free will and fate
A strict belief in fate is the worst kind of slavery; on the other hand there is comfort in the thought that God will be moved by our prayers.
Epicurus
We want our beliefs to be caused by the relevant facts in the world – as this will give us knowledge and help us to act successfully – yet we are not as eager for our actions to be caused by those facts, even where the price is the failure to attain our goals.
Robert Nozick
In 1924, two teenagers stood trial in Cook County, Illinois, for the murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. It was the case that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, and the Orson Welles movie Compulsion (directed by Richard Fleischer). Franks had known his killers – both brilliant students from wealthy Chicago families. Eighteen-year-old Richard Loeb was the son of a retired Sears and Roebuck vice-president and had been the youngest-ever graduate of the University of Michigan, while his nineteen-year-old lover, Nathan Leopold Jr, was the son of a packaging magnate and already one of America’s leading authorities on ornithology. Leopold had been drawn to the work of the late nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and in particular his idea that exceptional men were above the moral norms that bound the majority. Leopold considered Loeb an example of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or ‘Superman’, and was willing to help him commit the ‘perfect’ crime in order to demonstrate their contempt for society. The pair abducted Loeb’s distant cousin, Bobby Franks, on his way home from school one afternoon in May, inviting him into the car they had hired for the occasion, attacking him with a chisel and finally suffocating him. After disfiguring the body and hiding it in a drainage channel, they sent a ransom note to the Franks family demanding $10,000 in unmarked bills. However, Bobby Franks’s body was discovered and identified before the money was delivered. The investigators found an unusual pair of spectacles at the scene, and the prescription was traced to Nathan Leopold.
At the trial, the celebrated lawyer Clarence Darrow made an unusual plea for clemency on behalf of his clients, who had both pleaded guilty:
To believe that any boy is responsible for himself or his early training is an absurdity…If his failing came from his heredity, I do not know where or how. None of us are bred perfect and pure; and the colour of our hair, the colour of our eyes, our stature, the weight and fineness of our brain, and everything about us could, with full knowledge, be traced with absolute certainty to somewhere. If we had the pedigree it could be traced just the same in a boy as it could in a dog…If it did not come that way, then… if he had been understood, if he had been trained as he should have been it would not have happened. If there is responsibility anywhere, it is back of him; somewhere in the infinite number of his ancestors, or in his surroundings, or in both. And I submit, Your Honour, that under every principle of…right, and of law, he should not be made responsible for the acts of someone else… Is Dickey Loeb to blame because out of the infinite forces that conspired to form him, the infinite forces that were at work producing him ages before he was born, that because out of these infinite combinations he was born without it? If he is, then there should be a new definition for justice. Is he to blame for what he did not have and never had? Is he to blame that his machine is imperfect? Who is to blame? I do not know. I have never in my life been interested so much in fixing blame as I have in relieving people from blame. I am not wise enough to fix it. I know that somewhere in the past there entered into him something missed. It may be defective nerves. It may be a defective heart or liver. It may be defective endocrine glands. I know it is something. I know that nothing happens in this world without a cause.’1
When we apportion blame we assume that the accused committed his or her crime of their own free will, while those whose actions were not under their control at the time can expect to be exonerated. Temporary insanity and coercion are respectable courtroom defences, yet, as Darrow pointed out, there is a sense in which ultimately nobody’s actions are ever under their control. Actions are like any other physical events in that they all have a cause. We may trace the causal route of the murder to Loeb’s intention, and that intention to his character. But his character also has a history, a set of causes that made it what it was. We can regress until we alight on causes outside the accused’s control. Leopold and Loeb cannot be responsible for what occurred prior to their birth.
In the event, the pair escaped the death penalty and were sentenced to life plus ninety-nine years. Darrow’s successful defence was an invocation of the philosophical theory known as ‘determinism’, according to which no events – not even human actions – are outside the jurisdiction of the immutable laws of nature. Just as the law of gravity causes an apple to fall to the earth, physiological laws operate upon your body and nervous system and govern your interactions with the environment and other individuals. What we think of as ‘choices’ are in fact the only possible outcomes in the circumstances. In short, there is no difference between what you do and what you are able to do. If determinism is true, then there is no role for free will in our behaviour and we need a new concept of responsibility.
The idea that our actions and their consequences are preordained was recognized in the ancient notion of Fate, but it was not until the Middle Ages that the doctrine of determinism was fully developed as a consequence of Christian theological beliefs. Christian philosophers reasoned that if God is omniscient, then He must know how each of us will behave in the future. But if our future actions are already known to Him, or if they could be so known in principle, then they must, in a sense, already exist, leaving us powerless to change them. This line of thinking was bolstered rather than undermined by the Scientific Revolution and the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton. The Newtonian world view seemed to show that if we could know everything about both the laws of nature and the objects upon which they operate, it would be possible in theory to predict the future destination of all things that were subject to those laws. As the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace was to put it in 1820:
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situations of the beings who compose it – an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis – it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.2
There would be such a thing as destiny after all, only it would lack the dramatic connotations we have come to expect. Even the most mundane life would bear the mark of fate.
One might hope to blunt determinism by locating our agency beyond the physical world in an ethereal realm where one’s soul could make decisions unmolested by material causes and effects. In fact, this scenario would make no difference, since the force of determinism holds whether causes are earthly or heavenly. So long as a cause determines one’s behaviour, it makes no difference whether the shove comes from matter or spirit. Our choices need to be caused by something and determinists believe that whatever ‘causes’ them must shape those choices in every detail. Something would have to cause even a spirit’s choices. Neither would the problem be solved by the discovery of a hitherto unknown sector in the brain that was capable of overriding the inputs of society and body chemistry. We would only have relocated the object under discussion and would now have to ask on what basis this substance makes choices, and by what means it reaches its decisions. The issue is one of time rather than space. Every choice bar an act of pure caprice has a history. Decisions are made in the moment but conceived in the past. The past is the source of the present, and if an earlier state of affairs causes a later one, then it does not just prompt or precipitate it but determines what that event is like. The problem is how to reconcile this logic with the undeniable sensation of freedom that we all experience, for it certainly feels as though we can choose one thing rather than another.
Other philosophers have hoped that a newer science would rescue us from the old. Events such as the decay of a radioactive particle seem to be entirely random and unpredictable. While we can say that an atom of the substance has been caused to decay, the causes do not seem to specify the particular rate of that decay down to the last alpha particle emitted. However, if random events on the quantum level were found to influence our decisions it would leave us no better off. An element of chance could not give us quite the power to originate acts that we are looking for. If I could have acted otherwise by the intercession of a random event in my brain, then this seems no different to being coerced or constrained by an event from the outside. Acts of pure caprice are not the only examples of choice, and free whim is not quite the same thing as free will. An element of chance in the decision-making process might even damage our ability to function as free agents. Most of us rather hope that our actions are efficiently determined – so long as they are determined by our nature, our preferences and our desires.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who inspired Leopold and Loeb, would never have appeared in Chicago as a witness for the defence. He was an early exponent of a solution to the problem of free will and determinism that has attained widespread approval today. In his finest work, On the Genealogy of Morals, he wrote:
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength…For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.3
This was an early expression of the view known as ‘compatibilism’, according to which both the determinism of the physical world and our subjective experience of freedom can be preserved.
Compatibilists believe that libertarians (in the metaphysical, not political, sense) ask too much of freedom. We begin by wanting to be free from physical coercion. Then we want to be free from undue influences on our decisions, such as people lying to us, spiking our drink with drugs or dominating us by the force of their personality. We might also want to be free from our own weaknesses, such as an addiction to alcohol or a tendency towards selfishness. But if we want to be free in an absolute sense – that is, in the sense that nothing whatsoever can rigidly determine our behaviour – then this would involve being free from every part of oneself, the good parts included. If we were truly free from our beliefs and opinions, our likes and dislikes, our every preference, then there would be nothing left of us to be free. The desire for absolute freedom terminates in a desire for the dissolution of one’s selfhood, because the only thing we could mean by someone who is free in this way would be for them to be nothing at all. Since we can make no sense of a choice free from all influences, we will have to find a way of locating freedom in a world of influences that are not themselves freely chosen.
We are constantly told in newspapers and magazines, through their distillations of the latest results of the sciences, that we are ‘at the mercy’ of this or that drive or inclination. But one’s desires are part of one’s make-up, and if we take these and other personal characteristics away there is nothing left to be at the mercy of anything. It makes no sense to say that you are at the mercy of yourself, because what else would one expect? It would be strange indeed if this were not the case. If someone takes hold of your arms and forces you to act in a certain way, you feel your limbs being moved against your will. But if someone should take hold of your will itself, your very desires, and force them into a shape of their own design, what could you use to struggle against this? You have your body, your mind – and what else? Perhaps you have an immortal soul that could carry on the battle after your body and mind have fallen, but these defensive lines must stop somewhere. Once the soul was in turn overcome – however this might be accomplished – there is nowhere left for a further struggle to take place.
A prisoner who requires no walls to keep him in check is a slave. A slave who requires no whip to bend his will is a puppet, and a puppet is not an agent at all but a mere extension of its controller. We may be unfortunate enough to find ourselves prisoners, but that is a matter of others’ intervention rather than our metaphysical nature. A frustrated will is a will nonetheless. The determinist, by contrast, believes that we are slaves of a sort. However, his view implies a violence that does not take place. When the determinist says that your choices are ‘determined’, this is a forceful word implying that your will could be contrary to the will of the world, and that the latter is somehow stronger than your own and able to overpower it.
According to compatibilist philosophers, the most celebrated being Daniel Dennett, it is simply not possible to be at odds with the world in this way. Dennett is a large man with Father Christmas whiskers and a booming voice. He was born in Beirut in 1942, where his father studied Islamic history and his mother taught English. His father worked for the forerunner of the CIA – the Office of Strategic Services – during the Second World War, and died in a plane crash while on a mission in Ethiopia in 1948. Dennett’s high-achieving New England family assumed that their son would grow up to be a professor at Harvard, but he shunned the Ivy League to teach liberal arts undergraduates at the nearby Tufts University, finding beginners better at keeping him alert. As he explained to me in his modest office at Tufts: ‘Younger students are not afraid to tell the Emperor that he has no clothes.’ Dennett argues that, although we naturally think of action, or agency, as something that makes a difference to the world, something that ‘disturbs the natural course of events’, nothing of the sort actually happens since we are ourselves part of nature. It may seem to us that the asteroid ‘was going to hit the Earth’ until we sent all those nuclear missiles to blast it to smithereens, whereas we don’t say this of all the asteroids that have been interrupted by other celestial bodies such as Jupiter or the moon during their ‘collision course’ with the Earth. In neither case was ‘the course of nature’ changed in any way. The impact simply was not determined in advance, and if anything was inevitable it was the other collision, with either moon or missile.
Incompatibilists argue that this kind of thinking is merely dressed-up determinism – in other words, that it amounts to the existence of iron fate but massages language to preserve our everyday talk of choices. In a sense, this is exactly what it is. By contrast, incompatibilists insist that real freedom requires the possibility that you could have acted otherwise. If there was only one choice you could have made, then that is no choice at all.
Suppose, one morning in the office, your boss presents you with an enticing offer: a new posting has opened up overseas and he thinks that you would make an ideal candidate for the job. He understands that you have a settled family in your current area, with three children in local schools and that your partner enjoys a wide circle of friends and works nearby in a good job of his or her own. After considering the upheaval that this will cause your loved ones and talking it over with your partner, you decide to take up the offer due to the large rise in salary it promises. However, when you tell your boss of your decision, he says that it is just as well, because he has already appointed a successor in your present role and arranged temporary accommodation for yourself and your family close to your new workplace abroad. It now seems that you had no choice at all, that the decision had already been made for you. Yet nothing has changed in one sense – you did not choose under duress since there was none that you were aware of. The physical and mental process by which you came to your decision was the same as if your boss had left the outcome open all along.
In the seventeenth century, the English philosopher John Locke wrote of how a man might ‘be carried whilst fast asleep into a room where there is a person he longs to see and speak with, and be there locked fast in, beyond his power to get out; he awakes and is glad to find himself in such desirable company, which he stays willingly in’.4 The compatibilist sees that we are constantly in this happy predicament. The natural world ensures that there is only ever one choice we can make in a given situation but, because our will is itself part of the natural world, it is invariably the one we desire. If a pessimist, or rather a determinist, calls this a ‘straitjacket’, he or she must remember that it is one so well tailored that it allows our every desired movement. To put it another way, a cage that moves whenever you move cannot rightly be called a cage. This may be mere wordplay, but then the compatibilist would argue that a linguistic or conceptual muddle is the root cause of deterministic worries.
When we are aware of duress from the outset, it can be very difficult to disentangle our feelings from our fears. If our office worker had discovered a memo outlining their intended fate, then their deliberations would have been very different. In moments of selfdeception – the ‘bad faith’ of the existentialists – we are apt to tell ourselves that we actually desire to take those choices that we are not strong enough to decline. Some bloody-minded individuals are even prepared to forgo their desires for the very reason that they would have faced compulsion were their wishes different. Perhaps those possessed of flawless self-knowledge will always know when they are acting freely, but who can claim such transparency? Without such practised clarity we are forever left doubting our choices. Far from requiring the knowledge that we could have done otherwise, to be truly free is to know that you could not have acted differently had there been no constraints on your behaviour. Curiously, folk wisdom maintains that a man or woman’s ‘true’ character is to be divined from those occasions when they have few options available – ‘Just wait until they’ve got their back to the wall, then you’ll find out what they’re really like!’ A far better sense of what someone is ‘really’ like can be garnered from how they act – how they must act – when they are at the peak of their powers and have the luxury of many paths. Where character is concerned, ordering death from the Oval Office is more telling than cutting the throat of one’s captor.
However, we can still make sense of choice even in cases where options are extremely limited. Coercion does not disqualify responsibility if someone actually wanted to commit the atrocities that they were under pain of death to carry out. For example, Nazi officers who refused to obey orders might have been shot for disobedience, but many of them did not require this threat and were quite happy to torture and kill innocents. There is a moral difference between Nazis who were only obeying orders and those whose orders happened to coincide with what they wished to do – although at the Nuremberg trials the difference may have been difficult to discern. Something may make it impossible for you to avoid a certain act without being the reason for your committing it. For example, you may be about to perform a parachute jump when the plane’s engines fail. This calamity makes jumping absolutely necessary, but you were going to do it anyway. When we excuse a person who has been coerced, we do so not because they could not have acted otherwise, but because the coercion was their only reason for doing it. The question is one of motivations rather than opportunities.
Though few of us are slaves, all of us may nevertheless be puppets. What is at issue is whether we ever actually act at all, or whether things just ‘happen’ to us. How are we to differentiate actions from mere bodily events, a raised salute from an involuntary tic hanging over from one’s army days? The obvious answer is that I choose to do the former, whereas the latter just happens. But what exactly constitutes this ‘choice’? The choice cannot be my resolution to salute when my commanding officer marches past on the parade ground, because I could always change my mind at the last minute.
A man in England once received a prison sentence for attempted robbery even though his ‘attempt’ consisted of tripping over the threshold of the bank and knocking himself unconscious before he had a chance to announce his purpose. The tellers who administered first aid found an imitation firearm and a handwritten note in his pocket, which read: ‘Put all the money into the bag.’ This man certainly did not manage to commit a crime, but was he not so incompetent that he failed even to attempt one? He might well have lost his nerve as he approached the counter, but he was punished nonetheless. Perhaps we should allow ‘choices’ to be revisable prior to the final action, but we also feel that choices are full, resounding actions in themselves that, once made, are made forever.
If ‘choices’ are such as to truly commit one to action, then we never perceive them. In everyday life, as in Nietzschean philosophy, action is the only reliable test for intention. An experiment conducted in 1985 seems to confirm this. The American physiologist Benjamin Libet asked a group of subjects to move their fingers and to note the precise moment of their decision to do so by a stopwatch. He also placed electrodes on their scalps to detect the motor cortical activity in their brains that initiated the finger movement. He found that this activity began a third to half a second before his subjects were aware of making a conscious decision to move their fingers.5 This in fact tallies with normal experience, in which we never catch ourselves in the act of making a final choice until we have acted and the instance has passed. We have all heard the expression: ‘I don’t know what I want to do. I’ll wait and see what I do, and that will be what I wanted to do.’ Imagine you are on a diet, yet you choose burger and fries for lunch rather than a salad. You wish that you had chosen otherwise and afterwards curse your weakness. But you regret more than just the decision – you also regret being the source of the action, in this case a source that is greedy and self-indulgent. If our decisions could not shape our character or indicate its nature, then we would not be so worried when we made lamentable choices. We despise our moral failures not because they cut against our character, but because we suspect that they reveal its true form.
To return to the metaphysical debate, in the compatibilist version of events, the human agent seems to get subsumed into the universe’s general causal flow. The willing agent is not a special part of nature, walled off from the past and the future so that free choice can take place, but an ordinary (if extremely complicated) part of nature. It is for this reason that the American philosopher Thomas Nagel writes:
I believe that in a sense the problem [of freewill and determinism] has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things. But as the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things. Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed tothe responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised.6
Jesus advocated something similar when he exhorted us to ‘hate the sin but love the sinner’. But Nagel doubts whether we will be able to achieve this, because we are unable to view ourselves simply as portions of the world. From inside, we are aware of a boundary between ‘what is us and what is not, what we do and what happens to us, what is our personality and what is an accidental handicap’. As a result, he argues, ‘We do not regard our actions and our characters merely as fortunate or unfortunate episodes – though they may also be that…Those acts remain ours and we remain ourselves, despite the persuasiveness of the reasons that seem to argue us out of existence.’7
The concern is that if there is no source of agency distinct from the causal flow of the universe, then we cannot really talk of agents at all, which leaves human beings as mere puppets. Puppets, however, require a puppet master. The philosopher John Martin Fischer imagined just such a figure – the evil Dr Black, also known as ‘the Nefarious Neurosurgeon’. While performing an operation on Jones to remove a brain tumour, Black secretly inserts a microchip into Jones’s brain that enables the neurosurgeon to monitor and control his patient’s behaviour via a computer. Shortly after his recovery, Jones decides to vote in the American presidential election, which is when Black’s computer is programmed to swing into action. If Jones shows an inclination to decide to vote for Carter, then the computer, through the chip in Jones’s brain, intervenes to make him decide to vote for Reagan. But if Jones decides to vote for Reagan of his own accord, the computer does nothing but continue to monitor Jones’s behaviour.8
Suppose now that Jones decides to vote for Reagan on his own, just as he would have if Black had not inserted the mechanism into his head. Jones may think that he could have acted or, more importantly, willed otherwise, but the possibility is an illusion. The chip is a special form of prison that negates the will at its source. The difference between the machinations of the neurosurgeon and the dominion of nature is that in the former there is another individual human being in control of us. These are not fundamentally different categories of cause, but they carry very different forms of value and proffer different answers to the question of our freedom. It clearly matters whether the device – or any other cause that informs our choices – is under the control of another individual. Many of the problems with free will start with determination at the hands of a particular individual, and then go on to encompass gods, natural forces or ‘life’ itself. We should not allow our enemy to advance so far.
Imagine that Dr Black, instead of just inserting a chip, managed to alter Jones’s neural pathways in a way that changed his character. The patient goes under the anaesthetic as a law-abiding citizen but wakes up as a violent criminal. He does not understand why he feels these aggressive impulses, but he is as comfortable with them as he was with his formerly placid nature. Suppose that Jones is then apprehended while carrying out an armed robbery and brought before a court of law. His defence team might well argue that it should be Dr Black facing the charges rather than their client, just as Clarence Darrow cited Richard Loeb’s ancestry. Poor Jones, for his part, never intended to become a miscreant. Though there may be no option but to keep him locked up where he cannot harm the public, we will feel differently towards Jones from the way we do towards those who take up wrongdoing via more natural means. To anyone viewing him through the Perspex barrier that prevents him from attacking the jury, there is no doubt that Jones is a vicious individual, but morally speaking, we regard the explanation for how he came to be one as significant.
This is not to say that we ought to regard it as significant. It is merely a description of common-sense moralizing. The accused is now a bad man on any account – he has bad desires and given half a chance will act on them. However, our intuition tells us that to judge someone to be wicked is not a matter of describing their mental state alone. Being free is not a matter of feeling unfettered, or being at one with yourself, sound and single of purpose. It is a matter of history, and it seems that we attach more weight to some histories than to others. In another world, Jones might have been a psychopath all his life, made so by events in his early childhood, or in the genetic makeup of his parents prior to his conception. To exonerate Jones on the basis of Black’s intervention seems to betray a prejudice in favour of recent causes over the more distant. Perhaps a benevolent neurosurgeon could ‘cure’ Jones and thereby make him ‘free’ again (‘Phew, it was terrible in there! You wouldn’t believe the things they made me do!’). But if Black’s handiwork could not be undone, it would be odd to say that Jones could never again act freely – even fifty years hence – because of that single event in his life. The issue is the presence or absence of control.
Dennett writes:
Consider a deer in Magdalen College Park. Is it imprisoned? Yes, but not much. The enclosure is quite large. Suppose we moved the deer to a larger enclosure – the New Forest with a fence around it. Would the deer still be imprisoned? In the state of Maine, I am told, deer almost never travel more than five miles from their birthplace during their lives. If an enclosure were located outside the normal unimpeded limits of a deer’s lifetime wanderings would the deer enclosed be imprisoned? Perhaps, but note that it makes a difference to our intuitions whether someone installs the enclosure…Do you feel imprisoned on Planet Earth – the way Napoleon was stuck on Elba? It is one thing to be born and live on Elba, and another to be put or kept on Elba by someone. A jail without a jailer is not a jail.9
This is important, Dennett suggests, because our concern follows from confusing the concepts of control and causation. ‘The Viking spacecraft,’ he continues, ‘is as deterministic a device as any clock, but this does not prevent it from being able to control itself. Fancier deterministic devices [such as ourselves] can not only control themselves; they can evade the attempts of other self-controllers to control them.’
Moreover, Dennett adds:
The past does not control us. It no more controls us than the people at NASA can control the spaceships that have wandered out of reach in space. It is not that there are no causal links between the Earth and those craft. There are; reflected sunlight from Earth still reaches them, for instance. But causal links are not enough for control. There must also be feedback to inform the controller. There are no feedback signals from the present to the past for the past to exploit.10
Few people would regard the Viking lander as free enough for our purposes, even if it were more sophisticated. Suppose the nefarious neurosurgeon were to die in a road accident on his way to the lab, leaving his machinery working away in Jones’s brain. He may no longer be able to make changes in the program but his design lives on nonetheless, albeit stuck on its final setting. It might seem to Jones as if his nemesis has cheated death and now reaches out to control him ‘from beyond the grave’. Depending on the relative importance of the past to our present, and the efficacy of the device in Jones’s case, this is something we will have to live with. Dennett has nonetheless shown that we can drive a wedge between causation and control, and that we can talk of self-control without adding that we are always controlled in turn by something else. As Robert Nozick puts it: ‘No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats do not control temperature.’11
Dennett is a philosopher unafraid to propose – and claim – positive solutions to philosophical problems. Many of his critics dislike the way in which he uses science to settle philosophical questions, while some seem to dislike the very idea of a solution to a philosophical puzzle. As Dennett told me at the end of our meeting: ‘Sometimes you get the problem articulated and the answer is clear. Free will is a good example. But there is so much backsliding. You can point out that an illusion is an illusion, and people agree. Yet then they just go on suffering for it.’
Compatibilism is a rare example of a philosophical theory that has been successful without following on from any scientific discoveries. However, it has not garnered universal acceptance. The situation is that most philosophers who work on the question of free will are incompatibilists, while most of those who do not are compatibilists. The former camp often ridicules the latter for their unfamiliarity with the latest arguments and texts on the subject. But perhaps compatibilist philosophers have better things to do than reoccupy secured ground.
The poker champion Doyle Brunson once advised card players not to ignore their extra-sensory perception during games, remarking that ‘although scientists don’t believe in it, how many world championship poker bracelets have scientists won?’ We might also ask how non-theologians can regard the matter of Mary’s virginity as settled, or how people who are not UFO fanatics can consider the alien abduction question settled. The answer, of course, is very easily. The last twenty years of the free-will debate have produced a strong line of anti-compatibilist thinking. This, however, is what one would expect in a field that has been vacated by philosophy’s regular armies and left to partisans who refuse to accept defeat.