Libertarians and others

1
Libertarians and others

• Chisholm, Holbach and Frankfurt

2
Roderick Chisholm

• A foundationalist (remember?).
• Also an enthusiastic defender of the primacy of
  raw experience in epistemology.
• Also a libertarian.

3
Human freedom and the self

• The Dilemma Both determinism and indeterminism
  rule out responsibility.
• The main idea Humans can, as free agents,
  initiate new causal chains.
• The question What is it about the self that
  makes this new causal chain attributable to the
  self, in a way that justifies blame or praise for
  the action that initiates the new chain of
  causes?

4
Following along with Chisholm

• Conditions for responsibility
• Wholly up to the agent.
• Could have done otherwise.
• What youre responsible for is the result of
  (brought about by) some act of yours.
• That act must be in your power to perform or not
  to perform.
• 4 implies that the act isnt determined by any
  event that isnt also within your control
  including your desires and beliefs.

5
Overcome

• Consider a dam, caused to fail by a flood It
  simply had to fail, in the circumstances.
  Similarly,
• If the flood of desire caused the weak-willed
  man to give in, then he, too, had to do just what
  it was that he did do and he was no more
  responsible than was the dam for the results that
  followed

6
The flip side

• Good character, if it causes you to do good
  things (i.e. leaves you no option but to do
  them), prevents you from being responsible for
  doing those good things!
• (Reid) Catos constitution is no more the
  work of Cato than his existence.
• The implication for theism (via Aquinas) If
  every movement proceeds from God as the prime
  mover, then God is the only agent!

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The compatibilist move

• The key premise Could have done otherwise
  would have done otherwise, had s/he chosen to
• This is consistent with determinism.
• But Chisholm claims that the second phrase could
  be true even when in fact the first phrases is
  false, that is, it can be true that I would have
  done otherwise than I did, in some case, even
  though, in the circumstances, I could not do
  otherwise.
• So Chisholm rejects the compatibilists premise.

8
Making a case against compatibilism

• If youd chosen otherwise, you would have done
  something different.
• But in fact you couldnt choose otherwise (for
  example, your character or beliefs, which arent
  under your control at the time of the choice,
  caused you to choose as you did).
• Then you are caught up in causal chains that
  include these features of yourself, and given
  these causes, you really couldnt do otherwise.

9
Choosing to choose?

• Theres a regress in the air here.
• A real choice (a free choice) seems to require
  (see the earlier definition) control over all the
  factors that cause that choice.
• And this includes beliefs, desires and character.
• So you must control these things, and whatever
  causes them, and so on, if they cause you to
  choose as you do.
• Thats a lot of control!

10
Between determinism and indeterminism

• If theres no cause of an action, it seems
  fortuitous or capricious, and responsibility is
  out.
• If there is a cause, it seems that (even if, had
  the agent chosen otherwise, s/he would have done
  otherwise) in fact s/he couldnt have chosen
  otherwise (the choice is causally determined,
  after all), and, again, responsibility is out.

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Is there an alternative?

• We need an event that contributes to the agents
  act, but that isnt caused by another event.
• Instead, its caused by the agent herself.
• Usually, we speak of events as caused by other
  events
• the occurrence of a cold night caused the water
  in the bird bath to freeze
• The sudden creation of a super-critical mass
  caused the nuclear device to explode.
• But what is an agent, and how does it cause
  events?

12
Transuent and Immanent

• Transuent causation links events or states of
  affairs together.
• Immanent causation links an event or state of
  affairs to an agent who brings it about.
• Chisholm says we can trace back, following the
  physiological transuent causes.
• But at some point (in the brain?) we come to an
  event or state of affairs that is caused by the
  agent, and not by some other event or state of
  affairs.

13
Making happen vs. doing

• To do something requires some awareness
  (intentionality) concerning what youre doing.
• But to make something happen doesnt we make all
  kinds of things happen without being aware of
  them (or concerned about them).

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But what is immanent causation

• What do we mean when we say an agent caused an
  event (rather than an event causing it)?
• How do we distinguish As causing an event in
  this way, from the event merely happening
  (spontaneously)?
• Suarez the action is in reality nothing but the
  effect as it flows from the agent HUH?

15
The mystery of causation (again)

• For Chisholm, its not any harder (or stranger)
  to explain agent causation than it is to explain
  ordinary transuent causation.
• But even on a strictly Humean account of
  causation, what we say when we say that event A
  caused event B is that events of the A-type are
  always followed by B-type events.
• Nothing this informative emerges from the claim
  that an agent A caused some event.

16
Hume vs. Reid

• Chisholm cites Reid against Hume, suggesting that
  our awareness of our ability, as agents, to bring
  things about is the basis for our grasp of
  transuent causation.
• But Hume actually argues against this view we
  arent, he said, conscious of our power to do
  things. If we were, we wouldnt be surprised by
  a sudden paralysisa stroke victim would
  immediately realize that she couldnt move her
  (say) left leg. Only experience teaches us what
  we can (or cant) do

17
Small Gods

• If Chisholm is right, then, each of us, when we
  act, is a prime mover unmoved.
• No set of statements about a mans desires,
  beliefs, and stimulus situation at any time
  implies any statement telling us what the man
  will try, set out, or undertake to do at that
  time.
• Note how empty this is of any predictive power

18
Can desires incline without necessitating?

• Chisholms public official
• Can resist soliciting a bribe.
• Cannot resist accepting a bribe (if its
  presented in the right way).
• For Chisholm, this is the kind of case where we
  would say his motive (the desire for the bribe)
  inclines but doesnt necessitate, since he
  doesnt try to make the bribe come his way, but
  if it does come his way, he cant resist.

19
Baron dHolbach (1723-1789)

• One of the Encyclopedists- a French enlightenment
  group led by Diderot and DAlembert.
• A hard determinist He believed in a
  deterministic physics, and believed that this was
  incompatible with responsibility.

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The view

• We are complicated mechanism.
• Our will is determined by our desires, beliefs
  and circumstances.
• It is altered only by stronger, intervening
  desires etc.
• This is hidden from us by our own complexity,
  which makes prediction very difficult.

21
Harry Frankfurt (1929- )

• Emeritus Professor at Princeton.
• A compatibilist, with a complex view of the
  conditions of freedom (including abilities to
  evaluate and motivate change in our lower-order
  preferences).
• Wrote On Bullshit (2005)

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Alternative Possibilities

• The Principle We are morally responsible for
  doing X only if we could have done something
  else.
• Frankfurt identifies a problem with this
  principle.
• Circumstances can cut off alternatives for us
  without interfering with our ordinary
  choice-making processes.
• In such cases, we are morally responsible even
  though we could not do anything else.

23
Constraint without coercion

• Im in a room, the door is open, and it seems Im
  entirely free to stay.
• But in fact, the door will close and lock if I
  attempt to leave.
• But I dont attempt to leave.
• Am I responsible for staying in the room?
• Or, having decided to stay already, Im told Ill
  be killed if I leave.

24
The hidden intervenor

• Black and Jones.
• Black will ensure Jones does X if Jones doesnt
  choose to do X himself.
• But Jones does do X by his own choice.
• Still Jones had no alternative to doing X.
• What explains Jones doing X here? The
  constraints (Blacks arrangements) dont his
  choice does. So (says F) hes responsible.

25
The alternative principle

• A person is not morally responsible for what he
  has done if he did it only because he could not
  have done otherwise.

26
The problem of attribution

• When we say that someone is responsible for
  something theyve done, we are committed to there
  being some connection between them as agents, and
  the action theyve performed.
• Chisholm is concerned about this when he says
  that neither determinism nor indeterminism will
  do
• Determinism puts what I do out of my control (we
  can trace it all back to things that Im clearly
  not responsible for)
• And indeterminism also puts it out of my control
  one or another of the possibilities results, but
  I dont choose.

27
But

• Chisholms appeal to transcendent, agent
  causation seems like a cheat.
• Chisholm says that the agent begins a new causal
  chain, rather than that something merely happened
  spontaneously and without being causally
  determined.
• But it does not explain how were supposed to
  tell the difference. In fact, it doesnt explain
  what the difference is at all.

28
The problem of the link

• What we need to know here is both something
  metaphysical and something empirical.
• First, we need to know about how an agent comes
  to make a choice and how that process is
  different from mere coin flip indeterminism.
• Second, we need to know how we can tell the
  difference between these things. (And the
  difference had better be obvious, since we seem
  to make this distinction very naturally and very
  easily in practice.)

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Why these requirements?

• 1. Without a story that somehow links the agent
  to the choice in an explanatory way, the
  attribution of the choice to the agent (and the
  consequent assignment of responsibility to her)
  is utterly opaque.
• By links in an explanatory way I mean that
  something about the agent should explain why she
  chose as she did.

30
Why, contd

• As for the epistemic requirement, if we cant
  effectively distinguish chance from agent
  cases, we surely ought to be much more skeptical,
  reserved or modest than we usually are when we
  blame or praise someone for what theyve done.
• Some would suggest the first person case is the
  key we know, in a special, privileged way, when
  weve made a choice rather than merely flipped a
  coin and we can then go on to attribute similar
  choice-processes to others on the grounds of the
  similarity of the cases and circumstances.

31
But

• This move only makes sense if we can say what the
  difference is and show that it really is the sort
  of thing we could reliably detect, at least in
  our own case.
• And just saying what the difference is, is
  already very difficult.
• Some character of the agent must make the
  difference between the available choices.
• But we cant say that a causal process leads the
  agent to become the kind of agent who makes one
  choice rather than anotherthis leads back to
  determinism!

32
Whence character?

• Let character stand for the features of agents
  that explain why they make the choices they do.
• So character grounds attributions of
  responsibility to agents by linking them to their
  choices.
• If character results from natural, causal
  processes, were back to determinism.
• But if character is just spontaneously there from
  the start, were back to indeterminism
• Either way, how is it an agents fault that, by
  causes or just by chance, she has a character
  that leads her to do cruel things?

33
Oh, dear.

• Appeal to agent causation is just a place-holder
  for a solution, not a solution in its own right.
• When we try to fill that place-holder out, it
  leads right back to the original puzzle.
• If were to be responsible for what it leads us
  to do, it looks like we need to form or choose
  our own character ourselves, in a way that were
  responsible for.
• But theres a nasty regress here we need to
  invoke a prior character to make us responsible
  for how weve formed our character over time.

34
Who am I, anyway?

• Leibniz was a non-causal determinist.
• For him, what happens for each monad (a separate,
  independent atom) is fully determined by its
  internal law and its appetition, a force that
  drives it to express itself over time (its
  internal law, though, respects a harmony that all
  monads are set up to express).

35
Judas

• For Leibniz, Judas is determined, according to
  his internal law, to betray Jesus. He must do
  it, else (says Leibniz) he would not be this
  Judas.
• But this doesnt mean Judas isnt responsible for
  what he does.
• After all, what he does is part and parcel of
  (and emerges from) who he is.

36
Character, again

• It looks as though the libertarian has a hard
  time explaining how we can be ultimately
  responsible for our character we cant freely
  choose our characters, on pain of a regress.
• On the other hand, who is each of us, if not a
  person with a certain character?
• Can an initial self, the ultimate source of the
  choices that we take ourselves to be responsible
  for, be responsible for the character that s/he
  begins with?

37
A fallback position

• Perhaps the best thing to say is that we are
  responsible for our choices insofar as who we are
  is what leads us to choose as we do.
• Though we didnt choose to become who we are, the
  process of becoming our (present) selves (our
  history as persons) is shaped by who we had
  (already) become before.
• This view of persons traces their present
  character back to previous experiences and
  choices grounded in a previous character.
• But it is a view we can only take looking
  backwards.