Freedom and Determinism A N I NTRODUCTION James Petrik O n June 14, 1494, the grand mayor of St. Martin de Laon declared that the penalty for a case of infanticide in which the victim had been suffocated and disfigured would be death by hanging. Given that the crime was horrendous, it is not particularly noteworthy that a fifteenth century French court would impose the death penalty. What is noteworthy about the case is who or more appropriately what the defendant was. The death penalty was to be imposed on a jeune pourceau, a young pig. 1 There is, of course, nothing unusual about the decision to destroy a dangerous animal. What is likely to strike us as bizarre, however, is that the decision to destroy such an animal should be made in the context of a criminal trial with the animal (not its owner) as defendant. No less bizarre is that the manner of killing the beast was one traditionally used as a form of punishment. The offending pig was not simply to be taken out back and knocked over the head. No, as the purpose was punishment and not mere destruction, the swine was to be hanged in a public forum, and that only after a period of incarceration. The reason that the notion of an animal trial strikes us as so odd, of course, is the same reason we would find it absurd to hold accountable an inanimate object like a volcano: we are strongly inclined to believe that human beings alone among natural things are morally responsible agents who ought to be held morally accountable for what they do. We tend, that is, to think that we humans are sometimes capable of acting in a special way, a way that is unique to us and justifies ascription of moral responsibility. And that we have this special way of acting is what we are after when we describe ourselves as free. Thus it is that philosophical discussions about human freedom are, at bottom, simply attempts to decide whether human beings really do have this special way of acting and in what this special way of acting consists. Though the problem of human freedom can be put fairly simply, the actual theories that philosophers have advanced on the topic of human freedom are varied, complex, and nuanced. Nonetheless, without too much dis-
FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION tortion they can all be placed within one of the following three categories: hard determinism, the theory that all human actions are causally necessitated and therefore no human actions are free; libertarianism, the theory that some human actions are free and therefore are not causally determined; and compatibilism (or soft determinism ), the theory that some human actions are free even though all human actions are causally determined. Compatibilists are so called because they believe that freedom is consistent with a thoroughgoing causal determinism. Hard determinists and libertarians, on the other hand, are sometimes referred to as incompatibilists, for both assert that freedom and causal determinism are mutually exclusive or incompatible. The remainder of this introduction will be used to provide a brief sketch of each of these theories, including some of the issues motivating them. THE INCOMPATIBILISMS: HARD DETERMINISM AND LIBERTARIANISM Determinism is the theory that the way the universe was at any past moment uniquely fixes the way it will be in any future moment. Given that there was a way the world was before there were any human beings, what determinism implies for human beings is the following: everything that is true of every human being including all their feelings, desires, choices and actions was fixed before any human being existed. The present orbit of Mercury, the number of galaxies in the universe, the chemical composition of the comet Hale-Bopp, and your decision to have that second helping of yams are all of a piece on a causal determinist view of the universe. They were all equally and irretrievably fixed by the initial stages of cosmic history. If determinism is true, it is natural to believe that human beings are not sources of action in a special way and thus are not free. This conclusion is reinforced for the incompatibilist by recognizing that an action can be free only if the person who performed the action could have done otherwise; however, determinism eliminates the possibility that the individual could have done otherwise and therefore removes the possibility of human freedom. Hard determinists claim that determinism is true and thus conclude that there is no freedom. This is the conclusion reached by seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza believed that all finite things including human beings are mere modes of God, modes which have emanated of necessity from the Divine nature. Spinoza thus believed that things could not have been other than they are and went on to conclude that human beings are not free. Human beings are no more immune from neces-
FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION sitation than anything else in nature and thus have no special way of acting that would count as free. A human being is not, Spinoza insisted, a kingdom unto him- or herself. There are no borders that separate human action from the causal fabric of nature generally; thus, human beings have no special sovereignty over the things that they do. Spinoza did believe that we can continue to praise and blame human beings for the things that they do; however, we should not think that these practices differ from our efforts to protect ourselves from nature in other respects. We inoculate our children to ward off disease, we build dykes to hold back floodwaters, we take cover from lightning and we punish dangerous human beings. But there is no sense in which the dangerous human being is a special case in that the punishment is deserved. No, the microbes and the floodwaters and thunderstorms and villains simply do what they are causally necessitated to do. And when we take steps to ward off their harmful effects, we simply do what we are necessitated to do: act to preserve our own welfare. Confronted by the challenge that hard determinism would excuse all wickedness, Spinoza replied [W]hat of it? Wicked men are no less to be feared and no less dangerous when they are necessarily wicked. 2 But the conclusion reached by hard determinists has proven too stark a conclusion for advocates of libertarian freedom. Such philosophers find it implausible to conclude that human beings are not sources of action in a special way. Indeed, it seems rather preposterous to believe that punishing a wrongdoer or rewarding a hero is ultimately no different from building a dyke to hold back water or reinforcing animal behavior by dispensing a treat. But where one encounters an absurd conclusion in one s reasoning, it is clear that a mistake must have been made somewhere along the line. For libertarians the mistake is found in accepting determinism. The hard determinist is right, says the libertarian, to recognize that determinism abolishes human freedom. Since it is clear that human beings do act in a special way that justifies ascriptions of moral responsibility, the conclusion that should be drawn is that human beings sometimes are immune to the causal forces that determine all other events within the universe. Faced with a choice between determinism and human freedom, therefore, the libertarian rejects determinism. The fact that it is appropriate to hold humans responsible for their actions shows that human beings are free and that determinism is therefore false.
FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION COMPATIBILISM That all human actions are causally determined does imply that the specialness of free human actions can t be explained by the absence of causation; however, it does not, according to the compatibilist, imply that human action is never special in the sense needed for moral responsibility. Though all human actions are as causally necessitated as the motions of the tides, there may still be other important respects in which certain human actions differ from other causally determined events. Lions and lemmings share the significant characteristic of being animals, but we would not deem that a good reason to conclude that there are no differences of moment between the two species. Why, then, should we take the determinism that human actions share with all other events as showing that there is no significant difference to be drawn between certain human actions and other causally determined events? When one asks this question, according to the compatibilist, one is in position to see that the special status of free human action does not depend on its being uncaused. What accounts for the specialness of free action is that it flows from a choice made by the person. Consider the plight of Ms. Monty who failed to make an important business meeting because a severe ice storm made it impossible for her to drive up the hill leading away from her house. In such circumstances we would be loath to blame her. She chose to come and did her best to come, but external conditions prevented her from acting on the choice she made. But if Ms. Monty failed to make the meeting because she chose to go ice-skating instead, we would certainly be willing to hold her responsible for her derelict behavior. And we would do so without feeling any need to puzzle over whether her choice was itself causally determined by other psychological factors, such as desires, emotions, beliefs, and character traits. Thus it is that the issue of whether an individual could have chosen otherwise is not relevant to the decision to hold a person morally accountable. And thus it is that free for the compatibilist means free to do as one chooses where this is understood in terms of the absence of external factors that would impede the efficacy of one s choices. There is no need to insist that the choice itself be uncaused. Indeed, the compatibilist finds it hard to see how the choice s being uncaused would help make sense of moral responsibility, for a choice s being uncaused would seem to sever any meaningful connection we might draw between it and the person to be held responsible for it. If anything, what s needed to make sense of holding an individual responsible for a chosen action is a more robust psychological story in which the chosen
FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION action is seen to flow causally from the individual s desires, emotion, and more enduring character traits, like pettiness or kindness. Insofar as such inner states are constitutive of the person, the fact that such states cause a person s choices serves to strengthen, not diminish, the sense in which the person should be seen as the source of the chosen action for which he or she is being held accountable. THE TERMS OF THE DEBATE As is evident from the foregoing discussion, there are really two issues of central importance to philosophical treatments of freedom. The first issue is whether human beings are as causally necessitated as the rest of the natural order. Hard determinists and compatibilists insist that they are. Libertarians insist that they are not. The second issue is the question of what it means to say that an action is done freely. Hard determinists and libertarians (the incompatibilists) line up on one side of this issue, alleging that what it means to say that an action is free is that the person who performed the action was not causally determined and thus could have done otherwise. (Of course, the hard determinist believes that this never happens and thus that there are no free actions; nonetheless, this is, according to the hard determinist, one of the things that would be required for an action to be free if any free actions there were.) Compatibilists, on the other side of the divide, contend that an action is free if the action was chosen by the person and thus was not produced by external constraint and compulsion. The first issue is a factual issue; thus, it is natural to look to the sciences to answer it. There are, however, two reasons it would be a mistake to think that science is in a position to provide a definitive answer to this question. The first reason is simply that the sciences are not at least yet able to supply an unequivocal answer to the question of whether science views all events as causally determined. If anything, developments in physics and especially in quantum mechanics over the last century seem to be heading in the direction of maintaining that there is a measure of indeterminacy built into nature, but the matter is far from settled. (A good place to look at what science can tell us on the issue of freedom and determinism is John Earman s A Primer on Determinism.) The second reason it would be a mistake to think that science might provide a definitive answer to the question of whether all human actions are causally necessitated is the following. Even if science ultimately comes down on the side of unqualified causal determinism, moving from this conclusion to the claim that all human actions are fully causally
FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION necessitated is a legitimate inference only if one adopts a realist understanding of science, i.e., if one believes that science is in the business of uncovering the true nature of the reality that underlies our surface experience of the world. Many philosophers and scientists, however, believe that this is a mistaken view of science. According to some such philosophers and scientists, the so-called instrumentalists, science is merely a tool or instrument that can be used to make predictions about the world of our experience. According to these philosophers, science does not unveil a deeper and truer level of reality; therefore, if science does embrace unqualified determinism, this means only that determinism has turned out to be the most effective predictive tool there is. It does not mean that underlying causes really causally necessitate all human actions. Human actions might be as undetermined as ever, but viewing them as determined is merely the most effective way to handle them in science. The second issue really amounts to a debate over the correct definition of free as this term is applied to human action. The key to resolving this issue, or so it has seemed to most philosophers engaged in the debate, is to focus on the close connection that obtains between the concept of freedom and the concept of moral responsibility. As will be seen in the following readings, each side to the debate points out that the one thing a decent theory of freedom had better be able to do is make sense of our practice of holding people morally accountable for those deeds they do freely. And then each side appeals to strong intuitions about the conditions of moral responsibility to show the superiority of its view. The incompatibilists assert that a condition on holding an individual responsible for an action is that the individual could have done otherwise; a condition that can only be fulfilled if determinism is false. At that point, of course, the hard determinists and the libertarians part company; the hard determinists insisting that determinism is true and that there is no moral responsibility, the libertarians insisting that persons are sometimes responsible and thus determinism is false. The compatibilist, on the other hand, highlights the importance of being able to causally trace the chosen action back to the responsible person as its source, a condition that can be satisfied only if the choice that caused the action was itself caused by other factors that are components of the person who performed the action. Whereas the incompatibilist emphasizes the need that the person be able to avoid doing what she did, the compatibilist emphasizes the requirement that the person be the source of the action.
FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION READING PHILOSOPHICALLY As you work through the following essays, strive to do so philosophically. Do not, that is, content yourself with merely understanding the various theories and arguments presented. Strive also to subject these theories and arguments to your own critical evaluation. You might even start by subjecting this introduction to some critical scrutiny. I began by suggesting that the public hanging of a hog is a preposterous act, and I m willing to stand by that; but before you agree too quickly, you might reflect on the fact that this hanging of a nonhuman animal was not an isolated event. Indeed, the late medieval and early renaissance periods were littered with such cases. Apparently not all humans are as willing to find such a hanging as preposterous as I. By simply dismissing such acts as preposterous, perhaps I m missing some philosophical insight that might be gained by reflecting on what motivated our ancestors to treat nonhuman animals as moral agents. And just as I have taken certain points for granted in this introduction, there are many principles and concepts that the authors of the following essays will have in common and will seem to have taken for granted. Feel free to probe and question where they do not. Feel free to criticize those claims they hold most dear. Be prepared, of course, to back up your criticism with well-reasoned argumentation, for that is the way of philosophy. But be willing to question those claims that others take for granted, for that too is the way of philosophy. Who knows; perhaps you ll be the one to achieve fame by winning a posthumous acquittal for the homicidal hog of Laon. ENDNOTES 1 A description of this case can be found on pp. 306 7 of E. P. Evans s fascinating work, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe s Animal Trials (London: Farber & Farber, 1988). 2 Baruch Spinoza. Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters, Second Edition, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 287. SUGGESTED FURTHER READING Earman, John. A Primer on Determinism. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986. Fischer, John Martin and Mark Ravizza, eds. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hill, Christopher, ed. Free Will. Philosophical Topics 24:2 (Fall 1996).
FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM: AN INTRODUCTION Hook, Sidney, ed. Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science. New York: Collier Books, 1974. Klein, Martha. Determinism, Blameworthiness and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Lehrer, Keith, ed. Freedom and Determinism. New York: Random House, 1966. Van Inwagen, Peter. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.