Free will

The standard argument in favour of incompatibilism goes as follows. Free will requires the existence of genuine alternative possibilities. If my action was free, this means that I had several options of which I selected one. But determinism precludes the existence of alternative possibilities except the one that actually happens. More precisely, determinism states that there is only one possible evolution of the world given its initial state at a particular time and the laws. If we select the initial state of the world at a moment well before I was born, we may safely assume that my action cannot change it. So if determinism is true, I couldn’t act freely because I had no genuine alternatives: there was only one action which was possible for me to take. But compatibilists have several strategies of how to respond to this challenge. The main strategy is to deny that free will really requires the existence of alternative possibilities in the sense which is incompatible with determinism. But the question is now how to better define what free actions are. Several interpretations of the notion of freedom are available. One possible interpretation is that a free action is when there are no external constraints (physical threats, mind-controlling devices etc.). But this definition is not necessarily adequate, because there may be actions without external constraints and yet unfree (for instance, obsessive-compulsory behaviour). Moreover, some actions subjected to external constraints are nevertheless still free. If I am held at gunpoint, and the gunman demands my money, my decision to hand in my money is still free in the fundamental, metaphysical sense (I could refuse and risk death).

A marginally better analysis is that X acts freely iff X does what he/she wants (or, more carefully, that if X does what he wants, X acts freely). But it may be the case that X is forced by a mind-controlling device to do something that happens to agree with X’s wishes. We can correct this problem by adding the requirement that if X hadn’t wanted to do A, he wouldn’t have done A. Note that even in a deterministic world this statement may clearly come out true, and we don’t even have to consider a possible world which has a different past from our world – as Lewis pointed out, we can assume that a miracle made X not want to do A. But this definition of a free act raises some concerns. It may be true about a compulsive kleptomaniac that if he didn’t want to steal, he would refrain from stealing. The problem is though that this person is not free to choose what he wants, so the freedom is illusory in this case. And the incompatibilist would insist that we all are precisely in the same situation: we are not capable of choosing what we want, because our desires and beliefs are predetermined by the initial state of the world, and therefore we are not acting free exactly as the kleptomaniac from our example.

Harry Frankfurt chooses a different strategy of dealing with the argument for incompatibilism. He stresses that the existence of genuine alternatives is not necessary for the freedom of the will. He gives the following example to illustrate his point: suppose that John pushed Peter of his own will, but unbeknownst to John there was Larry nearby with a mind-controlling device who would have made John push Peter if he hadn’t wanted to do that. So actually there was no genuine open alternative to John’s action, and yet we would call him morally responsible of his action, and therefore we would have to assume that he acted freely. But the incompatibilist can formulate some objections to this argument. Firstly, it is not clear that in the described situation there were no genuine alternatives. We may argue that actually John had two options: he could push Peter of his own will, or he could be forced to do so. Secondly, even if we agree that there were no alternative possibilities for John’s action, this does not show that determinism was true in the described situation. If we assume determinism, the intervention by Larry was predetermined by the past, and the entire set-up that underlies the story is destroyed.

Finally, compatibilists attack their opponents by pointing out that actually indeterminism turns out to be incompatible with freedom of the will. This by itself does not prove that determinism is compatible with free will, for it may happen that both determinism and indeterminism are incompatible with our freedom. But this would imply that the existence of free will is impossible, and this does not look plausible. The argument is that if the world is indeterministic, then there are certain events which can be called ‘random’. These events, in turn, can cause individual actions to occur. But this means that a given action was taken not of free will, but as a result of random, indeterministic processes. It is as if our actions were governed by a throw of a die. But it may be replied that the ‘random’ event in question is not something external from the person who is about to act. Indeed, it is our decision to do this rather than that which, from the perspective of the deterministic stance is a random occurrence, in the sense that it is not uniquely fixed by the past events.

Reading:
B, Garrett, "Free will", pp. 112-117, What is this thing called metaphysics?