7.1 The Lazy Argument
‘If determinism is true, all our strivings are equally futile to an absolute and categorical degree.’ Not many would agree with this, the last chapter’s concluding sentence. For is this not the fallacy of Logon Ærgon (Ignava Ratio, ‘the Lazy Reason’, ‘the Lazy Sophism’, ‘the Idleness Argument’)? Generations of philosophers have thought so – from Chrysippus to Aulus Gellius to Cicero to Leibniz to Oliver Wendell Holmes. This chapter, however, defends the claim that the Lazy Argument is no fallacy.
Start with clarity on one matter: the Lazy Argument precisely isn’t claiming that ‘what we do doesn’t make a difference’; and nor (we shall see) is it claiming ‘therefore we should do nothing’ – notwithstanding that its critics, ancient and modern, wish us to take it in such ways.
This … demolishes … what the ancients called the ‘Lazy Sophism’, which ended in a decision to do nothing: for (people would say) if what I ask is to happen it will happen even though I should do nothing; and if it is not to happen it will never happen, no matter what trouble I take to achieve it … (Leibniz 2005: #55)
The defender of the Lazy Argument, though, isn’t defending its subjunctive conclusion – of futility or impotence, a ‘decision to do nothing’ – he is saying that since any such conclusion is untenable, so is determinism. Throughout the ancient and modern literature, we are invited to amuse ourselves at reasoning like this: ‘If determinism were true, then what happens would happen of necessity. If I’m to be hit by a sniper’s bullet, then this will happen of necessity, and if I’m not to be hit by a sniper’s bullet, then this will happen of necessity, so I might as well show my head above the parapet as not’. However, actual, as opposed to straw-man defenders of the Lazy Argument don’t believe in determinism. So the defender of the Lazy Argument precisely doesn’t advocate reasoning to a conclusion of impotence or futility (except conditionally – as a reductio). He advocates keeping one’s head down, because he supposes this is something one can do to increase one’s likelihood of survival, as against other, unwise things one equally well could do. After a period in the trenches, such an indeterminist philosopher can nevertheless have acquired a good (but less than total) measure of the fatalist attitude; for he may have seen a good measure of local fatalism (Dennett 1984: 104) – as, say, when reflection indicates that the deaths of the occupants of a deep dugout with a difficult egress would have been already determined from the moment a shell was fired, more than a minute previously and 10 miles distant. But that soldier nevertheless resists any global determinism – the idea of his survival or death being determined before even his conscription.
For the determinist, though, his survival or death and its precise time, date, method, precursor events and causal chain are indeed held to be determined before his conscription – indeed, before his birth, before even his grandparents’ birth or the start of life on earth. Notably, such a view is sufficiently all-encompassing that it must apply to its authors and proponents. On this view, were you to come to believe some sophistic version of the Lazy Argument – perhaps thus to show your head above the trench parapet – this philosophical conviction would have been predetermined. And were you to come to oppose this argument, then this, together with the precise grounds that convinced you (incompatibilist, compatibilist, Ciceronian, Leibnizian, fallacious or sound) would likewise have been predetermined: determined in the first instance causally, not rationally – by the laws of nature and the start-up distribution of matter and energy that obtained at the time of the Big Bang.
There are two common responses to the Lazy Argument. Either is meant to be sufficient to justify replacing ‘argument’ with ‘fallacy’, but though they may be conjointly held, they aren’t identical.
1. The ‘Co-Fated’ response – ‘the inevitable comes to pass through effort’ (Wendell Holmes, paraphrased by Grünbaum 1971: 302).
2. The ‘Epistemology not Metaphysics’ response: what happens is unavoidable, but as we don’t know what will happen, our actions in trying to find out are non-futile.
7.2 The ‘co-fated’ response
In work which is now lost, Chrysippus originated this response with his famous example of the doctor (in Cicero 1942: xii 28–xiii 30; Gellius 1927: 7.2.11). Put into the mouth of his opponent is the argument that if it is determined that I shall die of my illness, it won’t make a difference whether I call the doctor. If it is determined that I survive the illness, it makes no difference whether I call the doctor. So just lie there in a torpor and hope to be fated to get better – says his version of the Lazy Sophist. Chrysippus countered by claiming that the act of calling the doctor would be a part of the causal chain that resulted in my health (should I survive). Calling the doctor is ‘co-fated’ with recovery. As the continuation of the earlier quotation has it:
… the effect being certain, the cause that shall produce it is certain also; and if the effect comes about it will be by virtue of a proportionate cause. Thus your laziness perchance will bring it about that you will obtain naught of what you desire, and that you will fall into those misfortunes which you would by acting with care have avoided. We see, therefore, that the connection of causes with effects, far from causing an unendurable fatality, provides rather a means of obviating it. (Leibniz 2005: #55)
Generations of determinists after Chrysippus have repeated this counter with gusto, supposing it to offer an easy refutation of its target position. Is, though, the ‘co-fated’ response really a good answer to the Lazy Argument?
7.2.1 Normatively prescribed inaction is also denied us by the Lazy Argument
The first thing to note of the co-fated response is that it attributes to the defender of the Lazy Argument the claim that a certain action follows, normatively, from determinism – say, that the Chrysippan patient should remain in a torpor and not call the doctor. But the defender of the Lazy Argument is precisely claiming that (subjunctively) were determinism true, nothing at the level of normatively, agent-determined action would be achievable by us – for determinism would rob us of the ability to act in a way that is normatively determined yet diverges from the path that is causally predetermined.
The Lazy Argument claims (subjunctively) that no action would follow, normatively, were determinism to be known or believed to be true; not that inaction would follow from this – Leibniz’s ‘decision to do nothing’ (cf. Bobzien 2001: 192ff). An actual (as opposed to straw man) defender of the Lazy Argument may not claim that some specific course of action would be mandated to follow, normatively, were determinism’s truth to be established – here, that one persuaded of that truth ought to desist from action; for that too is an action, that too is a normatively urged prescription held to follow from determinism’s truth. The defender of the Lazy Argument is committed to denying that, were determinism true, a course of inaction could or should be chosen (determined by the agent qua agent in the exercise of their agency and response to their reasons). Granted, such things could be causally determined, but so could anything else – say, the contrary of any such position, or something wholly orthogonal to the issue.
The anti-determinist’s repudiation of the idea that inaction might follow, normatively, from determinism’s truth (that, on the assumption of determinism’s truth, inaction could be advocated, normatively, as an act) is not different in kind from the anti-determinist objections to the inaction (immobility) examples of Frankfurt and Fischer attacked in the last chapter. To claim, normatively, that an agent ought to remain immobile requires that the agent has the ability to determine her immobility, when any such ability is just what has been called into question. You might think the incompatibilists are wrong to call this into question, but manifestly they do, and to attribute to one’s opponents an argument that their position defines itself as opposing is a poor tactic at best.
7.2.2 Overdetermination and the Eleatic conception of agency
The challenge of the Lazy Argument can be phrased as asking about the point to action and deliberation given determinism’s truth; but a stronger version would rather phrase this as asking whether, given determinism’s truth, there could be any actions proper at all, any acts determined by agency: any agency proper. This is the position of Helen Steward – a position I find plausible and motivated. ‘What ought I to do?’ looks, as a question, to be inapplicable if there is only one thing I can do (better: only one thing that can be done) – what it was that was determined by the Big Bang.
Agency, if it is anything, is a power to determine things: actions. Steward (2012) calls this the ‘up-to-usness’ of actions: that they may, sometimes, settle matters. And, to go beyond Steward, agency fulfils a normative role. That is, an agent can decide (sometimes) what she ought to do, and can determine (sometimes) that this thing gets done. Questions of this normative stamp have application, if at all, only to those who are agents, and those who are agents must sometimes be able to decide such questions and determine their answers in actions, including mental actions – cf. Chapter 4. An agent, furthermore, is an agent only inasmuch as she determines her acts qua exercise of her power of agency. But now consider these matters in light of the thesis of global determinism. The Big Bang and the laws of nature are held to entirely determine everything. How, without overdetermination, can the agent then decide or determine anything? And even if the attempt were made to embrace overdetermination, how may the agent determine anything qua power of agency – when the determination of that thing is deemed to have been entirely decided causally, 13.75 billion years prior to her power of agency being in existence?
At least partly underpinning the dissatisfaction with the co-fated response expressed in these questions is an Eleatic conception of agency. By Alexander’s Principle, to be real is to possess causal powers (better: powers of determination). That is, for agency to be real, the agent’s exercise of that agency must determine her acts. That is what the notion of a power of agency means. That is what an agent is. But according to determinism, the Big Bang entirely determines the act, and does so prior to the determination of any event by any agent – before powers of agency are acting in the world.
Can it be said that the agent really determines action – determines this qua exercise of his agency – notwithstanding that the exercise of this agency in all its acts was itself wholly determined by the Big Bang and the laws of nature? Though I have many times heard this position stated in words, I find it profoundly difficult to understand what is meant by such a claim – and specifically, the meaning of this ‘determines’. Aristotle, famously, says in the Physics: ‘The stick moves the stone and is moved by the hand, which is moved by the man’ (Aristotle 1999: 256a 6). The man is the mover, the stick is not – it is an intermediate stage in the communication of movement that is determined by the man. If, now, the movement of the stone, together with the precise manner of its movement, is wholly determined, and is so determined many billions of years prior to the presence of any agency in the world and fully 13.75 billion years prior to this agent’s putative act, for these putative reasons, then the man is at best no more than an ‘intermediate mover’: I cannot see how the man then really determines movement any more than the stick did in the original, Aristotelian example.1
Consider Chrysippus’s doctor example. The libertarian wants to know how the patient’s decision – whether to call a doctor or refrain therefrom – can determine the outcome of his illness; given that this outcome and the route the world takes to it has, on the determinist’s assumptions, been already entirely determined by the Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago. The determinist offers him the idea that the already determined and inevitable fact that he will call the doctor (if he will, given that it has been determined for 13.75 billion years that he will) or won’t (if he won’t, given that it has been determined for 13.75 billion years that he won’t) will bring about the inevitable outcome. Where is the determining factor of agency (qua agency) here? Are we to believe that a power of agency determined the medical decision 13.75 billion years ago? For that was when, on the determinist’s own view, these matters were entirely determined. The only agency even a candidate for being in existence at the Big Bang was God’s – but God’s agency is not our patient’s agency.
McKenna swiftly dismisses something in the vicinity of these remarks when he declares the following argument (which he constructed for the purpose of informative destruction) to be a ‘certainly a nonstarter’: ‘to assert that if determinism is true, the fact that no agents existed at earlier moments in time could transfer through to a conclusion that no agents exist now’ (McKenna 2008: 381). Notwithstanding that it was intended as an Aunt Sally, why, actually, is McKenna’s argument a nonstarter – that is, given the antecedent ‘if determinism is [/were] true’? Determinism, note – not, for instance, materialism, for which, in an interesting contrast, an analogous argument (mutatis mutandis) does indeed appear without foundation – as when Reid, despite his own hostility to materialism, notes: ‘[if matter were to] require only a certain configuration to make it think rationally, it will be impossible to show any good reason why the same configuration may not make it act rationally and freely’ (Reid 1969: 357 cited in O’Connor 1995: 178–9). The argument McKenna sets up in order to dismiss is not, however, in any obviously similar way fallacious – at least, not if it works via a consideration of the properties of agency. What are the properties of agents? That these possess powers of agency. The agent’s exercise of that agency must determine her acts – and determine these acts qua exercise of her power of agency (see Reid, ibid). And agency fulfils a normative role – determining acts in accordance with the agent’s reasons (see Reid’s use of ‘rationally’ above). But it is defining for determinism that the Big Bang entirely determines our acts. ‘Transfer’ remains a problem because overdetermination is a problem, and overdetermination is a problem because intrinsic to the concept of an agent is the concept of a power of agency. In light of this, I fail to see how McKenna’s self-constructed and putatively straw man overdetermination problem warrants so swift a dismissal.
McKenna follows his remarks above with: ‘if determinism is true, there is a causal history according to which agents emerged from causal conditions that did not themselves include any agents’ (McKenna 2008: 381). He is not by any means the only compatibilist to make such a claim; yet I think, in terms of the logic of the dialectic, this is the wrong thing to say; and wrong in just the way I shall argue a cognate claim by P. S. Churchland is wrong in the chapter to come. All that McKenna may maintain is that if determinism is true and determinists wish to save the existence of agents and agency in their ontology, and Alexander’s Principle is true, then determinists will have to hope they can somehow develop and defend an account whereby ‘agents emerged from causal conditions that did not themselves include any agents’. This is a commitment of their position; it is not something we may presuppose they are able to do, it is a state of affairs they will have to work very hard to secure. And their prospects in this task do not look promising. For they will have to attempt to make good this commitment in the teeth of their own view’s claim that everything (every act, say) is entirely, exhaustively determined by the Big Bang, billions of years prior to the existence of any agent, much less this agent, and any reasons, much less these reasons, yet with an agent being taken to be one who possesses a genuine power of agency and, further, capable of determining acts qua this power of agency (not, say, exclusively qua the powers of the perduring quarks that aggregate their features into a compositional behavioural resultant). Good luck to the compatibilists in this, their task; but having a metaphysical commitment does not establish that one can discharge that commitment, nor does it establish that one who seeks to press them on such a point is somehow begging the question.
Note also, and particularly, McKenna’s use of the term ‘emerged’ in the above. This is repeated in the near-identical passage that immediately follows – a passage that now concerns responsibility: ‘[the compatibilist holds that] if determinism is true, there is a causal history according to which morally responsible agents emerged from causal conditions that did not themselves include any morally responsible agents’ (McKenna 2008: 381). ‘Emerged’? McKenna’s determinism (any determinism) is ineluctably homopathic (resultant) not heteropathic: on such a picture, novel determining properties (like powers of agency or responsibility) do not simply ‘emerge’ – as, say, in an act of ‘creative synthesis’. As shall be argued in Chapter 9, the agency theorist can say things such as Reid says, above; and the anti-associationist emergentist can make claims to the effect that ‘agents emerged from causal conditions that did not themselves include any agents’ – in fact, it is defining for such a view and only such a view that it makes exactly such claims (cf. Lewes 1875; Alexander 1920). The determinist, however, cannot just help himself to such claims. Novel properties, properties which satisfy Alexander’s Principle and possess determining powers (of agency, normativity, responsibility) – powers that radically transcend any previously found swirling in the void – are not things that just any metaphysics has title to. The structural emergentist (Broad 1925) has resources available to him that the component non-emergentist does not. The structural emergentist pays for these resources with his metaphysical commitments, which are considerable: arguably, with a commitment to ‘downward causation’ (Sperry 1986). The commitments of emergentism and self-determinism appear in any obvious sense to have been eschewed by determinists. Compatibilists are committed to trying to resurrect some simulacrum of these powers with only the tools at their disposal. A number of hard-headed philosophers who share their deterministic metaphysics but without a prior allegiance to the compatibilist stance on freedom of the will, doubt, in the general case, whether anything that even approximates to higher-level powers of determination can be defended (Kim 1989, 1992, 2000 – the Exclusion Argument). Compatibilists cannot point to their conjoint commitments – to determinism plus free will/powers of agency – and premise that the latter has been discharged, then see any attempt to tax them with a conflict between it and the former as question-begging. One does not beg the question against the compatibilists by pointing out that things their opponents are required to pay for (and they wish for) are not obviously available to them.
From the foregoing, we may concede to the co-fated response that the inevitable may come about as a result of prior ‘efforts’ (scare quotes indicating there is nothing agential about these efforts); but what entirely determined these efforts, and will determine all others that follow, is not the agent determining her acts in response to her reasons qua exercise of her power of agency – it is the Big Bang and the laws of nature. I can think of myself as ‘determining’ acts in such a fashion only passively, qua patient not agent, which is to say I cannot conceive of myself, qua agent, determining acts on this basis at all.
7.2.3 The point to our actions (co-fated itself determined)
The co-fated response is meant at least to underwrite a point to our actions in the teeth of the Lazy Argument: that, in a determined world, there would be no space for the determinations of agency – no space for normative determination of action at all. Perhaps the co-fated response is meant to do more than this and defend a notion of agency (‘determined agency’) itself.
Granted, the presence of a co-fated precursor to and prerequisite of the inevitable outcome is meant to invest our actions with a point: the question is how? The co-fated determinant is itself co-fated. Any challenge to agency or the point to our actions that derives from determinism will just resurface at the level of these actions’ co-fated determinants in turn. We don’t get agency emerging from a sufficient number of epicycles added to the basic determinist account. The Lazy Argument questions how we, with our powers to decide, could make a difference to the way the world might be, yet determinism still be true – determinism which insists that the way the world is and has been and will be is wholly determined by the fundamental laws of nature and the start-up conditions that obtained at the Big Bang, long before we, with our powers to decide, were in existence. Surely, though, no-one was or is baffled, metaphysically, by how our behaviour (well, our movements) could have been caused by the Big Bang as such; nor yet by how our behaviour could in turn be a part of a causal chain that brings about other events – themselves ultimately necessitated by the Big Bang. The puzzlement is how, if determinism were true, the person could exhibit agency (could determine action).
A large part of what motivates the co-fated response is undoubtedly the straw man version of the Lazy Argument, which has it that what the determinist must oppose is the enervating conclusion criticized above: that we ought to choose inactivity. Versions of the Chrysippan counterargument have, throughout its long history, taken the task of this argument to be that of convincing those who are vulnerable to the Lazy Argument that there is a point to their actions (an emphasis, we shall see, that is shared by the proponents of the sister to this Chrysippan counterargument – the ‘epistemology not metaphysics’ position). Repeatedly we see the successors to Chrysippus urging upon a potentially ‘lazy’ agent that he should realize how his actions are causally, hence conatively, significant – as these actions may be ‘co-fated’ with their desired (and determined) intentional outcome. There’s a point to calling the doctor. The Chrysippan counterargument becomes, as it were, a pep talk: the agent would be foolish (in this literature, repeatedly he is characterized as a fool) were he to lapse into lassitude; the doctor needs to be called – to effect the patient’s (inevitable) survival.
How, though, on the determinists’ own assumptions, can taking this task as their project make sense: of reassuring us as to the point of our actions? How can there be a point to being told to call the doctor (on grounds that his being called may be ‘co-fated’ with the patient’s recovery) when that act of calling the doctor is itself entirely fated – quite as fated as the patient’s survival or death? At a second-order level, how can there be a point in urging upon the person that they be convinced by the ‘co-fated’ response – thus not to be a fool? That act itself is entirely fated. The agent either is co-fated to be convinced (by the co-fated response) or is not; but this state of affairs was decided already, 13.75 billion years ago. And the ‘decision’ to advance the co-fated argument, to do this urging, was itself an act already entirely co-fated in turn. Why the urgency then? What is it that the Chrysippan is trying to bring about that was not anyway going to happen? What are the followers of Chrysippus trying to prevent that is in any way preventable? How can there be a point to being urged to do anything (any more than there would be a point to being urged to do nothing) given that the power to bring about your doing that thing avowedly does not rest with you now – it rests with the fundamental laws of nature and the start-up conditions that obtained at the Big Bang?
A major issue here is whether determinism may be seen by its proponents as possessing any practical consequences at all. As will be seen in the chapters to come, determinists vary considerably; yet even those numbered among the hardest of determinists/incompatibilists typically dispute the claim that determinism has genuinely devastating practical consequences, while even very soft determinists typically dispute the claim that determinism has no practical consequences. From the tradition this book defends there comes a standing challenge as to the practical consequences of determinism. Thus, Diogenes Laertius reports of Zeno: ‘we are told that he was once chastising a slave for stealing, and when the latter pleaded that it was his fate to steal, “Yes, and to be beaten too,” said Zeno’ (Diogenes Laertius 1925: Bk7 #23). Kant famously maintains on just such a basis: ‘I assert that every being who cannot act except under the Idea of Freedom is by this alone – from a practical point of view – really free’ (Kant 1964: PA 448, emphasis in original – and cf. Kant 1933: A689 B717ff.). This general direction of argumentation is deemed by Bobzien (2001: 193) to be very far from what the ancients took the Lazy Argument to be about; but it is close to where the core issues of that argument should lie for us, possessed of a modern conception of determinism.
Those who make the ‘co-fated’ response are claiming that my action is metaphysically potent and non-futile, as without it, subsequent actions won’t happen. But defining for determinism is the claim that only the Big Bang and the laws of nature have what Kane calls a power of ‘originative control’. All else is mere ‘relative’ or ‘hypothetical’ necessity, mere guidance ‘control’. Nothing has a power of arché, of initiating causal potency (rather than inevitable causal continuance) apart from the Big Bang and the fundamental laws of nature. It is hard, then, to see how in any deep sense the charge of futility is blunted rather than deferred by the co-fated response. What is co-fated is itself co-fated, all the way back to the Big Bang. It is hard to see how I, as an agent, then have any causal role. I transmit causation, but I do not initiate it, and on a basic Eleatic principle – that to be real is to have causal powers – it is at least questionable whether I then count as possessing causal powers, or agency proper, at all.
The quotation above has Leibniz claim that determinism ‘far from causing an unendurable fatality, provides rather a means of obviating it’. But on Leibniz’s declared views, the agent can’t obviate anything. ‘The inevitable comes to pass by human effort,’ but which efforts are made are themselves inevitable. If inevitability is really not a problem, why make one pass at solving it through reference to (inevitable) human effort?
7.2.4 The mode of determination (partial fate determinism)
Grünbaum’s earlier paraphrasing of Wendell Holmes constituted a very minor divergence from his source quotation. The original is ‘the mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort’ (Wendell Holmes 1992: 118). This slight divergence (‘mode’) may be used to develop a point. The mode by which I travel from Edinburgh to London may be train, aeroplane, car, etc., but the destination is the same. The determining factor is my intention to be in London, and the means to that end is left open. Plenty have embraced this picture as an anti-reductive, intentions-based model of agency (Compton 1939; Tolman 1948; Popper 1966; Luria 1979; Fodor 1988; Edelman and Gally 2001); indeed, I shall defend just such a picture in two chapters’ time (cf. also remarks on ‘interchangeability’ and ‘degeneracy’ in Chapter 4, Section 4.6). When conjoined with determinism, however, this model yields a very odd, rather beautiful, pre-modern picture: the original picture of determinism, nowadays no longer encountered outside of literature and mythology. This is the (typically polytheistic) model of a deity or fate’s intentional stipulation of an outcome, with a human pawn possessed of just enough ‘wriggle room’ to decide the method by which he (perhaps surprisingly – even to the supernatural agent) reaches what is, alas, a foreordained outcome. The destination is inevitable, but the mode of transportation to it is not. Both the destination and the mode of transport to it derive from irreducibly agential, intentional, teleological forces – human or supernatural. Perhaps (for all we know) this picture may have been behind Chrysippus’s original version of the ‘co-fated’ response.2
However, on a modern determinist view, there is no telos. Intentions – whether human or divine – are not the source determinants of anything; and the mode of arrival at our destination is as precisely specified as that destination itself: specified to the last detail and with no degree of freedom, no wriggle room, at all. I then simply cannot see how the co-fated mode of achievement of the determined outcome may be invested with the properties this device needs to possess: of yielding a point to our agency; or even of permitting us agency at all. The goal state and the mode of travel to it and the degree of ‘effort’ applied to the latter were all entirely determined prior to our agency’s putative presence in the world. And they weren’t determined as a semantic, content-driven, intentions-based representation of a desired outcome. They were determined by the Big Bang: by energy that eventually became quarks, in a purposeless universe blindly pushing outwards to the heat death.
This indicates that there is a significant issue as to the ‘co-fated’ argument’s target; and specifically, whether anyone occupies this position. Fatalism with regard to an event, e, is often glossed as the claim that that event’s occurrence will be brought about ‘regardless’ of what we/anyone does prior to e. (Regardless of any specific ‘co-fated’ antecedent events.) There is a strong suspicion that many (most?) of the determinists who are responding to the Lazy Argument have such a picture in their sights. But such a position (held globally) really is a straw man – at least in the modern era. Locally, there can be such fatalism: even on the assumption that they possess an incompatibilist freedom, the occupants of this deep dugout will die regardless of what they or anyone else does once the distant gun is fired – for after this point they cannot be clear of the exit in time. Avowedly, though, they will only die here, in this way, granted that they go into the dugout, and the distant gun is fired – and no-one at all in the modern era holds the contrary view – it is entirely a straw man. Their death, all acknowledge, will occur, if it occurs, because of other events that bring it about; here (for the determinist and non-determinist alike), their going into the dugout and the firing of the big gun. The determinist needs to show how all events, without exception, could be co-fated with all others back to the one event that cosmically necessitated all others, long prior to the existence of any agent, yet have everything else we want to say about agency remain wholly unaffected. Prima facie, one might think that an extraordinarily ambitious aim. The co-fated response, so far from enabling them to achieve this aim, is one more statement of the problem that confronts them.
7.3 The ‘epistemology not metaphysics’ response
The second major way determinists have sought to defang the Lazy Argument is to mark a standard epistemology/metaphysics distinction and acknowledge that it is metaphysically impossible to succeed in avoiding or altering something (whatever it is) that has been in the post for 13.75 billion years and cannot possibly be avoided or altered. However, it is maintained this would not establish that it is futile to attempt to avoid or alter matters – given that it is not known (at this stage) what is unavoidable or unalterable. Nor, the determinist’s response continues, does the fact that we are apprised of determinism’s truth vitiate this point. The determinist knows that all things are unavoidable and unalterable, but the determinist does not know which things are unavoidable and unalterable. Because we don’t know what will come to pass – only that (whatever it is) it will have been pre-determined – the idea is that it is still epistemically possible for many different things to come to pass. The determinist will argue it is thereby not futile (epistemically, that is) to struggle to bring about the (metaphysically) inevitable by our human efforts. Fischer puts matters thus:
Even if … antecedent psychological states are causally sufficient for my decision, and I know this, it does not follow that I know what decision I will make and what action I will perform. Hence … there is a clear point to engaging in deliberation. (Fischer 2006a: 328)
Two things are striking from this. The first arose with the earlier ‘co-fated’ response (Section 7.2.3): the determinist, in responding to the Lazy Argument, is searching for a point to (here) deliberation. The second is that the passage has an oddly dissociated (‘spectatorial’) ring to it. I am seen as trying to find out ‘what decision I will make and what action I will perform’ – this is the ‘clear point to engaging in deliberation’.
In considering the ‘co-fated’ response, it seemed as if we were to envisage matters in the following way: conatively, a wholly determined world (‘world’ to include ourselves and our actions) whose determined outcome (/actions) we were struggling to bring to pass – in case, as it were, these (inevitable) occurrences otherwise should not take place. Here, it seems we envisage something like the epistemic equivalent: a determined world (‘world’ to include ourselves and our decisions) whose determined outcome (/decisions) we are closed off from and therefore are struggling to predict. It’s as if the world (to include ourselves and our actions/decisions) is seen as determined, but we – or rather an epistemic part of us – is, as it were, sideways on to it, in a place where our effort is crucial, and must be exerted, to permit us to predict the decisions … that we are anyway inevitably going to take, or to predict/effect the actions … that we are anyway inevitably going to perform. The importance of this project (of ourselves predicting the purportedly inevitable in our actions) purportedly invests a ‘clear point’ to our engaging in deliberation.
We here see the agent as estranged from himself – as separate, dissociated. One part of the self is a Cartesian automaton, obeying the determined laws of nature – the metaphysics of determinism. The other part of the self is an epistemic monitor of, or spectator to this automaton: trying to predict his (‘its’?) behavioural and cognitive outcomes. Since the epistemic monitor of the automaton is closed off from the inevitable, determined outcome, ‘there is a clear point to engaging in deliberation’ – for he does not know ‘what decision I (/it?) will make and what action I (/it?) will perform’.
The obvious question needs to be asked, though: what is the status of the epistemic monitor here? Consider Kapitan’s version of this ‘epistemology’ response:
Given our limited grasp of the actual facts, what we wonder about and want to know is what we can do given what we take to be the relevant past, present and future circumstances. However, the conviction that what we take to be relevant allows for different circumstances is entirely consistent with adopting a deterministic stance. (Kapitan 2002: 140, emphasis in original)
The trouble is, ‘what we take to be the relevant past, present and future circumstances’ may not, by the defender of this position, itself be seen as metaphysically open. When we claim a course of action is non-futile because, although metaphysically impossible, it is exploring epistemic possibilities: is it that these are epistemic or that these are possibilities that they are held to be non-futile? For they are not possibilities (as opposed, that is, to necessities), are they? What happens has been in the post for 13.75 billion years and was, from the moment of postage, wholly unpreventable. Nothing else is or was ever possible. What happens is wholly unpreventable, where ‘what happens’ includes what happens in us, in our thought processes, what seems possible to us. The epistemic ‘possibilities’ – what these are taken to be by the agent – are all of them fixed, and were so fixed 13.75 billion years ago: nothing else is or was ever possible. Which thought processes we undergo in eliminating, on which grounds, such lines of reasoning as end up being eliminated, is and always has been unpreventable. What singular ‘possibility’ remains as one’s eventual decision is and always has been unpreventable.
To be consistent with the position it is being marshalled to defend, the notion of ‘epistemic possibility’ in use must be a wholly determined one. Unless we fix on this point, it is easy to make the ‘epistemology not metaphysics’ defence against the Lazy Argument so facile as for this latter to deserve the title of sophism. But consider how odd the notion of a causally necessitated ‘possibility’ is:
The useful notion of ‘can’, the notion that is relied upon not only in personal planning and deliberation, but also in science, is a concept of possibility – and with it, of course, interdefined notions of impossibility and necessity – that are, in contrast to first appearances, fundamentally epistemic. (Dennett 1984: 148)
Dennett’s ‘can’ here (meaning ‘it is possible’) deserves to be scare quoted twice over: once because, as the view itself acknowledges, it is an epistemic not a metaphysical notion of possibility; the other (which defenders of this view do not commonly dwell upon) because the view itself must be committed to this ‘can’ being a notion of ‘possibility’ that is entirely necessary. That is, in placing scare quotes around talk of other options being ‘possible’, we not only indicate that it is epistemic rather than metaphysical possibility that we are talking about; these scare quotes also indicate a heavily scare-quoted (indeed fictive) sense in which the options being considered are even epistemically possible.
Consider what one would naturally suppose to be involved in a case of epistemic as opposed to metaphysical possibility in a quotidian case. Bad weather has grounded my flight in Edinburgh and I use all the resources available to me to decide whether to book a hotel in Scotland and wait for the weather to lift, or instead to get either a train or a car rental to make the journey down south to home. Unbeknownst to me, my activities are (metaphysically) futile: the credit card I would require for the car rental has been cancelled in a computer error and the trains I might be about to take are shortly to be victims of a wildcat strike. (Suppose this is due to local fatalism rather than global determinism: that is, ‘determined’ only in that the events in question – strike decision, computer error – have already occurred, not ‘determined’ in the sense that they, much less events more generally, were fixed by the Big Bang.) Unaware of these events, I phone some car rental companies, use an online train timetable and so on. Eventually, after intelligent consideration of many factors – cost, reliability, effort, potential to go wrong – I decide on the train.
Here, I am fated to be thwarted in my aim to reach my destination, so my activities are metaphysically futile; but epistemically they are not futile at all. So far as I am able to know (within all I have access to – all that is available to me in my epistemic perspective) there is a point to my inquiries; they are instrumentally and otherwise rational.
My efforts were metaphysically futile because it was determined (locally fated) that I could not achieve my end; and from the moment consideration occurred I was in fact always going to have to remain in Scotland for the night. But my efforts were not epistemically futile because my reasoning takes place within a framework of (here, warranted – though untrue) assumptions in which this isn’t the case; and in regard to this reasoning, I can achieve my end: deciding whether to book a hotel or find an alternative mode of transportation. Be clear: although my reasoning is an epistemic activity par excellence, nevertheless it too has a metaphysics – it has ‘being’ after all. For it to be epistemically non-futile, its metaphysics (the metaphysics of this reasoning) must be non-futile.
What is it, then, for the metaphysics of (considered, conscious, rational) reasoning to be futile or non-futile? Well, what was it for the metaphysics of my actions (actions per se, as opposed to mental actions) to be futile? Consider the epistemically non-futile status of my trips to the train station, the car garage, my inquiries about road and rail-works and the like… Is it only the fact that these are in the service of epistemology not metaphysics that saves them from the charge of futility? Surely that would be a difficult position to defend. Suppose it were locally fated that I was to ‘choose’ in my decision-making to travel by train – say because of an overwhelming phobia3 against other forms of transport, and an overwhelming irrational distaste for remaining in Scotland, or because of post-hypnotic suggestion, or demonic neuronal manipulations – then activities exploring other modes of transport would indeed be futile.
Why, however, does local fatalism (phobia, etc.) avowedly entail that the metaphysics of epistemology is futile, when a stronger, global determinism that entails but is not entailed by the level of unavoidability of the local does not? In the case we are considering (of local fatalism), attempting to leave Scotland is metaphysically but not epistemically futile. What, though, of my inquiries at the train station, rentals office, telephone and computer terminal, etc.? And what of my inner decision-making, my consideration of options, my train of thought? Are these always going to lead to exactly one outcome by exactly one and the same (perhaps circumlocutious) route; and exactly that one outcome, and that route, alone? Yes. The epistemology no less than the metaphysics has been in the post for 13.75 billion years – we can deviate from it not one bit. Indeed, the epistemology has been in the post for 13.75 billion years precisely because it (the epistemology) has a metaphysics, and its metaphysics – of ratiocination, telephone inquiry, etc. – is and has always been determined. How are these epistemic activities thereby non-futile?
If goal-directed human activity in the face of only one outcome’s being possible doesn’t lead to futility, why not insist on this abruptly, baldly, without further argument or digression in the direction of epistemology? Why feint in the direction of epistemology, when just the same issues will only end up having to be addressed (or rather, finessed) for the metaphysics of that domain, too? I’d suggest the answer here is simply that the determinist doesn’t look too deeply into the consequences of her views – that the determinist chooses to suppose that determinism can be true and everything else left pretty much as it is. Tacitly, the determinist who deploys the ‘epistemology not metaphysics’ response is relying on an unscrutinized, ultimately incompatibilist epistemology (notwithstanding that, on having this pointed out, any such epistemology would of course have to be disavowed). We saw in Part 1 of this book that there is space for a determined epistemology. But as Chapter 5 argued, this determined epistemology cannot be the only epistemology there is.
7.4 Compatibilism and epistemology
Can we then construct a compatibilist epistemology that will do the job of undermining the Lazy Argument – characterizing the activities that this argument dismisses as futile as being only metaphysically but not epistemically futile? An obvious starting point here would just be to apply classical Hobbesian compatibilism (or some advance on this) to epistemic activity. Among others, Steup (2008) takes this line. The following is not the final version of his sophisticated account, but as the details will not concern us, it will do to give a flavour of the approach:
Doxastic Freedom: 1st Account
S’s doxastic attitude A towards p is free iff (i) S has attitude A toward p; (ii) S wants to have attitude A toward p. (Steup 2008: 376)
The trouble is, if classical compatibilism (or anything like it) were felt to be adequate, the Lazy Argument would already have been refuted without any need for diversion into an epistemic counterargument. The epistemic move precisely took its point of departure from a dissatisfaction with the standard compatibilist line on (metaphysical) free will. It was supposed to offer us a line on the Lazy Argument that was quite distinct from a standard compatibilist formulation on ‘could have done otherwise’ (had the agent had the (determined) will to do otherwise). If this epistemic diversion merely recapitulates standard compatibilism, it is hard to see why we made the feint into epistemology in the first place. If I ‘could have done otherwise’ metaphysically (à la Hobbes–Locke–Hume), why then should it ever have been conceded to the Lazy ‘sophist’ that metaphysically I can’t do otherwise – but that I ‘could have done otherwise’ epistemologically (also, however, à la Hobbes–Locke–Hume)?
7.5 Broad’s ‘Mathematical Archangel’
It is doubtful, then, whether the ‘epistemology not metaphysics’ response is defensible; yet scrutiny of the commitments of those who defend it offers us further lessons from which we may learn.
If our agency is only to be defended as epistemically non-futile, would we cease to have a point to our deliberation in the event that we had access to a supercomputer’s perfectly accurate accelerated emulation of our decision-making; or, say, the results of calculations by Broad’s (1925) ‘Mathematical Archangel’? Would it be mere epistemic doubt that would lead us to refuse to accept the outcome of the Archangel/computer’s workings until we had laboriously ‘hand calculated’ them for ourselves? Fischer explicitly endorses such an approach: ‘if I genuinely knew all my future choices and behaviour, then it would seem to me that I could just sit back and let the future unroll’ (Fischer 2006a: 350).
I think Fischer’s position here is commendably consistent with his starting assumptions – and that he has honestly gone down a line of thought that others, hostile to the Lazy Argument, would rather not examine. I don’t think his line of reasoning will work, however. Consider first the ‘mere epistemic doubt’ that might lead us to refuse to accept the outcome of the Archangel/computer’s calculations. The Archangel/computer’s workings were meant to emulate our ‘mere epistemology’ – how is it acceptable to have an excrescence of doubt that follows this output? Are we to require a supercomputer’s emulation of these epistemic doubts also? Consider a ‘neo-Sartrean’ case like the following:
A bright young man from a country with a demoralized and underfunded education system has won the opportunity for graduate-level study at a first-class university abroad, at a crucial time in his academic development. But just in the last few weeks prior to leaving his home nation he commences a relationship with a woman (herself in a relationship with another) that appears as if it could be very serious indeed. Given another few months, the relationship could have defined itself, perhaps (probably?) into something so serious he would abandon his academic ambitions without a care, and one in which she would probably (he believes) be his alone. But his relationship with her isn’t there yet, all is undefined, it is very, very early days and his academic offer must be accepted or rejected now. Does he abandon his academic ambitions nevertheless? Or does he go abroad with an inchoate and undefined relationship that perhaps (probably?) won’t survive the enforced separation? What does he do? He agonizes. Would it really help to tell him we’ve stuck his neuronal inputs into a supercomputer to run a perfectly accurate emulation of his reasoning processes; and (by the way) he will in three weeks’ time board that aeroplane? Would he say ‘oh well, that’s it then’? Would his only doubts be whether it is a perfectly accurate emulation? And if he could be reassured on this point, would his only further agony be, as it were, Fregean ‘tone’ rather than genuine uncertainty in his decision?
As a non-determinist of course I doubt much of what this example is predicated upon – that such a computer, such an emulation, is one of Russell’s ‘mere medical impossibilities’ – but ignore this doubt and continue to entertain the thought experiment. Imagine our wavering student is given as output from the Archangel/computer: ‘You will board the aeroplane – this will be your decision,’ and imagine this output is perfectly accurate (and he believes it to be perfectly accurate). Nevertheless, that output is for the world in which he isn’t given this as an output. In the world where he is given this output it will give him further ‘material to work through’ (in the psychodynamic sense). He incorporates the vividness of that image, of himself boarding the aeroplane, its finality, its status as ‘actual’ (as it were) in another world (the world without the archangel monitoring and predicting4). Its ‘actuality’ makes horrifyingly real for him what he will be abandoning, losing. It strips bare from him all self-deception. He realizes, early days or no, he cannot abandon this relationship. In the three weeks of anguish he has left, he comes to the decision to abandon this educational opportunity for what he now comes to see (comes to fix, comes to define for himself) as love. He makes the decision. His agonizing, epistemically, isn’t the epistemic monitoring of a metaphysics that is, at least in principle, something the monitor is extrinsic to, dissociated from, a spectator to. The epistemology is the metaphysics of decision-making. Constitutive of decision-making is, well, the decision-making.
7.6 The epistemology is the metaphysics (when a response to a transcendental argument becomes illicit)
We are not, in our epistemology, running offline an attempt to predict what our determined bodily system is going to do anyway. We are trying to decide what to do. The metaphysics of the decision is the epistemology – is the decision-making. As noted in Chapter 5, a failure to appreciate the special nature of situations where this state of affairs obtains is a common feature of a number of fallacious attempts to respond to transcendental arguments by marking an epistemology/metaphysics distinction. Such normally unproblematic realist moves are by no means unproblematic when the epistemology is the metaphysics.5 The metaphysics of the decision-making is not a separate event or process that the epistemology is monitoring or ‘spectating’ or estimating. The standard, epistemic line by determinists against the Lazy Argument illicitly separates two things: the determined decision and the epistemology of that decision (finding out that it is to be your decision). The decision is the finding out – one and the same. ‘Decision-making’ is epistemology and metaphysics. Decision making is already an epistemic activity; that is its metaphysics – what it consists in, what constitutes it: the settling of doubts.
7.7 The ‘Locked Door’ example
Throughout the earlier, purely epistemic, material of Part 1, the regulative, practical, action-guiding context of ethical and epistemic appraisal was emphasized. Martin (2009) calls this the ‘context of deliberation’. What point would there be to such deliberation in a determined world? This question is an ellipsis for an argument, something Copp (2003) calls the Argument from Guiding Action: that there must be a point to requiring an action – namely, to get it done. If determinism is true, only one thing is possible. If that thing is morally prohibited, this makes moral obligation irrelevant – it cannot provide the agent with guidance (and mutatis mutandis for epistemic obligation).
A similar argument is made by van Inwagen (1983) out of his ‘Locked Door’ example. This example has the agent desirous to exit a room, standing before the sole exits: two unbreakable doors, one of them securely locked. Van Inwagen asks: what would be the point of decision-making in such a circumstance? And he claims that if determinism were true, all our circumstances would be relevantly similar to this.
Something like van Inwagen’s example originates with Erasmus:
It would be ridiculous to command one to make a choice, if he were incapable of turning in either direction. That’s like saying to one who stands at the crossroads ‘choose either one’, when only one is passable. (Erasmus 2005: 27, in Martin 2009)
Erasmus then cites an example from scripture consisting of God’s edicts to His people preparing to cross the Jordan. Of these edicts (enjoining them to obey His commandments, etc.), Erasmus notes:
You hear again and again of preparing, choosing, preventing, meaningless words unless the will of man were not also free to do good, and not just evil. Otherwise it would be like addressing a man whose hands are tied in such a manner that he can reach with them only to the left, ‘to the right you have excellent wine, to the left, poison. Take what you like.’ (Erasmus 2005: 27)
Fischer takes up the challenge represented by this family of arguments to consider the ‘Locked Doors’ example:
In a causally deterministic world [two doors – one locked, we don’t know which] … every choice and action would be such that … I could not have made another choice (or performed another action). But it seems to me that there could still be a perfectly reasonable point to deliberation. … All that is required is that I have an interest in figuring out what I have sufficient reason to choose. (Fischer 2006b: 186–7)
An interest? How is his semi-compatibilist agent (avowedly bereft of regulative control), in ‘deciding’ (being determined by the Big Bang to decide) to reflect on what he has ‘sufficient reason to choose,’ really here in a different position to Schopenhauer’s hubristic water, similarly deciding to reflect?
[L]et us imagine a man who … would say to himself: ‘It is six o’clock in the evening, the working day is over. Now I can go for a walk, or I can go to the club; I can also climb up the tower to the see the sun set; I can go to the theatre; I can visit this friend or that one; indeed, I also can run out of the gate, into the wide world, and never return. All of this is strictly up to me, in this I have complete freedom. But still I shall do none of these things now, but with just as free a will I shall go home to my wife.’ This is exactly as if water spoke to itself: ‘I can make high waves (yes! in the sea during a storm), I can rush down hill (yes! in the river bed), I can plunge down foaming and gushing (yes! in the waterfall), I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air (yes! in the fountain), I can, finally, boil away and disappear (yes! at a certain temperature); but I am doing none of these things now, and am voluntarily remaining quiet and clear water in the reflecting pond.’ (Schopenhauer 1999: 36–7)
Suppose I am deciding which of van Inwagen’s doors to attempt to open. I don’t know which is locked – epistemically either seems available – so, allegedly, decision is not futile. But decision only seems not futile precisely because I (and you, and everybody else) is in the grip of a deep, tacit view that I am incompatibilistically free to decide. Make this tacit view explicit and of course it must be disavowed – it is clearly unavailable to the determinist. What, then, becomes of the dismissive line that consideration is non-futile because other possibilities are epistemically available? It is a position that is now more difficult to animate. Let us make the attempt.
7.8 Double doors
Suppose, then, I am in front of two separate sets of double, not single doors. The two outer doors are in each case transparent – bulletproof, say – and very securely locked. Each of these two outer doors gives access to its own (and only its own) inner door, one of which I know to be locked and one of which I know to be not locked – but I don’t know which is which. Let one of the inner doors be a red door, the other blue. In a sealed, soundproof cell, through CCTV, I can see a rigorously trained dog, whose behaviour I cannot alter, choosing, apparently on canine whim, between a red and a blue key – each located for it at either end of a T maze. The dog will emerge into my chamber through a one-way and unreturnable dog flap with the single key it has chosen between its teeth. If it is a red key, it will allow me to open only the outer, transparent door that gives access to the inner red door – which may be locked or unlocked as the case may be (if it is locked I cannot open it). If a blue key, it will open only the outer, transparent door to permit me to try the blue door. Whether the door I try is unlocked or locked is already fixed; and which door I try is also fixed. I can witness but not influence the dog ‘choosing’ between the keys in real time. Perhaps the dog makes this ‘choice’ in a way that is determined, or perhaps it is random (though certainly its set-up training is determined). As a matter of empirical fact, I may or may not agonize over the dog’s choice – perhaps I am oddly indifferent to it – but, rationally, how is any thought I give to the matter other than futile? And how has Fischer’s ‘epistemology’ response to van Inwagen’s Locked Door example added more than an epicycle to the charge of futility? The determinist must be committed to the epistemology being as unavoidable as the metaphysics. Something 13.75 billion years prior to the agent has already predetermined which door is to be tried. Something 13.75 billion years prior to the agent has already predetermined that agent’s thought processes leading up to this choice.
It will do no good to claim that in our decision we make the ‘choice’, not the dog: this is precisely to presuppose what is at issue – and to do so for the second time. We asked what would be the point to rational consideration in a world that is seen as wholly fixed in advance – a world whose outcome we cannot alter (the locked doors). The response came back that this concerned metaphysics, but our decision-making still yielded a point to our rational consideration (epistemology). It is then countered that the metaphysics of this ‘rational consideration’ is itself wholly fixed in advance – it is already determined which decision it will yield, and that this decision we cannot alter. Is the erstwhile determinist, against the content of her own views, baldly denying this? Or is she simply embarking on a futile regress of responses? On her metaphysical picture, we no more have control over the direction of our thoughts than we do over the dog: our ‘choice’ is determined by the Big Bang; and the appearances to us as to what our possibilities are in this situation will likewise be determined by the Big Bang.
Is there a counterattack available to the determinist on the ground that we instantiate, we ‘enclose’ the determined process?6 Well, so what? I enclose various cellular processes, but am not thereby responsible for them. Put another way, let the dog analogy be placed in the head. The dog is a homuncular dog, but which arm of the T maze it goes down isn’t up to me, to my agency (though it may be ‘up to’ my neuronal mitochondria, or sodium ion pumps – themselves determined by the Big Bang). It appears to be possible for me to take actions other than the one I am (metaphysically, actually) determined by the Big Bang to take – and thus, it is claimed, there is a point to agonizing over which course of action to take. But according to determinism, metaphysically, only one set of courses of action can appear to be possible, and only one passage of reflective, cogitative travel is possible through these appearances: a path fixed prior to my epistemic agency (any epistemic agency) determining anything.
What is the point to reflective cogitation in one who believes all is determined? Answer: he doesn’t know what is determined and he needs to decide between options that appear to him to be open. But what is the point to reflective cogitation in one who believes all is determined including the appearance to him of which options are open – and including which one of these options he will eventually decide, and why?
This question may most obviously be responded to by noting that this, his putative decision, is a determined process he undergoes, not an option he may or may not take.7 He instantiates (is the site of) the process that was determined from the Big Bang: the process that involves seeing some things as possible, then moving through them via various transition states to end up with the one thing that he does or thinks. Why, though, describe this as a model that needs, as it were, the assent, the say-so of an executive ‘final word’? Why suppose such a picture is available to the determinist (or intelligible under the assumption of determinism)? The idea will be that ‘this reflection has some point because I don’t know which of these options I’m determined to take, so I must decide this’. But you don’t decide this (as if you might decide otherwise), and you certainly don’t give permission for this process to unfold; you host the neuronal (and ultimately quark-based) dance that spits it out, and was always going to spit it out.
The appearances (to you), the epistemology, have, and has, been in the post for 13.75 billion years. You could be missing some possibilities, in some reified sense of ‘possibility’, and perhaps even some ‘obvious’ possibilities in this sense; but no effort on your part can uncover them: they are not possibilities for you – whether epistemically or metaphysically. And of the epistemic ‘possibilities’, the appearances, those that you have access to (that it has been determined that you will consider): those of these that you choose, and the reasons why you choose, and precisely the rate and manner and route of ratiocination by which you consider and accept/reject them … these, all of them, have been in the post for 13.75 billion years. What does it mean, for one who embraces this view, to take seriously and respond to arguments such as Copp’s, van Inwagen’s and Erasmus’s? I can see no point. I see only epicycles and confusion.