QuestionsIII
Can you be free in a determined universe?
Perhaps freedom never meant escaping causes. Perhaps it means acting from your own reasons, which can be caused like anything else.
- Reading time
- 4 min
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Branch
- Free will
- First posed
- The Stoics, c. 300 BCE; developed by Hobbes, David Hume and John Locke
The question
Two people hand over their wallets. The first does so because a stranger is holding a knife to her throat. The second does so because she has decided to donate to a friend in need. Both acts had causes. Yet everyone sees a difference: the second person acted freely and the first did not.
Compatibilism builds a theory of freedom out of that difference. On this view, what makes an act free is not that it was uncaused, but that it was caused in the right way: by your own beliefs, desires and values, without coercion, compulsion or manipulation.
If that is right, the old opposition between freedom and determinism is a confusion. A fully determined universe could still contain free agents, just as it could contain healthy hearts and accurate thermometers.
“By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.”
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Why it matters
Compatibilism is the most widely held view among professional philosophers. In the 2020 PhilPapers survey, a clear majority of respondents accepted or leaned toward it. Whether or not it is correct, it is the view the other positions must beat.
It also explains how we already behave. We hold people responsible after asking whether they knew what they were doing and whether they were forced, not after asking whether their neurons obeyed physics.
Key terms
- CompatibilismThe view that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Freedom, on this view, is acting on your own reasons and desires without compulsion, not escaping the laws of nature.
- IncompatibilismThe view that free will and determinism cannot both be true. Incompatibilists divide into libertarians, who keep free will, and hard determinists, who keep determinism.
- Reasons-responsivenessA compatibilist account of responsibility: you are responsible if the mechanism behind your action would have responded to good reasons to act differently.
- Hierarchical theory of free willHarry Frankfurt's view that you act freely when the desire that moves you is one you want to be moved by: when your first-order desires match your second-order desires.
- CoercionForcing someone to act by threat or pressure. Whether a coerced action is free, and whether the person is responsible for it, is a test case for theories of freedom.
The positions
Classical compatibilism
You are free when you can do what you want: when nothing external stops you from acting on your will.
Hierarchical compatibilism
You are free when the desire that moves you is one you endorse on reflection: when you want to want it.
Reasons-responsiveness
You are free when the process that produced your action would have responded to good reasons to act differently.
Incompatibilism
Freedom and determinism cannot both be true. If your act was fixed before your birth, you are not its source.
Arguments and objections
Classical compatibilism
- Best argument
- This is how the word works in ordinary life. A prisoner is not free; a person walking home is. David Hume called it 'liberty of spontaneity' as opposed to 'liberty of indifference', and argued that only the first is worth having, since an act that came from nowhere would not reflect the agent at all.
- Strongest objection
- It is too permissive. A drug addict who wants the drug and takes it does what he wants, yet many think he is not fully free. Neither is someone whose wants were installed by brainwashing.
- The reply
- Later compatibilists refined the view to deal with exactly these cases, by looking at the structure of the will rather than just the absence of chains.
Hierarchical compatibilism
- Best argument
- Harry Frankfurt pointed out that persons, unlike animals, can have desires about their desires. The unwilling addict wants the drug but wishes he did not; the willing addict endorses his craving. Freedom of the will is the match between the desires that move you and the ones you identify with.
- Strongest objection
- Why should the higher-order desire be the real you? It too was caused, perhaps by manipulation. And an infinite regress threatens: do you need a third-order desire to endorse the second?
- The reply
- Frankfurt answered that identification can be decisive without further endorsement: at some point you simply stand behind a desire, wholeheartedly.
Reasons-responsiveness
- Best argument
- John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza argue that what matters is the mechanism behind the act. If you would have changed course had you seen a strong reason to, the act is under your guidance control. This view is fully compatible with determinism and handles addiction and brainwashing well.
- Strongest objection
- Incompatibilists say this is still not enough for ultimate responsibility: you did not create the mechanism, and so cannot be the true origin of what it produces.
Incompatibilism
- Best argument
- The consequence argument: you have no control over the past or the laws of nature; if determinism is true they entail what you do; so you have no control over what you do. And the manipulation argument: there seems to be no principled difference between being designed by a manipulator and being shaped by genes and environment.
- Strongest objection
- Compatibilists answer that the argument equivocates on 'control', and that if incompatibilism is true, freedom becomes impossible under determinism and indeterminism alike, which is a reason to doubt it.
Who argued what
- Classical compatibilism David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke
- Hierarchical compatibilism Harry Frankfurt
- Reasons-responsiveness John Martin Fischer, Mark Ravizza, Daniel Dennett
- Incompatibilism Peter van Inwagen, Derk Pereboom, Galen Strawson
Where you stand
Can you be free in a determined universe?
In surveys
Choose one to see how people answer.
Variations
The thermostat test
A thermostat responds to reasons, in a way: it turns on the heat when it detects cold. Why is it not free? Compatibilists must say what distinguishes reflective human responsiveness from simple mechanical sensitivity. Most point to self-awareness, the capacity to evaluate one's own motives, and sensitivity to a wide range of reasons rather than one.
Go deeper
Strawson's basic argument
Galen Strawson argues that to be truly responsible for what you do, you must be responsible for the way you are, since you act as you do because of how you are. But to be responsible for how you are, you would have to have chosen it, using some prior self, which you would also have to have chosen, and so on forever. Ultimate responsibility is therefore impossible, whether or not determinism is true.
Compatibilists usually accept the conclusion about ultimate responsibility and deny that it is the kind that matters.
Schools of thought: Stoicism
Related ideas
Further reading and sources
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Compatibilism
- WikipediaCompatibilism
- SurveyPhilPapers Survey, 2020 · question: Free will; about 1,785 professional philosophers; accept or lean toward
- BookElbow Room, Daniel Dennett
- BookThe Importance of What We Care About, Harry Frankfurt
- BookResponsibility and Control, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza
Open questions
- Is the freedom compatibilists describe real freedom, or a consolation prize?
- Where exactly is the line between being shaped by your upbringing and being manipulated?
- Could a sufficiently sophisticated machine be free in the compatibilist sense?