Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It by R. E. Hobart (= Dickinson S. Miller) Mind, Vol XLIII, Number 169 (January, 1934) Preamble -- Free will and determinism are compatible. In fact, the former requires the latter. I am not maintaining that determinism is true; only that it is true in so far as we have free will. All that is here said is that absence of determination, if and so far as it exists, is no gain to freedom, but sheer loss of it; no advantage to the moral life, but blank subtraction from it. (2) Notice a particular choice of terminology on Hobart s part: When I speak below of the indeterminist I mean the libertarian indeterminist, that is, him who believes in free will and holds that it involves indetermination. (2) 1
Failure to see that free will requires determination is failure of the analytical imagination. This failure is epitomized in the story of the peasants who were shown the workings of a locomotive yet insisted that inside it there had to be a horse. Self and Character (Libertarian) Indeterminism: A free act of will is an act of the self. The acts of will or volitions are spontaneous, not caused (3-4), but they cause physical acts. [In later times this view developed a variant called the theory of agency, in which a free or spontaneous act of the will is self-caused.] What we judge morally are selves or characters, settled sets of motives [and dispositions]. By character we mean the sum of a man s tendencies to action, considered in their relative strength; or that sum in so far as it bears upon morals. (3) Indeterminists, in cutting the self off from character by making volitions spontaneous, make moral evaluation of persons (continuing selves) impossible. The spontaneous self is an inner duplicate of the person or character, like the horse in the 2
locomotive, a failure of the analytical imagination. But the indeterminist cannot escape the basic dilemma. Either this self decides to act in a certain way because, on the whole, it preferred to decide in that way [that is, acts of the self are determined by one s character] or the decision was an underived event, a rootless and sourceless event. Indeterminists tacitly think of selves as acting in the former manner (in order that selves might be held responsible) while overtly claiming that they act in the latter manner (to preserve freedom ). If in conceiving the self you detach it from all motives or tendencies, what you have is not morally admirable or condemnable, not a morally characterizable self at all. Hence it is not subject to reproach. You cannot call a self good because of its courageous free action, and then deny that its action was determined by its character. In calling it good because of that action you have implied that the action came from its goodness (which means goodness of 3
character) and was a sign thereof. By their fruits ye shall know them. (5) In proportion as an act of volition starts of itself without cause it is exactly, so far as the freedom of the individual is concerned, as if it had been thrown into his mind from without by a freakish demon. It is exactly like it in this respect, that in neither case does the volition arise from what the man is, cares for or feels allegiance to; it does not come out of him. In proportion as it is undetermined, it is just as if his legs should suddenly spring up and carry him off where he did not prefer to go. Far from constituting freedom, that would mean, in the exact measure in which it took place, the loss of freedom. In fine, then, just so far as the volition is undetermined, the self can neither be praised nor blamed for it, since it is not the act of the self. (7) Freedom (1) possession of a power [that is, to say that A possesses a power to do X is, at least, to say that A can do X, so possession of a power is a modal notion], and (2) the 4
absence of interference (restraint, constraint) in the exercise of the power. Can I can will anything, and can will effectively anything that my body will enact. (10) The can here expresses a power. A power is inherently dispositional and depends on laws. That is, A person has a power if it is a fact that when [that is, if] he sets himself in the appropriate manner to produce a certain event, that event will follow. (8) One has the power to do things that one does not do. This strongly suggests that any account of the notion of a power will involve counterfactual conditionals will require adverting to what would have happened in situations where I did not try to exercise the power. [Hobart simply asserts that can is univocal, that it has but one meaning. On this view, while its meaning is constant, the set of sentences assumed as background with which the given sentence is assumed to be consistent or compossible is context-dependent. This is polysemy. 5
Others think it s better to distinguish this can from a different sense of can that expresses nomic possibility. In this latter (nomic) sense, of course, I could not have willed or done otherwise, given the laws of physics and some previous state of the world, if determinism is true. Nonetheless, I had the power to do otherwise (because I would have done otherwise if I had tried to), and that is the sense of can (according to Hobart) relevant to moral evaluations. For example, I can jump six inches high. This claim is true, when I do not jump, or try to jump, or want to jump. It says that I could, if I wished to. It is also true that I cannot jump six feet high. This claim also is true, when I do not jump, or try to jump, or want to jump. It says that I could not, even if I wished to. So notice that, at times when I have no wish whatsoever to jump or any thought of jumping, of the following two sentences the first is true and the second is false: 1. If I wish to, I can jump six inches high. 2. If I wish to, I can jump six feet high. 6
These conditional sentences, then, cannot be represented as material conditionals. Each has (by hypothesis) a false antecedent (at times when I have no wish to jump). Were they material conditionals, both would have to be true. Rather, they are called in the trade counterfactual conditionals. The analysis of counterfactual conditionals is no fussy little grammatical exercise. What makes the analysis of can complex is the connection between the notions of power, disposition, counterfactual conditional and law. As Hobart says, Thus power depends upon, or rather consists in, a law. (8) The proper understanding of each of these concepts and their interconnections is a vast and still open topic in itself. David Hume famously thought that the notion of power was meaningless: All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined but never connected. And as we can have no idea of anything, which never appears to our outward sense or inward 7
sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be, that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasoning, or in private life. (On Necessary Connection, II) But if one is allowed the notion of a law of nature and so the notion of nomic necessity, perhaps powers can be brought back into respectable metaphysical discourse. As an opening suggestion with respect to power, one might suppose that I have the power to do A iff there is some nomically possible world in which I do A. Clearly, this has to be a world sufficiently near that I exist in it. And also clearly I can have the power to do A at time t even if I do not do A at that time.] Hobart has a simple [overly simple, I think] model of decision-making: wish will act. I have the power to will as I wish and to act as I will, so I (at least sometimes) have the power to act as I wish. All this is consistent with, and in fact requires, determinism, since the relation between these elements is supposed to be lawful. 8
[His model might sound quite a bit more up-todate if one substitutes preference or preference structure for wish, as he does at one point.] Wherever there is a power, there is a law. In it the power wholly consists. A man s power to will as he wishes is simply the law that his will follows his wish. (9) My free power, then, is not an exemption from law but in its inmost essence an embodiment of law. (9) Freedom the absence of interference or restraint in the exercise of a power (9). [Notice that, as one example, if I am on a highway driving at (say) 80 km/hour, it is true that my car can go 100 km/hour but not 1,000 km/hour. And there is no interference or restraint holding my car back. But it does not seem that my car is free, even though it has a causal power in the absence of restraint. So Hobart s conditions may be necessary, but do not seem to be sufficient for freedom. An analysis of a term or concept is generally thought to be a set of conditions for it that are 9
individually necessary and jointly sufficient. What other conditions, then, need to be added to make the above formula an analysis of the concept of freedom?] Compulsion The indeterminist conceives that according to determinism the self is carried along by wishes to acts which it is thus necessitated to perform. This whole mode of speaking distinguishes the self from the wishes and represents it as under their dominion. This is the initial error. This is what leads the indeterminist wrong on all the topics of his problem. In fact, the moral self is the wishing self. The wishes are its own. It cannot be described as under their dominion, for it has no separate predilections to be overborne by them; they themselves are its predilections. The answer that has ordinarily been given is surely correct; all compulsion is causation, but not all causation is compulsion. Seize a man and violently force him to do something, and he is compelled also caused to do it. But induce him to do it by giving him reasons and his doing it is caused but not compelled. (13) Passivity It is not clarifying to ask, Is a volition free or determined? It is the person who is free, and his particular volition that is 10
determined. Freedom is something that we can attribute only to a continuing being, and he can have it only so far as the particular transient volitions within him are determined. (13) Hobart compares the will to ligaments. We can t move without either, but each is bound to the rest of the process (ligaments to bones, will to what) by tight causal bonds. Without these bonds, motion is impossible. Spontaneity An act or utterance is spontaneous if it springs from the inclinations or impulses of the being himself. Deny this (causal) connection, and you deny spontaneity. Source Indeterminists typically claim that persons are the absolute source of their actions. Is there any reason, however, why a source of an action (say, a person s will) can not itself have sources? According to Hobart, there is not. (And if so, then absolute adds no content whatsoever to the expression absolute source.) One merely needs to distinguish clearly: 11
flowing from this source and previously from another from not flowing from this source but from another. The libertarian confuses the two, compounding the mistake by confusing causation with compulsion. Prediction To predict a person s conduct need not be repellent. (15) On the other hand to predict a person s behaviour may indicate that he is more naïve or stereotyped than they would like to think. Material Fate [Replies to an article by Eddington in Philosophy, January 1933, but he seems to have misread Eddington, who, influenced by quantum mechanics, was an indeterminist.] Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event. (16) 12
Even supposing that materialism is true, determinism does not amount to this kind of fatalism. In this case, the mental struggle has (or is) a physical struggle counterpart which, so to speak, represents it and is in a manner its agent in the physical world. Then outcomes depend on this struggle. This observation, according to Hobart, refutes the particular strain of fatalism (given in what is known as the Idle Argument ) that claims that what will happen will happen necessarily, and so will happen whether I try to prevent pr promote it. Hence (this sort of fatalism claims) there is no need to take precautions against a bad outcome and no gain by taking actions to secure a good outcome. *Self as Product and Producer -- A familiar objection. How can one be praised or blamed if he was framed by nature as he is? A man can surely be blamed only for what he does himself, and he did not make his original character; he simply found it on his hands. Hobart just digs in his heels and denies this (essentially repeating what he has said earlier). 13
Morality has its eye upon acts, but an act is fleeting, it cannot be treasured and cherished. A quality can be, it lasts. And the reason why it is treasured and cherished is that it is the source of acts It is the stuff people are made of [that is, character] that commands our admiration and affection. Where it came from is another question (18) Note: on the top of page 22 when Hobart writes that it is the opposite doctrine that must revolutionize our attitude towards moral judgments, context makes it clear that he must be thinking of indeterminism as this doctrine--opposite (of course) to determinism. Responsibility The basic argument is reiterated, quite elegantly. The parent produced the man, none the less the man is responsible for his acts. We can truly says that the earth bears apples, but quite as truly that trees bear apples. The earth bears the apples by bearing trees. It does not resent the claim of the trees to bear the apples, or try to take the business out of the trees 14
hands. Nor need the trees feel their claim nullified by the earth s part in the matter. There is no rivalry between them. A man is a being with free will and responsibility; where that being came from is, I repeat, another story. (24) Desert. Hobart s theory of punishment. I believe that the ideal ends of the theory of justice are (1) to see that all possible restitution is made, (2) to see as far as possible that the malefactor does not repeat the act, and (3) as far as possible to render the act less likely on the part of others. (25) Worth thinking about, but it s not metaphysics. Some Comments I. Daniel Dennett argues that philosophers such as Ayer and Hobart, who argue that free will requires determinism, must be wrong. There are some ways our world could be macroscopically indeterministic, without that fact remotely threatening the coherence of the 15
intentionalistic conceptual scheme of action description presupposed by claims of moral responsibility. (p. 292 of On Giving Libertarians What They Say They want in Brainstorms). Dennett s argument here is that we could introduce a randomizer to choose between various particular ways to implement a certain kind of action when we are indifferent to the choice amongst the various ways. Say I am confronted with 200 identical cans of soup in a grocery store. Which do I choose? We could have a mechanism for selecting one arbitrarily without, it would seem, leaving us not responsible for the action. Notice that Hobart may have seen this sort of response coming. Consider that he wrote: But it is not here affirmed that there are no small exceptions, no slight undetermined swervings, no ingredient of absolute chance. All that is here said is that such absence of determination, if and so far as it exists, is no gain to freedom, but sheer loss to it; no advantage to the moral life, but blank subtraction from it. (2) 16
If Hobart just slightly weakened the last sentence, it might well meet Dennett s objection. He would merely have to regard the absence of determination as no gain to freedom or morality and sometimes (or perhaps normally) a loss to or subtraction from them. The sort of indeterminism imagined by Dennett is not likely to satisfy a libertarian, as Dennett observes. The libertarian would not be relieved to learn that although his decision to murder his neighbor was quite determined, the style and trajectory of the death blow was not. (292) II. Free will. We have the power to do as we wish, where these wishes are in turn products of our own character. [Hobart doesn t say this explicitly. This idea seems to be implicit in what he does say.] This definition defeats (it seems to me) Taylor s objection that a person who meets all the conditions imposed by Taylor s version of soft determinism to ensure freedom could also be the puppet of an ingenious physiologist who implants volitions, since the implanted 17
volitions have no relation to one s own character. We could not have free will in Hobart s sense unless there were a causal connection between our character and our choices and our actions. And the buck just stops at character, according to Hobart in the section Self as Product and Producer. III. Indeterminism? Suppose there were two characters, A and B (say) and two actions, R (a right action) and W (a wrong one). Suppose that the laws connecting will to action are indeterministic, and according to these laws, for character A in relevant situations R has high probability of occurring and W low probability, whereas for B the probabilities are reversed. Could we not praise character A and blame B, even given indeterminism? Is there, however, a way in which an agency theorist or libertarian can parlay this idea into an idea of freedom they would find acceptable? I do not see how. IV. Hypothesis. The question in III suggests the hypothesis that what is at issue in Hobart s paper is not the question of whether 18
determinism or indeterminism holds but whether there is a lawlike connection at all between character and will (like the ligaments that connect muscles to bones). It may be that libertarians (or agency theorists) really suppose that the actions of Self are simply not governed by laws of any sort, deterministic or indeterministic. But this idea is really quite remarkable. What, aside from our own (inflated?) sense of dignity or worth, could possibly justify the remarkable assertion the we somehow are essentially outside of or different from all the rest of the natural world? Man can do what he wills, but he can not will what he wills. (Arthur Schopenhauer) Is this a fatal criticism of Compatibilism? 19