Abstract
This paper begins with an argument for the claim that the compatibilism question (i.e., the question of whether free will is compatible with determinism) is less relevant than it might seem to questions about the metaphysical nature of human decision-making processes. Next, libertarianism (i.e., the view that human beings possess an indeterministic, libertarian sort of free will) is defended against a number of objections, and it is argued that there’s a certain subset of our decisions (which can be called torn decisions) for which the following is true: If these decisions are appropriately undetermined at the moment of choice, then they are also free in a libertarian sort of way. This is an extremely important and surprising result; it entails that the question of whether libertarianism is true reduces to the straightforwardly empirical question of whether our torn decisions are in fact undetermined (in the appropriate way) at the moment of choice. Finally, the paper ends by arguing that as of right now, there is no compelling empirical evidence on either side of this question. In other words, the question of whether our torn decisions are appropriately undetermined is an open empirical question. And from this, it follows that the question of whether libertarianism is true is also an open empirical question.
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Notes
- 1.
You might think that for some of the so-called compatibilist kinds of freedom in the literature, it’s actually not obvious that they really are compatible with determinism. If this is right, then if it also turned out that one of these kinds of freedom was free will, then we couldn’t settle the compatibilism question by merely determining that free will was the given kind of freedom; we would also need to determine whether the given kind of freedom was compatible with determinism.
- 2.
Some people would say that the what-is-free-will question is essentially equivalent to the question, “Which kind(s) of freedom are required for moral responsibility?” But (a) I think it can be argued that the which-kinds-of-freedom-are-required-for-moral-responsibility question is also a semantic question (because it’s just a subquestion of the what-is-moral-responsibility question), and (b) even if it’s not a semantic question, it’s pretty clearly not about the metaphysical nature of human decision-making processes.
- 3.
Actually, to fully motivate (4), we would also need to argue that if our torn decisions are TDW-undetermined, then they satisfy the other requirements for appropriate nonrandomness, i.e., rationality and the plurality conditions. But, again, this point is easy to argue; see Balaguer (2010), Sects. 3.3.4–3.3.5.
- 4.
Pereboom raises a worry like this about my view in his (forthcoming).
- 5.
To argue for this, libertarians need to argue that if TDW-indeterminism isn’t true, then libertarianism isn’t true either – i.e., that if our torn decisions aren’t TDW-undetermined, then we aren’t L-free. Now, you might doubt this, because you might think that even if our torn decisions aren’t L-free, some of our non-torn decisions could be L-free. But it’s pretty easy to argue – and I do argue for this point in Balaguer (2010) – that if none of our torn decisions is L-free, then it’s very likely that we don’t make any L-free choices at all. The more important worry about the above thesis (i.e., the thesis that if TDW-indeterminism isn’t true, then libertarianism isn’t true either) is that even if our torn decisions aren’t TDW-undetermined (i.e., even if they aren’t wholly undetermined), they could still be partially undetermined in a certain way. To say that a torn decision is partially undetermined in the sense I have in mind here – or what comes to the same thing, partially determined – is to say that, at the moment of choice, factors external to the agent’s conscious reasons and thought causally influence (but don’t causally determine) which tied-for-best option is chosen. I think it can be argued that if our torn decisions are partially undetermined in this way, then they’re also partially L-free. Thus, to be precise, what we need to say here is not that if TDW-indeterminism isn’t true, then we aren’t L-free, but that if TDW-indeterminism isn’t true, then we aren’t fully L-free. And so to get the result that if TDW-indeterminism isn’t true, then libertarianism isn’t true, we need to be clear that we’re defining libertarianism as the view that humans are fully L-free.
- 6.
Of course, there are people who favor certain interpretations over others, but there is pretty widespread agreement among those who work on the foundations of quantum mechanics that we do not have any solid evidence for any of the various interpretations and that when people embrace these interpretations, they are engaged in speculation.
- 7.
Actually, Honderich thinks we can use arguments like the one in the text to motivate not just macro-level determinism but universal determinism as well.
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Balaguer, M. (2015). Determinism and Its Relevance to the Free-Will Question. In: Clausen, J., Levy, N. (eds) Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4707-4_121
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