I think a sort of converse of the Dilemma of Determinism highlights the degree to which the self is central to free will debates. I am using 'caused' rather than 'determined' here, however; probably the D-word can be substituted without loss if desired. Consider the following:
1. If an agent is to have free will, her actions must be caused.
Argument: Free will involves causal control of one's own actions; a free willed agent must be able to cause his or her own actions.
2. If an agent is to have free will, her actions must be uncaused.
Argument: Free will involves causal control of one's own actions; a free willed agent must not be totally constrained by things external to him or her.
If we take (1) and (2) straight we get an antinomy - but it's not much of an antinomy, since the arguments for the opposing pair suggest exactly where the issue is. Free willed agents or selves (on this understanding anyway) must be causes of their own actions without having been caused to act in those ways by anything outside of them.
If you look at the problem in this way, it's possible to see various forms of compatibilism as 'widening the gap' between the inner and outer causes of behavior in various ways. Hume (on one reading) is the narrowest gap possible: the outside causes form us, and our inner states cause our actions, so 'we're both free and determined'. Frankfurt widens the gap by introducing second-order desires, which create more internal system complexity. The idea of widening the gap also might be used to characterize some of Dennett's ideas about freedom.
What the libertarian wants is a self in which the gap has been widened to infinity, in a certain sense.
Following out this line of thought one might explore a couple of things:
(a) There's a sort of 'game of freedom' approach possible here which might allow compatibilism to approximate libertarianism in the same way that the infinite limit of discovery by a rational community of inquirers is sometimes used to approximate truth. In other words, one might suggest that while the freedom we _have_ is always compatibilist in character, it is always open to us as human beings to widen the gap farther by introducing additional complexity and/or higher-order operations to our mental life; to abstract. This approach might also be used to connect freedom to mind in other senses, since the human ability to abstract is often taken to be pretty central to our intelligence, self-consciousness, rationality, etc. by various authors.
(b) Kane's view, or even a mini-Kane view without the psychological elements (SFAs), seems like an important test for revealing what else the libertarian might need. The reason for this is as follows: let's say that there's an indeterminism in the agent which leads somehow to the agent's actions. If we allow indeterministic causation, then the agent can cause his or her actions by virtue of such an indeterministic state. And since it's an indeterministic state, the actions are not caused by anything outside the agent. Therefore, the mini-Kane self counts as a free self in the sense of resolving the tension between 1 and 2 above. Is it a free self? In effect Kane adds a bunch of compatibilist-style psychology to this basic mini-Kane position to make it more palatable - but I'm not sure that stuff is what's central in the end. What's central is whether containing a locus of indeterminism within ourselves is really a source of freedom in the end. Things like this have been thought before - the idea that we discover our freedom in madness, Dionysian spontaneity, Kierkegaardian irrational leaps of faith, whatever - but do we really want to accept them? It seems like we need an argument for or against. Van Inwagen offers the 'replay argument' against - should we be persuaded by that or not?
Thoughts?
I think maybe what the Kane theory shows is that it's not enough for those who want traditional free will for the agent to be the cause, even if there's lots of responsibility-entailing and self-defining psychological machinery in place. The agent has to be a _controlling_ or _determining_ cause of its actions.
ReplyDeleteIf that's right, then to defend TFW you either need to be a dualist or you need agents to be somehow impervious to outside causes. On the emergentist account, the higher-order structure can be caused to exist or not exist by outside entities, but once it exists it (by hypothesis anyway) has new causal powers that are not directly dependent on its external environment. So is that freedom?
The reason I say this is that if you need interior determining machinery it's hard to see how it could include an interior indeterministic component.