. If contextualism is
understood in terms of the relevant facts account, then it seems that ‘S
can do a’ always means the same thing: that S’s doing a
is compossible with the relevant facts. What varies from context to
context—if contextualism is true—is the set of facts that is counted as
relevant, not the meaning of ‘can.’ Contextualism is committed to a
variation in the content of assertions of ability sentences—to
the “proposition that embodies [their] truth-conditions”—but not to a
variation in the meaning of such assertions—to “what is fixed
by the conventions for the use of expressions that we learn when we
learn a language” (Perry 1997). We may contrast contextualism
with the two-‘cans’
view endorsed by Moore (1912). Moore distinguishes between the hypothetical
sense and the categorical sense of ‘can.’ The latter is
picked out by the concept of all-in ability noted above; the
former is usually identified with the standard hypothetical analysis of
‘could have done otherwise’: if S had wanted (or tried, etc.)
to do otherwise, then S would have done otherwise.6
Perhaps the standard hypothetical analysis is really a version of the
relevant facts account. If it is, then Moore may be wrong in his claim
that the word ‘can’ is ambiguous. Nonetheless, Moore holds that ability
terms and sentences have two distinct meanings and in doing so he
endorses the two-‘can’ view and distinguishes his position from the one
held by the contextualist.7 The contextualist about ability
terms adds to
the relevant facts account the claim that the relevant facts vary with
the context of utterance. There are many different ways that one might
explain how and why this is so. According to a popular version of
contextualism—call it ‘naïve contextualism’—these variations
result due to differences in our sphere of attention. John
Hawthorne writes: “When
ordinary speakers utter English claims of the form ‘S did x
freely’ (and their synonyms), they frequently speak the truth. But when
our sphere of attention is widened by philosophical inquiry, we are
rarely in a position to truly utter the English words ‘S did x
freely’. Accordingly, the English words ‘S did x freely’
(and ‘It is up to S whether or not he does x’ and ‘S
did x of his own free will’ etc.) must have a meaning that
somehow allows its truth conditions to vary according to the sphere of
attention.” (2001, 68) Naïve
contextualism is a kind of compatibilism, for it claims that in ordinary
contexts our standards for determining what facts are relevant are
less restrictive since we attend to only “relatively ‘local’ facts.”
Yet in philosophical contexts our attention is draw
elsewhere—to facts about the neurological springs of our action, or to
the entire set of facts about the broad past—and we subsequently deny
that our actions are free. In this
section, I sketch out a compatibilist theory of alternatives that is a
variant of the two-‘cans’ view. My version of the alternatives theory
is opposed to naïve contextualism but my criticisms of naïve
contextualism leave room for other contextualist theories as well as
other non-contextualist theories. This is all to the good. I am not
certain whether ability sentences are genuinely ambiguous or whether
they suffer from some more complex linguistic malady. Since it is
relatively easy to talk in terms of different senses of ability
sentences, I make a provisional case for the claim that the two-‘cans’
view is correct. If it turns out that ‘can’ is more like ‘flat’ than it
is like ‘odd,’ or even that the relevant difference involves the
contents of assertions of ability sentences rather than the meanings of
those sentences (cf. Stainton forthcoming), then my comments may be
amended without much loss to the strong compatibilist position. Often when we
say ‘S can doing otherwise’ we mean that S’s doing
otherwise is compossible with all of the facts about the broad past. It
is our all-in ability that withers upon reflection, for in this sense
any fact about the broad past is relevant to whether or not one has
alternatives. As we discover and contemplate more information about the
world, our all-in ability to do otherwise appears to correspondingly
evaporate. All-in ability is exemplified in both the James thought
experiment and the incompatibilist criterion, noted above. Ability
sentences may also express a more general sense. In order to understand
the difference, consider first the following joke. (It is a philosophical
joke, so it’s not very funny.) A man has a bird in a cage. A friend
asks him, “Can your bird fly?” The man looks at the bird in the cage
and responds, “No. Not at the moment.” Whereupon the friend retorts,
“If it can’t fly, then why is it in a cage?” Peter
Unger (1984, 55) offers a related example: “while riding in a train
with a pianist friend, a person might ask the musician, ‘Can you play
“One O’clock Jump”?’ The pianist may reply, ‘Yes, I can.’” Unger notes
that “the lack of any piano on the train will not falsify the
musician’s claims” but that “in the hotel two months later, matters of
truth will be evaluated differently: The absence of piano might then
falsify.” Given the above examples, it is
natural to
conclude that ability sentences are ambiguous. A bird is in a cage and
someone asks, ‘Can the bird fly?’ The answer is ‘Yes’ if we are talking
about the bird’s general abilities. The bird would not be in a cage
unless it had the general ability to fly. But the bird does not have
the all-in ability to fly, for it cannot fly in the all-in sense given
that it is in a cage. Similarly, a man might have the general ability
to play ‘One O’clock Jump’ even if there is no piano available. When
there is no piano available it is not this general ability that is
lost, though indeed another ability may be absent. For there is
certainly a sense in which one cannot play a song on a piano if there
is no piano available to play the song. My distinction between all-in
and general
abilities is influenced by the work of Moore (1912) and Wallace (1994)
but it is not the same as either of their distinctions. All-in
abilities correspond well with Moore’s categorical sense of ‘can’ but
general abilities are quite different from the hypothetical sense of
‘can.’ With Wallace it is just the opposite. My notion of general
abilities is adopted from Wallace’s own view. But all-in abilities are
different from Wallace’s particular abilities. Wallace’s
distinction between particular and general abilities is a lot like the
difference between one’s general ability to play the piano—in my
sense—versus one’s ability to play the piano at a particular moment of
time, for instance, one’s ability to play the piano now. But
when I say that a person has the general ability to play ‘One O’clock
Jump’ I mean that there is a sense in which he can play ‘One O’clock
Jump’ now, even if there is no piano available. At this very
moment—regardless of the presence or absence of a piano—there are lots
of folks who can play ‘One O’clock Jump’ in the general sense though I
cannot. Nonetheless, I am willing to admit that there might be another,
more restrictive sense in which one cannot play ‘One O’clock
Jump’ if there is no piano available to play the song. In order for
Wallace’s view to be of use to the strong compatibilist it must be
amended and combined with the insights of Moore. Moore is correct:
‘can’ is ambiguous and, thus, so are ability sentences. However, Moore
was wrong about the details of this ambiguity. Wallace’s concept of general
ability is preferable to Moore’s hypothetical sense of ‘can.’ The
new proposal combines the theories of Moore and Wallace: ability
sentences are ambiguous between the all-in sense and the general sense.
Given
my version of the two-‘cans’ view, how should the strong compatibilist
respond to the Frankfurt example noted above? Recall that in this
example Eleanor is supposed to be morally blameworthy for her action.
Suppose that we slightly alter the example: Eleanor decides not to rob
the bank and Roscoe simply flips a switch causing her to do so anyway.
In this new case Eleanor is no longer morally blameworthy for robbing
the bank. What is the difference between the two cases, the original
case where the device is not activated and the new case where it is
activated? One cannot describe the difference in terms of Eleanor’s
all-in abilities since in both situations she lacks the all-in ability
to do otherwise. The difference lies in the things that she cannot do
in a more general sense. Though the Frankfurt examples show that all-in
abilities are not essential to moral responsibility, it would be wrong
to conclude from those examples that general abilities are not
essential to moral responsibility. General
abilities are more fundamental than all-in abilities. If a bird lacks
the general ability to fly, then it also lacks the all-in ability to
fly. I cannot play the piano in a general sense, so I am not able to
play it in the all-in sense. But as the above examples indicate, a bird
may have a general ability to fly yet lack the all-in ability to do so.
Similar comments apply to the pianist example. It is the fundamental
nature of our general abilities that make them appropriate candidates
for underlying the freedom-relevant condition necessary for moral
responsibility. As the Frankfurt examples illustrate, one may be
praiseworthy or blameworthy for his actions even if he lacks the all-in
ability to do otherwise but few would say the same were one to lack
general abilities like “the power to grasp and apply the principles
that support the moral obligations we accept, and to control one’s
behavior by the light of such principles” (Wallace 1994, 188). That
Eleanor cannot do otherwise in the all-in sense is irrelevant to our
judgment that she is morally blameworthy but if she could not do
otherwise in a more general sense—as is the case when the bank-robbing
device is activated, for instance—our judgment would rightfully be
different.8 One might
think that Unger’s pianist example is supportive of naïve
contextualism but that is not so. There is a general sense in which any
pianist can play the piano even if he is riding in a train and there is
no piano available to play. This is why it is appropriate to call one a
‘pianist’ or a ‘musician’ whether or not there is an instrument
available to play. A pianist’s general ability to play ‘One O’clock
Jump’ has to do with his training and “his knowledge of the jazz
repertoire” (Unger 1984, 55) not with incidental facts like the
availability of a piano. Even if one believes that there is no piano
available to play he might still say that he is able to play ‘One
O’clock Jump’ in this general sense. In one and the same context he
might admit both that he can play ‘One O’clock Jump,’ for he has what
it takes, and that he cannot play the piece, since there is no piano
available. This is why naïve contextualism is wrong. Similar
comments apply to the bird example. By merely asking ‘Can the bird in
the cage fly?’ one automatically draws attention to the fact that the
bird is in a cage. This would make this fact a relevant one if
naïve contextualism were true. If naïve contextualism were
true, it would be impossible to correctly answer ‘Yes’ to the question
‘Can the bird in the cage fly?,’ for the bird cannot fly in the all-in
sense given that it is in a cage. Suppose that someone wants to take
the bird out of the cage and hold it in his hands. He might ask, ‘Can
the bird in the cage fly?’ before doing so. On some occasions the
correct answer to this question is going to be ‘Yes.’ It is not clear
how the naïve contextualist may admit this. For these reasons, I am inclined
to believe
that naïve contextualism is false: the content of ability
sentences does not change simply because of a change in our sphere of
attention. This alone, though, does not entail either that
contextualism is false or that the two-‘cans’ view is true. But it does
suggest that merely attending to a fact does not in and of itself make
the fact a relevant one. As I indicated above, we should separate the
semantic issues—what to say about the precise meaning and content of
ability sentences—from the compatibility issue. I think that I have
given reason to believe that (a) on at least some occasions there are
truthful utterances of ability sentences, (b) often the truthfulness of
those utterances is essential to the moral praiseworthiness or
blameworthiness of an individual’s action, and (c) all of this is
independent of the truth or falsity of determinism. This is enough to
motivate strong compatibilism even though it is consistent with the
two-‘can’ view, contextualism, and a few other theories about the
semantics of ability sentences (cf. Stainton forthcoming). Bibliography Campbell,
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* Versions of
this paper were presented at the Bellingham Summer Philosophy
Conference as well as the Western Canadian Philosophical Association
Conference. I thank my commentators—David Sosa and Peter Murphy,
respectively—as well as other members of the audience—especially Hud
Hudson and David Zimmerman—for helpful criticisms and feed-back. I also
thank John Martin Fischer, Michael O’Rourke, and an anonymous referee
from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for written comments on an
earlier draft. Lastly, I thank David Shier and Harry Silverstein for
useful discussions on issues related to this paper. 1. Following
Peter van Inwagen (1983, 8), I use the term ‘free will’ out of respect
for tradition. By saying that one has free will I do not mean to imply
that the person has some faculty, e.g., the will, that has the
property of being free. Perhaps the expression ‘moral freedom’ (cf.
Markosian 1999, 258) is preferable to ‘free will,’ for it is common to
identify having free will with having alternatives, and it is equally
common to believe that alternatives are not necessary for moral
responsibility and, hence, neither is free will. But philosophers who
think along these lines—for instance, semicompatibilists (Fischer
1994)—generally accept that there is a freedom-relevant
condition that is necessary for moral responsibility. Thus, when they
claim that free will is not essential to moral responsibility they are
using the term ‘free will’ in a way that is different than the way that
I am using it here. 2. The
structure of this section is borrowed from Keith DeRose (1999). 3. Determinism
is the conjunction of the following two theses: “For every instant of
time, there is a proposition that expresses the state of the world at
that instant” and “If p and q are any propositions that
express the state of the world at some instants, then the conjunction
of p with the laws of nature entails q” (van Inwagen
1983, 65). For other definitions of the key terms of the free will
debate, see van Inwagen (1983) and Campbell, O’Rourke, and Shier
(2004b). For the
purposes of this essay, (3) expresses the thesis of compatibilism
whereas incompatibilism is the denial of (3). Some philosophers
use the term ‘compatibilism’ to designate the view that the free
will thesis—the claim that some persons have free will—is
compatible with determinism (van Inwagen 1983). But since free will
just is the freedom relevant condition necessary for moral
responsibility, this usage is not significantly different from my own. 4.
Contextualist theories of ability terms are developed by Lewis (1976
and 1979) and Sider (1997). A contextualist theory of ‘free action’ is
presented by John Hawthorne (2001). Both kinds of theories are
discussed by Peter Unger (1984, 54-8). Richard Feldman (2004) offers
several compelling criticisms of contextualism. In this section, I’m
presenting broad strong compatibilist strategies, so many of the
important details of contextualism are left out. For a more complete
understanding of contextualist theories of freedom, see Feldman (2004). 5. For a
general introduction to the grandfather paradox, and other paradoxes of
time travel, see Campbell (forthcoming). 6. Moore’s
own analysis of the hypothetical sense of ‘could have done otherwise’
is more elaborate and more interesting. According to Moore, we could
have done otherwise—in the hypothetical sense—iff three conditions
hold: “(1) that we ... should have acted differently,
if we had chosen to; (2) that similarly we ... should
have chosen differently, if we had chosen so to choose;
and (3) that it was ... possible that we should have chosen
differently, in the sense that no man could know for certain that we
should not so choose” (Moore 1912, 94). (1) is equivalent to
the standard hypothetical analysis, so Moore’s analysis is clearly more
detailed than the standard one. 7. Unger
(1983) suggests that the distinction between contextualism and
invariantism maps on neatly, and respectively, to the distinction
between compatibilism and incompatibilism. But the two-‘cans’ view
shows that this is not so. The two-‘cans’ view is a kind of
invariantism, for invariantism is just the denial of contextualism and
the two-‘cans’ view is not a kind of contextualism. What we need is a
distinction that lines up contextualism and the two-‘cans’ view on the
same side and incompatibilist versions of the alternatives theory on
the other. |