Compatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Compatibilism seeks to square free will and causal determinism.

Incompatibilism under two notions of free will

1. The freedom to do otherwise:
   • If someone acts of her own free will, then she could have done otherwise.
   • If determinism is true, no one can do otherwise than one actually does.
   • Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will.
2. One being the source of agency (“something necessary for her action originates within the agent herself”):
   • A person acts of her own free will only if she is its ultimate source.
   • If determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions.
   • Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will.

Classical compatibilism

Classical compatibilism “was developed in the modern era by the empiricists Hobbes and Hume, and reinvigorated in the early part of the twentieth century.”

We can define freedom as the ability to do what one wants (without being forced by an external source contrary to our will), side-stepping the metaphysical issue and quickly arriving at compatibilism.

McKenna and Coates have this objection, which strikes me as odd:

To cite just one shortcoming, various mental illnesses can cause a person to act as she wants and do so unencumbered; yet, intuitively, it would seem that she does not act of her own free will. For example, imagine a person suffering from a form of psychosis that causes full-fledged hallucinations. While hallucinating, she might “act as she wants unencumbered,” but she could hardly be said to be acting of her own free will.

The idea that mental illness strips away free will is unintuitive. Perhaps if we define free will as a property of rational agents, but we aren’t perfectly rational either. Where’s the line? If we are our minds, and some minds are affected in this way, the mentally ill fit the sourcehood requirement.

But the main failure mode, on the ability to do otherwise, is given in this example: Suppose Danielle is psychologically incapable of wanting to touch a blond haired dog. Her father gives her two dogs to choose between, one blond, the other black. Then according to classical compatibilist analysis, when Danielle picked up the black dog (happy and unencumbered), she was able to pick up the blond, even though, due to her psychological condition, she was not able to do so in the relevant respect.

A constrained set of possibilities is not counter to free will: Imagine adding a brown dog. Then, Danielle is free to choose between two of the three. The point of this thought experiment must be, then, that we all have the psychological condition of determinism, which prevents us from being able to do otherwise.

Compatibilism in transition

The Consequence Argument attempts to show that powerlessness transfers from one fact to its necessities:

• No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
• No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
• Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future

Frankfurt argues against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) that claims the ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility. Imagine John wants to shoot Smith. Black, wanting the shooting to occur, will persuade John if he wavers. John shoots Smith freely. John remains morally responsible, but didn’t have the ability to do otherwise.

Strawson challenged the nature of moral responsibility: “what it is to hold a person morally responsible for wrong conduct is nothing more than the propensity towards, or the sustaining of, a moral reactive attitude like indignation.” Thus, it would not be done away with, regardless of the freedom to do otherwise.

Contemporary compatibilism

Arguments for compatiblism should address alternate possibilities, the Consequence Argument, and regulative control—a form of control agents possess when they can bring about X and can refrain from bringing about X.

Two arguments against the first premise of the Consequence Argument (“No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature”):

• “Consider the difference between a person in the present who has the ability to act in such a way that she alters the past, as opposed to a person who has the ability to act in such a way such that, if she did so act, the past would have been different.”
• “Consider the difference between a person who has the ability to act in such a way that she violates a law of nature, as opposed to a person (at a deterministic world) who has the ability to act in such a way that, if she were to so act, some law of nature that does obtain would not. “

Slote argues against the inference of the Consequence Argument: Unavoidability applies to select facts that have nothing to do with a person, that bypass agency. The fact that most cars now run on gasoline is unavoidable. The Consequence Argument falsely derives that personal actions are unavoidable from the unavoidability of considerations outside her agency (facts prior to her birth and the laws of nature).

New dispositionalism

The new dispositionalists offer a positive account of regulative control, framing alternate choice as existing in counterfactual conditions while holding fixed the causal base of an agent’s disposition: Does the agent in an appropriately rich range of such counterfactual conditions do X? If she does, then even if in the actual world she does not do X, she was able to do so. She had at the time of action the pertinent agential abilities or capacities (the right kind of determined process).

Note how the problems with the classical compatibilists’ counterfactual analysis are circumvented. If we are attending to the causal base of the relevant dispositions, we can easily see how Danielle’s relevant causal base is ill-equipped for picking up blond haired dogs

Claude: The compatibilist’s bet is precisely that a determined process can be the right kind of process, and the regress you’re pointing at (“but is that determined too?”) isn’t a regress of accumulating unfreedom; it’s just the structure of any causal process, free or not.

Others appeal to similar restrictions,

but in doing so, they only mean to explain the nature of the freedom or control exhibited in how the agent did act—that is, what Fischer has termed her guidance control. In striking contrast to how the new dispositionalists reason, they do not think they are thereby entitled to claim that an agent in a Frankfurt example is free to do otherwise. So it is possible that what the new dispositionalists have identified with the pertinent counterfactuals they fix upon is not the freedom to do otherwise, but instead, a freedom located in what an agent does do (which is a matter of guidance control, not regulative control). This, at least, is how compatibilists like Fischer and Ravizza would reason.

Hierarchical compatibilism

Frankfurt’s hierarchical mesh theory develops classical compatibilism’s identification of freedom in an agent’s unencumbered ability to get what she wants. Here, a person who acts of her own free will acts from desires that are nested within more encompassing elements of her self. When a freely willing agent acts, her actions emanate from her rather than from something foreign. We have first-order desires about things, and second-order desires about our desires.

Take addiction to be a strict compulsion. Then the unwilling addict does not take the drug freely, since her first-order will is in conflict with what she wishes it to be. The willing addict acts freely; her will meshes with what she wishes it to be. Frankfurt claims one acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.

Arguments against hierarchical mesh theory include the infinite regress of desires about desires, the question of why those higher level desires are privileged, and whether one with a psychological mesh externally imposed would maintain freedom.

TODO

The Reason View, Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism, and Strawsonian Compatibilism