Actually, April Fools Day is the best explanation for all the talk of Donald Trump running for a third term! A pity Trump doesn't know who the fool is (the one he sees in the mirror).
I've never really got how the causal picture of libertarian free will is supposed to work. People always want some part that's uncaused (to avoid determinism), and yet they don't want it to be uncaused (they're not okay with randomness). I haven't yet gotten a coherent picture out of it.
This was (and to at least some extent, still is) my biggest difficulty with libertarian free will. Either it's caused (in which case Galen Strawson's Basic Argument applies and moral responsibility is impossible) or it's random (in which case we still aren't responsible, any more than we are responsible for the output of a random number generator). I could almost talk myself into buying libertarian free will, but the only way I could make it make sense was by losing the personal moral responsibility that is supposed to be one of its most attractive features.
I struggled with this basic problem from the age of 15 (when I distinctly remember arguing about it with my parents at the dinner table) through the age of 33, so more than half my life.
During the final few years of this, when I really decided I needed to Figure This Out, I came across three things that helped me. These led me to conclude that libertarian free will, though not necessarily *demonstrable*, can at least be described *coherently*, consistent with the facts of the world, with some motives for buying into that description:
* "Aquinas on Free Will and Intellectual Determinism" by Tobias Hoffman and Cyrille Michon: https://philarchive.org/archive/HOFAOF (and the Thomistic texts it extensively cites)
* Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will, by Timothy O'Connor. Hardest book I ever read (and not just because of the subject matter; O'Connor is simply not a very good prose writer), but quite rewarding.
Of course, I read many other things during those years (plenty of Derk Pereboom!), but these three stand out to my memory as helpful for the libertarian side.
I would still characterize my belief in libertarian free will as "fragile" and "a bit confused." This is probably not surprising, since I am naturally inclined toward incompatibilist determinism, I spent 18 years unclear on how anything else could possibly be the case, and I only "converted" to libertarianism gradually over the past couple of years. It is a fledgling libertarianism, one I doubt I could effectively defend in a serious debate. Nor can I deny that my conversion had a lot to do with my other intellectual commitments. (It's not a simple matter to be an incompatibilist determinist AND believe the claims of Christianity!)
However, those things helped me considerably, and, if I ever did go back to determinism, it would be with a much more sophisticated account of it, thanks to having read these things.
Very probable that something here is going over my head (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#LibeAccoSour doesn't seem like something that is skim-able), but am interested why if we believe in a metaphysics with immaterial souls, we can't have determinism for the material and allow the immaterial to 'cause' non-deterministic actions (why should the immaterial by chained by determinism)?
Do you want there to be causal influences from the material upon the immaterial at all? (I should hope so!)
But people don't want their choices to be arbitrary or random, but to be based on things. I would suggest, that, insofar as choices are based on things, they are determined, and insofar as they are not, they are not.
The problem arises because of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which most people intuitively accept: when something comes about, it can only be because something else caused it to come about. This is just as true in the immaterial realm as in the material.
When we make a decision -- say, about which flavor of ice cream to get -- we usually have some reason. Our intellect apprehended that we like chocolate best, so we got chocolate. Or our intellect (having recently apprehended how tight the household budget is right now) deliberated and concluded that chocolate was too expensive, so we got vanilla. Or our intellect apprehended that milk has been bothering our digestion lately, so we got a sorbet.
If these reasons fully explain our decision, then our decision was determined just as surely as if purely material factors did it. We can't be held morally responsible for accepting and acting upon a judgment of the intellect, either. The intellect isn't our our direct control. (If it were, I could just decide to understand Calculus II, and, let me assure you, that did not work!) So even the immaterial, insofar as it is governed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason, turns out to be determinist.
Perhaps God sends you supernatural graces that influence you to make the best choice. (Unbeknownst to you, but benknownst to God, buying vanilla will lead you meet your new best friend, who will save your soul in a coming hard time.) But this doesn't make your choice any more free. In fact, it seems to make it *less* free. If you aren't responsible for your own intellect's output, how much less are you responsible for graces God shoots at you?
Of course, in the end, I do think that you are right. I think that there is a human faculty, which is influenced by the intellect but not governed by it, which either accepts or refuses grace. (It does a handful of other things, but this is the most important.) The movement of this faculty towards or away from grace is explained partly by the rationales offered by the intellect but, ultimately, the explanation is simply "I chose it." This is the fundamental, ultimate explanation for the decision and cannot be further explained. It is an unmoved movement. That, as I see it, is free will.
But it is not obvious that this faculty exists. It is *coherent* to assert that the faculty exists, but the evidence for it is pretty scant. The determinist really can make a pretty convincing go at explaining away absolutely *everything* about human, angelic, and even *divine* action in terms of sufficient reasons that are outside the agent's ultimate control. I wrote the first few paragraphs of this comment, then, to illustrate the problem that I think libertarian free will can, with difficulty, solve. Strawson's Basic Argument (which probably does a better job explaining than I just did) doesn't care whether one's reasons for acting a certain way are material or not. ( https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Impossibility%20of%20Moral%20Responsibility%20-%20Galen%20Strawson.pdf )
In fact, I still *do* think today that the vast majority of our decisions -- including nearly all decisions about ice cream flavors! -- are fully determined, even the immaterial elements, and are therefore not truly free. Thanks to the intellect's tendency to provide overwhelming conclusions, plus force of habit, truly free decisions are probably fairly rare -- and so it is extremely important to make the right choice when grace offers you one.
(And, no, you're right, that article is not skimmable. It took me months to get through it, to be honest, and I had to read a number of the footnoted articles to make sense of it, and looking at it again tonight gives me a mild sandpaper shiver. I don't think I'm a dummy, but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy often makes me feel like one.)
These were mostly disappointing. I could only read the first of the Campbell articles, but it wasn't compelling. I don't agree with Strawson; I don't think that we need to be the determiner of our character to have moral responsibility. (As, obviously, we are to quite an extent, not, and yet we do. See also Romans 9.)
The Thomas was the most interesting. I'm not sure whether they're reading him correctly, but it's some nice work.
My inclinations are towards compatibilism. (Unsure as to determinism, at least, physical determinism, due to quantum mechanics.)
I should probably see what Voetius has to say some time. I know Van Asselt and Beck both wrote books that touched on him on this matter.
Then I'm sorry that what was helpful for me was unhelpful for you!
I think that, as difficult a time as libertarianism has explaining itself coherently, compatibilism has a much, much harder row to hoe. We obviously are not the *sole* determiner of our character. Far from it. Even Timothy O'Connor, in his account of libertarianism, describes us as "not-wholly-moved movers," which is a pretty modest claim when you get right down to it.
Yet it seems to me that we must be *a* determiner of our character for any account of moral responsibility to make any sense at all -- and that determination, even if it is only a sliver of what goes into a decision, must be fully self-determined in the way Strawson describes. Who could possibly blame someone for an act that was brought about entirely by forces not under their control? It would be like cursing a dropped book for falling on your toe, like blaming a gun for killing a man instead of the person who pulled the trigger. It would be like damning a pre-contact Indian for not having been baptized when he never heard the name of Christ -- a doctrine the Christian Church, at least, has always rejected, back to Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine. What the compatibilists call "free will," then, simply doesn't look very much *like* the thing I call "free will." Compatibilist free will seems to be a different thing wearing the same label -- and it lacks what I take to be free will's most important feature.
When applied to God, moreover, compatibilist doctrines make Him look -- at least to me -- like an absolute monster, creating the damned *for the purpose of damning them* (which is several steps beyond mere foreknowledge or weak predestination). On the whole, God does not seem monstrous, nor do I think He would have written a law of justice onto our hearts only to so fully overthrow it. My belief in determinism, then, led me for many years to very strong sympathy for various flavors of universalism. (Indeed, I strongly suspect I wasn't alone in that, and I would bet good money it's behind the current vogue for universalism. In my experience, scratch a universalist, find a determinist.)
I suspect quantum mechanics will ultimately prove to be deterministic, but, even if it doesn't, any true randomness down in the quantum realm seems to cash out up here in the Newtonian world as determinism anyway, so I'm not really sure it *matters*, at least for the moral-responsibility concerns that animate me the most.
>Who could possibly blame someone for an act that was brought about entirely by forces not under their control?
But I don't think that's entirely fair to say, given that we're talking about people doing acts that are entirely under their control. Whatever they're doing is an outflow of their character, and involved consideration where, if they had willed differently, they could have done otherwise.
I certainly think that God knew, when he created those who would be damned, that they would be damned. Was that the sole purpose? I would not try to suggest that.
Agreed, I don't think quantum matters all that much for these questions.
But if they *couldn't* will differently, saying that they could have done otherwise if they *had* willed differently is a meaningless concession. It's still blaming someone for an act brought about entirely by forces outside their control.
Their character, on this picture, is simply another force of nature, like the gravity that brings the dropped book down on your foot. That its locus is internal doesn't change that. The locus of a gun's mechanical action is also internal.
Speaking of God in terms of time (with a "when") is always tricky due to God's eternity. That said, I agree that God knows the destiny of a created being when He creates them -- but by observation (or something like it), not by prediction. That is, our free choices are not chronologically prior to God's knowledge of them, but they are logically prior to God's knowledge of them. (This denies open theism, preserves predestination, and preserves human cooperation with grace.) I'm not strongly committed to this, because divine foreknowledge was never my top concern, and I've never actually read Molina or the de Auxiliis documents. That is how I conceive of the matter at present, though. (And I think it's how Alasdair MacIntyre conceives of it, too, so I am at least not just making up wild new theories for myself!)
I think there's more than one sense in which we can say "could."
>It's still blaming someone for an act brought about entirely by forces outside their control.
But it's clearly brought about by forces that are in their control: their own body, as directed by themselves.
>Their character, on this picture, is simply another force of nature, like the gravity that brings the dropped book down on your foot. That its locus is internal doesn't change that. The locus of a gun's mechanical action is also internal.
Sure, the relevant difference between you and a gun isn't internality, but rationality. You can know what you ought to do. Guns don't make choices. If guns were making choices, and you killing people worked by persuading the morally responsible guns to kill people, that's just the same as getting a hit man or something, and both you and the gun would be culpable. This is true even if you're very persuasive, I would think.
>That said, I agree that God knows the destiny of a created being when He creates them
Okay, that seems Molinist-ish. But under Molinism, why wouldn't you have the same issues as you were worried about before, regarding damnation? I mean, if the Molinist God knows how the free agents would act otherwise, he could instead plan the world so that they would accept his grace, rather than reject it, couldn't he?
Clothing, and in a broader sense, fashion in general, is the first communication that you have when you meet someone in person. Why should this communication not also work as a form of communication with yourself?
Huh, I winced just watching the end of the Frakes video, but I find the sound of sandpaper if anything pleasant. Took a very brief detour to try to find why people find these sounds unpleasant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_scraping), but the hypotheses all seem pretty unconvincing (sounds similar to primate mating calls???).
It never actually even occurred to me that there would be a *reason* for this being so unpleasant. If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd probably just have gestured toward all the aesthetic philosophy I haven't read! I sort of like the idea of looking into it through psychoacoustics, but, you're right, I find all the hypotheses on that wiki page pretty sus (as the kids say).
Actually, April Fools Day is the best explanation for all the talk of Donald Trump running for a third term! A pity Trump doesn't know who the fool is (the one he sees in the mirror).
I've never really got how the causal picture of libertarian free will is supposed to work. People always want some part that's uncaused (to avoid determinism), and yet they don't want it to be uncaused (they're not okay with randomness). I haven't yet gotten a coherent picture out of it.
This was (and to at least some extent, still is) my biggest difficulty with libertarian free will. Either it's caused (in which case Galen Strawson's Basic Argument applies and moral responsibility is impossible) or it's random (in which case we still aren't responsible, any more than we are responsible for the output of a random number generator). I could almost talk myself into buying libertarian free will, but the only way I could make it make sense was by losing the personal moral responsibility that is supposed to be one of its most attractive features.
I struggled with this basic problem from the age of 15 (when I distinctly remember arguing about it with my parents at the dinner table) through the age of 33, so more than half my life.
During the final few years of this, when I really decided I needed to Figure This Out, I came across three things that helped me. These led me to conclude that libertarian free will, though not necessarily *demonstrable*, can at least be described *coherently*, consistent with the facts of the world, with some motives for buying into that description:
* "Aquinas on Free Will and Intellectual Determinism" by Tobias Hoffman and Cyrille Michon: https://philarchive.org/archive/HOFAOF (and the Thomistic texts it extensively cites)
* C.A. Campbell's writings, especially "In Defense of Free Will": https://iweb.langara.ca/rjohns/files/2012/11/Campbell_Free_Will.pdf and "The Psychology of Effort of Will": https://academic.oup.com/aristotelian/article-abstract/40/1/49/1804630
* Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will, by Timothy O'Connor. Hardest book I ever read (and not just because of the subject matter; O'Connor is simply not a very good prose writer), but quite rewarding.
Of course, I read many other things during those years (plenty of Derk Pereboom!), but these three stand out to my memory as helpful for the libertarian side.
I would still characterize my belief in libertarian free will as "fragile" and "a bit confused." This is probably not surprising, since I am naturally inclined toward incompatibilist determinism, I spent 18 years unclear on how anything else could possibly be the case, and I only "converted" to libertarianism gradually over the past couple of years. It is a fledgling libertarianism, one I doubt I could effectively defend in a serious debate. Nor can I deny that my conversion had a lot to do with my other intellectual commitments. (It's not a simple matter to be an incompatibilist determinist AND believe the claims of Christianity!)
However, those things helped me considerably, and, if I ever did go back to determinism, it would be with a much more sophisticated account of it, thanks to having read these things.
Very probable that something here is going over my head (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#LibeAccoSour doesn't seem like something that is skim-able), but am interested why if we believe in a metaphysics with immaterial souls, we can't have determinism for the material and allow the immaterial to 'cause' non-deterministic actions (why should the immaterial by chained by determinism)?
Do you want there to be causal influences from the material upon the immaterial at all? (I should hope so!)
But people don't want their choices to be arbitrary or random, but to be based on things. I would suggest, that, insofar as choices are based on things, they are determined, and insofar as they are not, they are not.
The problem arises because of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which most people intuitively accept: when something comes about, it can only be because something else caused it to come about. This is just as true in the immaterial realm as in the material.
When we make a decision -- say, about which flavor of ice cream to get -- we usually have some reason. Our intellect apprehended that we like chocolate best, so we got chocolate. Or our intellect (having recently apprehended how tight the household budget is right now) deliberated and concluded that chocolate was too expensive, so we got vanilla. Or our intellect apprehended that milk has been bothering our digestion lately, so we got a sorbet.
If these reasons fully explain our decision, then our decision was determined just as surely as if purely material factors did it. We can't be held morally responsible for accepting and acting upon a judgment of the intellect, either. The intellect isn't our our direct control. (If it were, I could just decide to understand Calculus II, and, let me assure you, that did not work!) So even the immaterial, insofar as it is governed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason, turns out to be determinist.
Perhaps God sends you supernatural graces that influence you to make the best choice. (Unbeknownst to you, but benknownst to God, buying vanilla will lead you meet your new best friend, who will save your soul in a coming hard time.) But this doesn't make your choice any more free. In fact, it seems to make it *less* free. If you aren't responsible for your own intellect's output, how much less are you responsible for graces God shoots at you?
Of course, in the end, I do think that you are right. I think that there is a human faculty, which is influenced by the intellect but not governed by it, which either accepts or refuses grace. (It does a handful of other things, but this is the most important.) The movement of this faculty towards or away from grace is explained partly by the rationales offered by the intellect but, ultimately, the explanation is simply "I chose it." This is the fundamental, ultimate explanation for the decision and cannot be further explained. It is an unmoved movement. That, as I see it, is free will.
But it is not obvious that this faculty exists. It is *coherent* to assert that the faculty exists, but the evidence for it is pretty scant. The determinist really can make a pretty convincing go at explaining away absolutely *everything* about human, angelic, and even *divine* action in terms of sufficient reasons that are outside the agent's ultimate control. I wrote the first few paragraphs of this comment, then, to illustrate the problem that I think libertarian free will can, with difficulty, solve. Strawson's Basic Argument (which probably does a better job explaining than I just did) doesn't care whether one's reasons for acting a certain way are material or not. ( https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Impossibility%20of%20Moral%20Responsibility%20-%20Galen%20Strawson.pdf )
In fact, I still *do* think today that the vast majority of our decisions -- including nearly all decisions about ice cream flavors! -- are fully determined, even the immaterial elements, and are therefore not truly free. Thanks to the intellect's tendency to provide overwhelming conclusions, plus force of habit, truly free decisions are probably fairly rare -- and so it is extremely important to make the right choice when grace offers you one.
Interesting, useful. Thanks!
(And, no, you're right, that article is not skimmable. It took me months to get through it, to be honest, and I had to read a number of the footnoted articles to make sense of it, and looking at it again tonight gives me a mild sandpaper shiver. I don't think I'm a dummy, but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy often makes me feel like one.)
These were mostly disappointing. I could only read the first of the Campbell articles, but it wasn't compelling. I don't agree with Strawson; I don't think that we need to be the determiner of our character to have moral responsibility. (As, obviously, we are to quite an extent, not, and yet we do. See also Romans 9.)
The Thomas was the most interesting. I'm not sure whether they're reading him correctly, but it's some nice work.
My inclinations are towards compatibilism. (Unsure as to determinism, at least, physical determinism, due to quantum mechanics.)
I should probably see what Voetius has to say some time. I know Van Asselt and Beck both wrote books that touched on him on this matter.
Then I'm sorry that what was helpful for me was unhelpful for you!
I think that, as difficult a time as libertarianism has explaining itself coherently, compatibilism has a much, much harder row to hoe. We obviously are not the *sole* determiner of our character. Far from it. Even Timothy O'Connor, in his account of libertarianism, describes us as "not-wholly-moved movers," which is a pretty modest claim when you get right down to it.
Yet it seems to me that we must be *a* determiner of our character for any account of moral responsibility to make any sense at all -- and that determination, even if it is only a sliver of what goes into a decision, must be fully self-determined in the way Strawson describes. Who could possibly blame someone for an act that was brought about entirely by forces not under their control? It would be like cursing a dropped book for falling on your toe, like blaming a gun for killing a man instead of the person who pulled the trigger. It would be like damning a pre-contact Indian for not having been baptized when he never heard the name of Christ -- a doctrine the Christian Church, at least, has always rejected, back to Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine. What the compatibilists call "free will," then, simply doesn't look very much *like* the thing I call "free will." Compatibilist free will seems to be a different thing wearing the same label -- and it lacks what I take to be free will's most important feature.
When applied to God, moreover, compatibilist doctrines make Him look -- at least to me -- like an absolute monster, creating the damned *for the purpose of damning them* (which is several steps beyond mere foreknowledge or weak predestination). On the whole, God does not seem monstrous, nor do I think He would have written a law of justice onto our hearts only to so fully overthrow it. My belief in determinism, then, led me for many years to very strong sympathy for various flavors of universalism. (Indeed, I strongly suspect I wasn't alone in that, and I would bet good money it's behind the current vogue for universalism. In my experience, scratch a universalist, find a determinist.)
I suspect quantum mechanics will ultimately prove to be deterministic, but, even if it doesn't, any true randomness down in the quantum realm seems to cash out up here in the Newtonian world as determinism anyway, so I'm not really sure it *matters*, at least for the moral-responsibility concerns that animate me the most.
>Who could possibly blame someone for an act that was brought about entirely by forces not under their control?
But I don't think that's entirely fair to say, given that we're talking about people doing acts that are entirely under their control. Whatever they're doing is an outflow of their character, and involved consideration where, if they had willed differently, they could have done otherwise.
I certainly think that God knew, when he created those who would be damned, that they would be damned. Was that the sole purpose? I would not try to suggest that.
Agreed, I don't think quantum matters all that much for these questions.
But if they *couldn't* will differently, saying that they could have done otherwise if they *had* willed differently is a meaningless concession. It's still blaming someone for an act brought about entirely by forces outside their control.
Their character, on this picture, is simply another force of nature, like the gravity that brings the dropped book down on your foot. That its locus is internal doesn't change that. The locus of a gun's mechanical action is also internal.
Speaking of God in terms of time (with a "when") is always tricky due to God's eternity. That said, I agree that God knows the destiny of a created being when He creates them -- but by observation (or something like it), not by prediction. That is, our free choices are not chronologically prior to God's knowledge of them, but they are logically prior to God's knowledge of them. (This denies open theism, preserves predestination, and preserves human cooperation with grace.) I'm not strongly committed to this, because divine foreknowledge was never my top concern, and I've never actually read Molina or the de Auxiliis documents. That is how I conceive of the matter at present, though. (And I think it's how Alasdair MacIntyre conceives of it, too, so I am at least not just making up wild new theories for myself!)
I think there's more than one sense in which we can say "could."
>It's still blaming someone for an act brought about entirely by forces outside their control.
But it's clearly brought about by forces that are in their control: their own body, as directed by themselves.
>Their character, on this picture, is simply another force of nature, like the gravity that brings the dropped book down on your foot. That its locus is internal doesn't change that. The locus of a gun's mechanical action is also internal.
Sure, the relevant difference between you and a gun isn't internality, but rationality. You can know what you ought to do. Guns don't make choices. If guns were making choices, and you killing people worked by persuading the morally responsible guns to kill people, that's just the same as getting a hit man or something, and both you and the gun would be culpable. This is true even if you're very persuasive, I would think.
>That said, I agree that God knows the destiny of a created being when He creates them
Okay, that seems Molinist-ish. But under Molinism, why wouldn't you have the same issues as you were worried about before, regarding damnation? I mean, if the Molinist God knows how the free agents would act otherwise, he could instead plan the world so that they would accept his grace, rather than reject it, couldn't he?
Re Clothing:
Clothing, and in a broader sense, fashion in general, is the first communication that you have when you meet someone in person. Why should this communication not also work as a form of communication with yourself?
I don't need to communicate with myself! I have muttering under my breath for that!
Remember, different people have different levels of ability to communicate:
Some talk with God
Some talk with Angels
Some talk with themselves
Some argue with themselves
Some lose those arguments...
Huh, I winced just watching the end of the Frakes video, but I find the sound of sandpaper if anything pleasant. Took a very brief detour to try to find why people find these sounds unpleasant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_scraping), but the hypotheses all seem pretty unconvincing (sounds similar to primate mating calls???).
Your different experience is fascinating!
It never actually even occurred to me that there would be a *reason* for this being so unpleasant. If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd probably just have gestured toward all the aesthetic philosophy I haven't read! I sort of like the idea of looking into it through psychoacoustics, but, you're right, I find all the hypotheses on that wiki page pretty sus (as the kids say).