Self-Determination and Determination by Reasons
9.1 Self-determinism
The idea that we have a power to determine our wills has historically faced a number of objections. One is that it is simply false: ‘Conative (/Cognitive) Voluntarism’ does not ever obtain. We have dealt with this position already in Chapters 3 and 4. More common, however, is the claim that the notion is conceptually confused.
I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say, I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech. (Hobbes 1962: 246, emphases in original)
Why is it absurd to say I determine – choose – my will? Historically, there have been several ways of making essentially the same objection; exemplified, for example, by these three points from Jonathan Edwards (2007). First, determining my will is said to entail a vicious regress: choosing must take place on the basis of an act of will, choosing my will then requires a further act of will and so on. Second, there would have to be a first choice, but this must be either determined or by chance, for if chosen in turn, it would (incoherently) require a choice before the first choice. Third, choice implies a preference (a desire) for something on the part of the chooser – a preference that the compatibilist thinks is determined, not chosen. If, however, we are free to choose our choices (our preference for something), then that cannot be a ‘freedom’ merely to be determined by another preference (desire) in turn. So we must ‘choose’ from nothing – no preference, perfect indifference or caprice – and that is no choice.
These objections are question-begging, in each case for the same reason. The self-determinist’s position is that choice is ultimately a determination of the self, the whole person, the mind. Automatically, then, it will be in opposition to any claim that choice has to be a determination of one or more sub-personal items (‘desires’, ‘acts of will’), at least if these be seen as separable parts of the mind rather than properties of the whole.
That is just why the self-determinist regards as fallacious the stock dilemma argument of the previous chapter. It presents us with a question: Whatever the conative part was that determined your choice, was this in turn determined by natural law or by chance? But this question presupposes already that a determination of action must be made by one or other part or item, rather than the self as a whole:
I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. (Hobbes 1962: 271)
This presupposition is question-begging: persons, not their parts, determine choices.
So, the regress objection presupposes that if an act is determined, this can only be by an ontologically real, prior and separable item in the chooser called an act of will – historically: a ‘desire’, or sometimes ‘volition’. (‘Ontologically real …’ is meant to highlight the fact that we must preclude a tacitly question-begging defence of this position under which we see a slide towards the committed term ‘desire’ being waived through because it is read as a harmless synonym for ‘choice’.) For one such prior item to be chosen is then seen as requiring another act of will (‘desire’) in turn. The self-determinist position this is supposed to be refuting says that acts are determined by persons, not items within them. If I choose my desires, or anything else, I determine these, some other desires don’t (or don’t have to) and there is no regress.
Similarly, the second objection presupposes that our first choice must, if it too is chosen, be chosen by a determining item – desire, act of will – before the first. But the self-determination view is defined by its claim that the first choice (to the extent one accepts this notion) is a determination of the person, not a sub-personal part, prior to that person.
Finally, notice that the ‘indifference’ objection has emerged in a specifically epistemic idiom in Part 1 of this work – the externalists’ attack on doxastic voluntarism: that we are not epistemically free because we cannot believe on a whim. The response here is as given previously: no-one aspires to a freedom of caprice. Choice may be a preference, but it is a preference of a person, not a ‘preference’ where this be a sub-personal item.
9.2 Indeterminism and self-determinism
The correct response to the dilemma argument, then, is that it is a false dilemma: we may be neither undetermined (in the sense used by this argument) nor determined (in the sense used by this argument); instead, we may be self-determined. This is the freedom required for us to possess the reflexive epistemic and ethical justification we need to be no longer vulnerable to the transcendental arguments of the last chapter. This is the freedom we need for our lives not to be futile.
The claim that self-determinism is neither a species of determinism nor indeterminism – that it is a ‘third way’ between these – needs expansion though. After all, on the one hand, self-determinism, if it is anything, is a kind of determinism (only, a determinism where actions and decisions are determined by the self who originates them). And on the other hand, such ‘third-way’ (false-dilemma) responses are invariably listed by their critics, and not a few of their adherents, as indeterminist positions. This state of affairs is insufficiently remarked upon.
Perhaps, on other grounds, the determinism/indeterminism dilemma can be forced on the self-determinist, but that needs to be argued, not assumed. Otherwise, to specify self-determinism as an indeterminist position looks to beg the question against it – or, for the case of those ‘third-way’ libertarians who identify themselves as indeterminists, for them to commit a category error and fail to understand the logic of their own position.
The exception to or qualification of this line of reasoning comes with William James, and it is an important exception or qualification. James (1897b) distinguished positive chance from negative chance. The former sense of ‘chance’ he took, with the classic compatibilists, to be pernicious, destructive of freedom and responsibility; the latter harmless, indeed necessary for freedom and responsibility. The former is the conception of chance that the indeterminist horn of the dilemma argument relies upon – we consider it now.
Imagine that there could be a true generator of randomness in the world (metaphysical randomness, that is). Let it drive, in some way (to some extent), our acts and thought processes, our decisions and behaviour. That is, insert this randomizer into, or over, or at, the origin of our acts. To the extent this positive source of chance exerted its influence, we would surely see a diminution in our degree of responsibility-relevant control.1 That is, such responsibility for our actions as remained to us would be just that degree of determination of our actions as was robust enough to survive this chaos, this noise, these gremlins. The more noise, the less we would determine action – the less we could be said to act at all. Surely our ability to act, and to bear responsibility for our actions, could survive some such randomness, and perhaps it could survive quite a lot; but it is hard to see how this randomization would enhance our freedom, and as it increased beyond a certain influence, surely it would only degrade it until we could not be said to determine our actions at all. There have been efforts to withstand this stock objection in the recent literature,2 but they seem less than compelling to me.
In contrast, however, James’s negative conception of indeterminism does not take indeterminism to be a positive randomizing force – one of Pereboom’s (2001) ‘alien-deterministic events’. It is simply an absence of determination by any positive force external to the agent himself. Maintaining that I am not determined is not, then, the same thing as maintaining that I am undetermined. Saying ‘nothing made me take this path’ is not the same thing as saying ‘something made me take this path’ (to wit, ‘randomness’, ‘chance’).3
Strictly, then, we should distinguish a positive force – whether determined or random – from the absence of such a force. The absence of determination by a positive force external to the agent does not imply the presence of determination by another such positive force – positive indeterminism (randomness, chance) – while the converse applies also: the absence of randomness does not imply the presence of an external determining factor. Nor does this mean that the event that is produced as effect (the action or decision) is thereby not caused. It may be caused all right – as perhaps is every event – but it is not determined by anything external to the agent (drawing, somewhat after Anscombe (1971), the distinction between causation and determination by law). It would be quite coherent, even, to entertain the notion of an event not determined by anything at all. Perhaps such things happen, perhaps not; but there is nothing incoherent in saying such a putative effect is nevertheless caused.
An event or act could be caused by a heterogeneity of lower-level determinants (by items falling under a heterogeneity of lower-level laws) to the point where this event or act, typed as (intelligible as) this event or act, is not determined by any one such law – yet it is caused right enough.4 Or it could be caused by a determinant (a power of necessitation in nature, a power that brings about its effect) that is singular: that does not instantiate any universal law. In the case of human action, it could be determined, perhaps, by the agent being a ‘law unto themselves’.
9.3 Self-determinism not agent-causation
I don’t wish to develop the positive side of this viewpoint at great length, because, as will be made clear in the final chapter, I am not completely convinced by the positive side of this viewpoint – at least, as when put forward as a constitutive solution to the problems of pure metaphysics (as opposed to high-level theoretical psychology or philosophy of science). Also, it is not necessary to develop this viewpoint at length because it is not original to this work and its existing sources are well documented – basically the 1960s and 1970s ‘special sciences’ literature and the older emergentist literature. It is worth adverting to these sources, though, in order to distinguish this position from the notion of agent-causation, with which it is apt to be confused.
The 1960s functionalist (‘special science’) literature contained many familiar examples (concerning the ontological status of tigers, Gresham’s Law – that good money drives out bad, rivers eroding their outer banks and all the like5) that were used to establish that the determination (sometimes: ‘nomologicity’) of an event commonly occurs only at the level of the particular higher-order special science that types and quantifies over such events. At levels below that (say, at the level of the quarks), the event is anomalous.
We were only able to deduce a statement which is lawful at the higher level, that the peg goes through the hole. … When we try to deduce the possible trajectories … from statements about the individual atoms, we use statements that are totally accidental – this atom is here, this carbon atom is there, and so forth. … This means that the derivation of the laws of economics from just the laws of physics is in principle impossible. … The conclusion I want to draw from this is that we do have the kind of autonomy that we are looking for in the mental realm. (Putnam 1980: 138–9, emphases in original)
I take the various now-familiar examples in this literature to be pretty much unassailable so far as the narrower interests of the philosophers of science and psychology go. The older, emergentist literature was then rediscovered to add that:
the characteristic behaviour of the whole could not, even in theory, be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the behaviour of its components, taken separately or in other combinations, and of their proportions and arrangements in this whole. (Broad 1925: 59, emphasis in original)
This picture, as applied to human psychology, has been underpinning many of the constructive philosophical approaches found in this book. Human thought is creative: it involves radically non-associative, top-down, higher-order, emergent processes. As far as it goes, as a position in theoretical psychology, I take this position to be very strongly defensible.
The problem is that at the level of pure metaphysics, there is no very hopeful prospect of satisfactorily solving the overdetermination problems that then arise – most notably ‘the Exclusion Argument’ (Kim 1989). This means the ultimate adequacy of this position as a positive account of the hardest problems concerning the metaphysics of free will (as opposed to a core truth about free will needing to be accounted for by any such metaphysics) is open to question – of which more in the chapter to come. But denying the datum – that determination often occurs only at the level of a specific, autonomous, higher-order science and those entities/objects/properties that it alone recognizes – is a Procrustean non-solution – it is simply not an option: downward determination (not causation6) is an inescapable truth. So, at the level of the specific special science of psychology, our intentions frequently determine that we are here rather than there – that our quarks and mitochondria and sodium ion pumps are here rather than there. There had better be some quarks and mitochondria and sodium ion pumps working according to the determinations of the sciences that type them if this is to occur, but that this ad hoc, open-endedly disjunctive swarm of quarks is here rather than there (that I am here rather than there) is due to me. I determined it, I intended to be here (Compton 1939: 53; Popper 1966: 66; Luria 1979: Ch. 7; Fodor 1988: 3–4; O’Connor 1994: 101, 1995: 178).
There has been a tendency to identify this relatively unmysterious ‘third-way’ alternative to the dilemma argument – self-determination – with a different type of ‘false-dilemma’ rejoinder to that argument: agent-causation. The friends and enemies of agent-causation alike see this as a species of causation that is quite distinct, ontologically, from other (say, event) causation. Notwithstanding my great admiration for Roderick Chisholm, C. A. Campbell and Tim O’Connor, I do not wish to embrace any such position and do not see my view as merely a terminological re-badging of it.
O’Connor (2011) identifies three characteristics of agent-causal theories: 1. Agents as substances that endure through time. 2. Agents as compositionally irreducible (though possibly physically composed). 3. Causal antireductionism. I wholeheartedly endorse his 2 and 3, but wonder why, with these endorsed, he sees his view as committed to 1. Note that, historically, substance theorists were very far from embracing O’Connor’s modern emergentist conception of 2 (the conception highlighted by 2’s parenthetic clause); and historically, substance theorists embraced a heavily ontological, pre-modern conception of 3. In contrast, emergentists were, from the start, wholly explicit that they trod a middle path between substance dualism and materialism (a point often ignored or misunderstood by their recent materialist critics). Emergentism defined itself from the first as embracing an ultimate physicalist ontology (Kim 1992: 122). And emergentism defined itself as opposing dualism (Broad 1925; Putnam 1980). Emergentists were precisely not ‘component theorists’ (Broad 1925). They were precisely not (substance) dualists. I endorse wholeheartedly the emergentism and antireductionism of O’Connor, but fail to see how, with this strand of his theory embraced, he needs, or indeed can easily make his position consistent with, this quite different pre-modern conception of ‘substance’. Agreed, agents endure through time, and must, by Alexander’s Principle, have their own causal properties – as opposed to merely perduring, or having causal properties entirely via their aggregate parts. But in making such a point, one is not in any obvious sense required to embrace a conception of agents as substances – unless this notion be attenuated almost beyond recognition. Strip out 1 in this way, maintain a modern emergentist conception of 2 and a modern non-reductive (nomological) conception of 3 and you have something like the view defended here. In defending such a view, one is very far from endorsing a heavily metaphysical, neo-scholastic conception of these matters – as, say, where Chisholm’s agent (/immanent) causation is held to be metaphysically distinct from his event (/transeunt) causation: with substances, heirloom-causation and who knows what else louring out of the background fog. For these reasons, I would think it highly misleading to describe the position defended here as an agent-causal libertarianism.
Notice, however, that these differences do not need to be articulated by claiming that self-determination, in contrast to agent-causation, restricts itself to invoking only event-causation – and I would resist any such characterization of the difference between these positions. For one thing, we should be sceptical of the widespread assumption that event causation is an especially or uniquely pellucid notion. But more importantly, notwithstanding various unclear and undefended ‘uniformity of causation’ assumptions, many other things have at least as much claim to determine outcomes besides events: objects (tigers, rivers, stars), and higher-order structural relations or systems (pressure–volume–temperature relations, predator–prey ratios, a nervous system, increases in the money supply, differing schedules of reinforcement); and probably much else besides (an invitation? Education? Personality? Emotions?). We do not by any means face simply a choice between only event versus event-plus-substance causation.
The claim here is rather that the (profound) ontological addition made by the emergence of a self is to the furniture of the universe, not to Hume’s ‘cement of the universe’. Agreed, by Alexander’s Principle, with the emergence of a self must come an entity postulated as possessing a new repertoire of causal powers (better: powers of determination), but not a new kind of causation (‘agent-causation’). Selves are, as the older emergentists stressed, a quite extraordinary ontological addition to the world; yet self-determination invokes determination by a self in a way that should be seen as continuous in principle with how chemical determination invokes determination by chemicals, zoological determination invokes determination by tigers, economic determination invokes determination by inflation and geological determination invokes determination by rivers. The river erodes its outer bank: this is the level at which erosion is determined. The tiger determined the death of the antelope: this is the level at which the death is determined. Gresham’s Law determined the whereabouts across the region of space–time that is revolutionary France of a disproportionate number of assignats being in circulation and a disproportionate number of Louis d’or being secreted in walls and mattresses and attics. Try even to make these sciences’ predicates intelligible in lower-level terms7: what is a ‘tiger’ in terms of the quarks? What is ‘death’? ‘Currency’? ‘In circulation’? ‘Erosion’? What, for our case, are such things as ‘intention’, ‘purpose’, ‘reason’, ‘ambition’ in terms of quarks? Special sciences detail the determinations appropriate to them of events that are typically anomalous (indeed, typically incomprehensible, typically indefinitely and open-endedly disjunctive, typically not events, not kinds or projectable predicates at all) at levels below that at which the determining special science operates.
9.4 The dilemma argument and the external perspective
One who subscribes to Hobbes’s view that ‘nothing taketh beginning from itself but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself’ may be said, in Campbell’s phrase, to take an external conception of determination. An event, externally conceived, is either determined or by chance; just as the dilemma argument would have us believe. So, for events such as this radioactive decay …, the path of this pollen particle …, the position and momentum of this photon …, each either obeys determinate laws or is random. The external perspective contains only these two possibilities; but these are not the only possibilities there are.
Libertarians hold that the causal conditions that produce the action or decision do not have effects that go through the agent (or the agent’s desires) to circumstances outside the agent’s control, but new conditions for the action or decision that originate within the agent. (Rudder Baker 2006: 309, emphases in original)
The positions are now on the table: the dilemma argument offers us a forced choice between determinism and indeterminism – each externally conceived. The latter is to be assimilated to James’s positive chance. Opposing this as a false dilemma is the view that a third position exists: self-determinism, where this entails that actions are ‘undetermined’ only negatively – in the sense of ‘not externally determined’. This would not mean such acts were uncaused, nor even that they were undetermined: they are determined by the agent.
This picture of self-determination, as it applies to epistemology, has already been both defended and relied upon in this book – notably, in Chapter 4, on executive control. In the domain of ethics, I have articulated this approach to moral psychology and the metaphysics of moral freedom elsewhere (Lockie 1998). We must reject the tacit theory of judgement, including philosophical judgement, which has it that this consists in passively collating to a resultant the associative sum of conatively prior items. Consider again, from Chapter 3, some of the straw men constructed by the doxastic involuntarists, who have the power to choose the specific content of their beliefs, as it were, upon a whim (‘I want to believe that the US is still a colony of Britain!’). No-one should (qua rational agent) aspire to such powers; and, where present, they are certainly not what our intellectual freedom consists in. Yet this is in no sense to say that our beliefs sum, passively, associatively, to yield a resultant judgement. Our agency – intellectual, moral and other – is not to be driven by Edwards’s ‘wild contingence’ – a freedom of caprice, a freedom of positive indeterminism, of chance; and nor is it to be associatively, additively, determined to action or judgement. Rather, it is to have freedom of thought.
Our beliefs are combined non-additively in acts of judgement. This is an emergent, heteropathic process: the beliefs don’t possess a prior conative or cognitive value (prior to combination in the act of judgement). Beliefs and desires don’t homopathically augment and countervail each other in a kind of automatic mental accounting, faithfully to preserve their prior conative or doxastic value to a bottom line. Rather, the act of judgement is just that: an act, or series of acts, a series of controlled processes, controlled by the agent. In judgement, we actively make a new creation in thought. The ‘parts’ that go into that judgement (our reasons, evidence, argument, data) are combined non-associatively to yield a judgement owned by the agent – for the agent created this belief through his cognitive activity: his thought.
9.5 Determination by reasons and determination by a self: The overdetermination objection
One fundamental challenge for a self-determination view may be expressed as a dilemma problem or as an overdetermination problem. We have already encountered the dilemma version of this problem in Chapters 3 and 4. This way of framing the problem asks how we may be epistemically free: if our actions and decisions are caused by our reasons, then they are reasonable (but not ‘free’). If our actions and our decisions are chosen by the agent, then they are free but not determined by reasons – not reasonable. I refer the reader to Chapter 3, Section 3.5, and Chapter 4, especially Sections 4.8 and 4.9, for my response to this challenge in its specifically epistemic and specifically dilemma-based form.
This challenge may instead be expressed as an overdetermination problem. Philosophers representing as diverse positions as the acausal libertarian Carl Ginet (2002b) and the hard incompatibilist Galen Strawson (1995) think that if there is determination by an agent and determination by reasons, then there is an indefensible overdetermination. ‘It seems clear that what [agent] a does when he acts intentionally is always and necessarily a function of his reasons; and that he cannot therefore truly be self-determining …’ (Strawson 1995: 21).
This problem remains under the assumption of (positive) indeterminism. Ginet (2002b: 398–9) considers Randolph Clarke’s (e.g. 1995) views (Clarke, in the position he held then, had combined elements of indeterministic event causalism – ‘reasons’ – with agent-causation). In making a case against Clarke, Ginet employs a revealing analogy, where he asks us to imagine Clarke’s reasons as being ‘like springs’, whose energy is ‘being released’ in action. He envisages two such springs, each with the potential to release a distinct and separate action; and asks as to the role an agent could then have in also contributing to the outcome. The agent ‘releasing’ said springs is either otiose (should a reasons view, probabilistic or deterministic, be an explanatorily adequate account); or the agent is properly considered as the sole (albeit perhaps homuncular and regressive) explanation. There’s no role for both explanations, Ginet avers; and interpreting reasons probabilistically does nothing to deflect this objection.8
Much of this objection has already been addressed in Chapters 3 and 4 (in regard to its counterpart in ethics, see Lockie 1998). There is no overdetermination in cases where an agent self-determines and acts for reasons; in fact, quite the contrary: for reasons only are reasons in a mind and for a self. When I determine an act, I am partially comprised by my reasons, which I, as a person, assimilate, accommodate and equilibrate. They only are reasons (fully) inasmuch as they are thus assimilated. This is precisely not an additive, associative process. Reasons are incomplete as reasons (reasons in a psychological, motivational sense and also in a normative sense) until they become that agent’s reasons. Reasons for one agent are not reasons for another. Only consider agents and reasons found in cases like the following.
9.5.1 Character and reasons: Non-associative motivation
Give Othello his reasons – Iago’s whispering campaign, Desdemona’s stolen and artfully placed handkerchief, etc. – and watch the ‘green-eyed monster’ take hold, not to lose its grip until his personal tragic dénouement. Give Macbeth his reasons – the weird sisters’ clever manipulations, his wife’s whispered aspersions against his masculinity, etc. – and watch his ‘vaulting ambition’ o’erleap itself; not then to lose its grip until his personal tragic dénouement. But preserve such details as make it intelligible to say we have given Macbeth’s reasons to Othello, or Othello’s reasons to Macbeth, and in neither case does such tragedy occur. Macbeth doesn’t have Othello’s tragic flaw – nor Othello Macbeth’s. Their reasons only are reasons in the light of their characters. Nor is saying this shorthand for something quite different: it’s not that Macbeth could be pressed, conatively, with some ‘bat-squeak’ impulse to jealousy in the light of a Caledonian Iago’s machinations – an impulse that is nevertheless countervailed by other reasons (perhaps so overwhelmingly that it never reaches consciousness). Othello’s reasons, for Macbeth, needn’t be reasons at all (indeed, they might even be reasons with a reverse direction of conative pressure). And Macbeth’s reasons need not move Othello at all. It is not that Othello could at some level be made to see the possibility of killing and replacing the head of state in whose service he is sworn, and be affected (consciously or not) with some desire to attain this end, yet have other reasons that countervailed and overcame this ambition (perhaps overwhelmingly so). On the contrary: he wouldn’t be affected at all – not consciously nor yet unconsciously. Macbeth’s reasons (to usurp the head of state) simply would not affect Othello. When Othello, just prior to his suicide, says, ‘I have done the state some service, and they know ’t,’ this is with, as the later poet puts it, ‘an humble and a contrite heart’. When Othello’s end comes, as the tragic form requires, he achieves nobility; and in his case this is in no small part due to his death coming with contrition and by his own hand. When, though, Macbeth nears his end, he asks contemptuously, ‘Why should I play the Roman fool and die on mine own sword?’ His end is also noble, as required, but noble because it comes with defiance in the face of the certainty of his own death, and not by his hand but facing his enemy – as, given his character, it always would. Great as Hume is as a philosopher, a choice between his psychological insights or Shakespeare’s is no choice at all.
Othello and Macbeth simply have different characters – they are different agents. Reasons for one are not reasons for the other, and what it is to have the character of the one isn’t just to be built up out of (‘bundled out of’) different, and different-strength, ‘reasons’ – it is to be ontologically different; it is to be a different person. The same reason given to two different agents may possess a different conative strength, or even direction: the same reason. So, give a Nietzschean/Adlerian type – a Cassius, say – an oath of service to a superior, and his ressentiment is a constant pressure upon his future actions: a pressure he may resist, and perhaps with other reasons (of prudence, peer pressure, regard for his family, etc.) he may censor and overwhelm, but a direction of conative pressure nevertheless – a pressure to rancour, seething, betrayal (‘such men as he be never at heart’s ease, whiles they behold a greater than themselves’). Give a gruff ‘honest retainer’ type the same oath of service, and his oath is a constant conative pressure in the other direction – to loyalty, fidelity, duty. That is, this reason (this self-same oath of fealty) has a different strength and direction of conative pull depending on the mind it enters into. It is not that, as the same reason, it must and does have conatively the same pressure to a direction and strength of action – one that, nevertheless, in the case of one agent is overwhelmingly countervailed by their other (bundled) reasons (or, if you prefer, some wretched notion of ‘disposition’) whilst in the case of another agent it is overwhelmingly augmented by a different bundle or standing disposition. Quite apart from the other reasons that are possessed, the self-same reason at input may be conatively different (even in direction, much less force) depending upon the other reasons it non-associatively, non-compositionally combines with – according, in other words, to the mind of the agent that it enters into. And though conatively different, it is the self-same reason to the extent anything may be said to be – on pain of the associationist clearly begging the question and defining ‘reason’ by its conative effects at output, then concluding ‘reasons’ so defined must determine action.9
We may terminologize this anti-associative insight with a distinction standardly employed in theoretical psychology: between idiographic and nomothetic theories of personality (Allport 1937; Windelband 1894/1980). ‘Individual differences’ is not the study of group sameness (Bannister and Fransella 1971). Understanding persons requires an idiographic approach, in which the person’s character is, in a significant sense, ontologically unique, prior and fundamental: under which, reasons for one would not and should not be reasons for another. The reasons that an agent possesses must indeed play their role in determining her action and cognition if she is to be rational, if she is to be responsible. But these reasons do not additively combine. For them to play a role, they don’t associatively cause action and cognition. They enter a mind and become active in interaction in that mind. The mind (the agent, the person, the self) decides – in active assimilation, accommodation and equilibration of that agent’s reasons. Reasons are in non-compositional combination. The person determines action in the light of their reasons.
9.5.2 A reason to drink
So, for this alcoholic, the presence of alcohol provides a reason to drink – and that conative state or disposition partially (perhaps not so partially) comprises that agent. And the presence of a social occasion – here, a wake – in his, this agent’s, culture and community provides yet more of a reason to drink. And a moment of grief, of upsetting emotional upheaval, in a man who has always looked for a crutch in escaping from self-scrutiny and the expression of fraught emotions, likewise provides a reason for drinking.
But these reasons in this agent do not sum: they provide a ‘crossover interaction’. This wake is his mother’s wake. And he comes to feel he has shamed her and failed her with his alcoholism throughout his adult life. This is his ‘moment of clarity’ – the first sober day of the rest of his life.
The associationist will surely refuse to accept the terms under which this example is described, to insist that this onset of sobriety has to be because of other, countervailing reasons: reasons which outweigh the alcoholic’s (nevertheless additive) reasons to drink – reasons that subtract their conative toll. And, the associationist will insist, there is one such countervailing reason staring us in the face. After all, the agent gave up drink, and avowedly he did so because of his mother’s death; so his mother’s death (so described) must have been the overwhelming, countervailing motive (‘reason’) which, added into the mix, urged abstinence – made this his ‘strongest motive’ (Reid 1969: Essay 4, Ch. 4, #3, #5).
Of course, in one sense, the death of his mother is undoubtedly his reason for stopping drinking here – making that claim was the starting point for this example. But her death was not a reason at input – or so this example stipulates (a stipulation that I hope is psychologically plausible). Of course the death of his mother was his eventual reason for giving up drinking. And it was the input fact, the ‘state of affairs’ that led to the changes in him that brought about his giving up drinking. That is not enough to make it a motivational force towards abstinence at input. At input, if and to the extent we can speak of it as a motivational force, it represented a motive to drink. At input, all his reasons/motives taken separately are to drink. Separately, they predict his drinking (an epistemic way of making vivid this metaphysical point). In interaction, in his mind, through his reasoning (and affect, and goodness knows what else), he and he alone acquires his reasons to abstain. No additive, associative, nomothetic function determines his act. Reasons and self do not overdetermine action: something that is not a self cannot have reasons. The reasons may partially constitute the self, but composition is not identity – the properties of the whole are radically distinct from any homopathic construction out of the properties of its parts.
Our alcoholic is not a Skinnerian ‘locus of variables’ (a linear function of deterministic conative weightings – inputs – to a resultant). Nor is he the randomized indeterministic equivalent of that model – perhaps, as on some event-causal views, randomized only when ‘torn’ (Kane, Balaguer) in a situation where otherwise he is in perfect balance. Sechenov’s principle is radically false10; associationism is radically false. In this respect, there are points of contact between Reid’s views and those of the much later, emergentist tradition. Critically scrutinizing what would later be entitled a ‘composition of causes’ view, Reid says:
It is a law of nature with respect to matter, that every motion, and change of motion, is proportional to the force impressed, and in the direction of that force. The scheme of necessity supposes a similar law to obtain in all the actions of intelligent beings; which, with little alteration, may be expressed thus: every action, or change of action, in an intelligent being, is proportional to the force of motives impressed, and in the direction of that force. The law of nature respecting matter, is grounded upon this principle, that matter is an inert, inactive substance, which does not act, but is acted upon; and the law of necessity must be grounded upon the supposition, that an intelligent being is an inert, inactive substance, which does not act, but is acted upon. (Reid 1969: 284 Essay 4, Ch. 4)
As Reid notes, this supposition is just false. The human mind is creative, interactive, idiographic. Our recovering alcoholic is a self, his mind is active: it determines (he determines) his acts. This is something that is intelligible (sometimes) from the internal perspective. It is not something to be understood on the model of a balance beam, from the standpoint of external observation – whether of determined or positively undetermined external observation.
9.5.3 ‘Reasons’ at input or outcome? (What is a psychological ‘simple’?)
Notice also that it is rather loose talk to speak of a reason’s already being a reason before combination in a mind. A bit like the sensation/perception issue in philosophy and psychology in the early twentieth century, the first move is the move that goes unchallenged. It is acknowledged that there may be reasons ‘at input’, we may speak of them, picking them out by reference to their typical (probabilistic and predictive) conative effects – or these effects in isolation from these other inputs, in other contexts or at other times, or under these laboratory presentation conditions (pick your preferred operationalization). But these properly become reasons – become motives – in a self. How these reasons bring about action – what actions they bring about – is something determined by the self whose reasons they are, through the process of decision: the self that these reasons nevertheless partially comprise.
The mind is ontologically and explanatorily more fundamental than the ‘reasons’ that are wrongly assumed to reductively constitute it. Reasons are already active, are already interpreted, are already reasons before they ever become further analysed, further interpreted, compared with other reasons, in that mind. This process of accommodation, equilibration and assimilation is an active process. The process of comparison of one reason with another is what is involved in judgement and decision. Which reasons are dwelt upon, in which order, how they are incorporated, absorbed and opposed, involves active organizing principles under the direction of, or constituted by, the individual mind in question (and not necessarily the conscious mind).
9.6 Cartesian Theatre objections
The self-determinist viewpoint should not be assimilated to a very particular, radically untenable notion of ‘freedom as choice’: of incompatibilist freedom as having to involve a situation whereby the agent looks dispassionately at his reasons, sees they are reasons and asks which of these reasons shall move him.
This ‘Cartesian Theatre’ position is actually one horn of a false dilemma. On this one horn of the dilemma, we have the view that the free decision-maker is like a spectator at a theatre, looking at his reasons and deciding which will be his reasons. From Hobbes through Leibniz to Edwards to Galen Strawson, the familiar regress objection is then made: on the basis of what (other) reasons does he take that decision? I am the play, I am not a spectator at my own play. On the other horn of the dilemma, we have the picture (initially much less absurd) that the agent just is his reasons – the reasons which associatively comprise him. So, he is the reasons-bundle that just happens to be there at the time, or perhaps he is the resultant of that bundle – with each reason in the bundle adding or subtracting its conative push or pull.
Against any such picture, the agent is not an aggregate that reduces to Humean mental (or even non-mental) simples – desires, beliefs or other Humean mental items, say. The agent is an enduring item in his own right – is ontologically distinct. As noted earlier, in distinguishing this self-determinism from its ontologically more committed cousin, agent-causation, this doesn’t mean we must see the agent as a Cartesian Simple made of soul-stuff.11 The agent may in a sense be made up out of simpler mental (or ultimately non-mental) items, but composition is not identity, and the mental (e.g. conative) properties of the whole agent do not reduce to a resultant of the mental (e.g. conative) properties of the items which comprise that agent. The agent’s reasons combine non-associatively; the whole has different, irreducible properties to the properties of its parts – conative, epistemic, moral properties: a mind, a self, rationality, agency, a conscience.
The agent doesn’t select from options like a spectator at a Cartesian Theatre. The agent is the chooser. This choice, however, need not thereby be an additive, homonomic resultant of previously assigned preferences. Motivational preferences are usually better seen as things that are assigned through and with the process of decision, rather than as fixed inputs – ‘prior settings’ into that process. To the extent we can make sense of a prior preference for each option (and sometimes we can), this ‘prior’ preference is actually an artefact of another, different preference context – an operationalization, if you like (‘prior to decision, he preferred this option’). To the extent that a reason may harmlessly be said to have a prior weighting, this is a whole outcome of another preference context. However, even in such cases, it is potentially misleading to talk of reasons possessed of ‘prior weightings’. A reason is ‘weighed’, by the mind, each time it is combined. It is better to say the mind is the weighing, the weighing of items that have no fixed, determinate prior weights – that have weights only after combination in that mind (cf. Nozick 1981: 294–306; McCall and Lowe 2005: 686ff; Steward 2012: 144ff).
In decision-making, a whole person – a whole mind – experiences and possesses many reasons. What is denied here is that there are any (many? enough?) reasons that have a fixed prior weight in this decision process. There are reasons right enough, but they play their part only in relation to a self and processes of reasoning directed by that self. The self isn’t a construct (a ‘bundle’, a ‘locus of variables’) out of reasons supposedly possessed of prior conative ‘weights’; yet nor are those reasons superfluous, or in some way not ‘real’ reasons, or in some way a logical construct out of the organism’s behaviour at outcome. The weightings given to these reasons, and that they are reasons at all, and the reasons that may succeed them or develop out of them, will emerge out of a process of engagement with them by the self. They aren’t added up and weighed (except metaphorically, and that only sometimes) by that self. The self is real, it isn’t a Skinnerian ‘empty organism’ – a fulcrum, a balancing point. There is a dynamic, non-additive, non-monotonic process of thinking through and with these reasons, whereby what is a reason, to what extent it is a reason, what weighting, and even what conative direction it represents, is the outcome of its interaction in that mind, during that process, by that person.
The free decision is reflexive; it holds in virtue of weights bestowed by its holding. An explanation of why the act was chosen will have to refer to its being chosen. (Nozick 1981: 304)
9.7 Framework objections
Objections to this position are typically animated by a framework view that has been strongly criticized already in this work. Here is Galen Strawson, a trenchant representative of this opposing view. Note the modal operator he applies to this venerable view of ‘reasons as input beliefs and desires’.
It may now be suggested that the reason we are truly self-determining free agents is simply that the process of deliberation … is truly our deliberation, our doing, ours in a way that we are truly responsible for whatever we do as a result of it. … But … in the end such deliberation comes down to a process of (practical) reasoning that necessarily takes one’s desires (values, etc.) and beliefs as starting points. And, given that one does not want to be self-determining either with respect to (simple, factual) belief or with respect to one’s canons of reasoning, but simply want truth in beliefs and validity in reasoning, once again the question arises as to how this process of deliberation can possibly give rise to true self-determination in action. (Strawson 1995: 23, emphasis in original)
Of Strawson’s point about reasoning: why, actually, wouldn’t one ‘want to be self-determining … with respect to one’s canons of reasoning’? Reader: when you do philosophy (and much else), do you not sometimes wish to be seen as the author of your canons of reasoning? In reasoning, I may wish for much beyond validity: for rationality, say; or integrity; or depth; or creativity; or responsibility; or insight; or wisdom. As a philosopher, I may wish even to inquire into the nature of validity. Here, for example, Strawson and myself are inquiring into (and disagreeing about) a fundamental canon of reasoning: Mill’s ‘composition of causes’. We are seeking to determine whether this canon is universally applicable or not. Why wouldn’t I want to determine the applicability of that principle for myself? I assume Mill, Reid and Broad did precisely that. And of Strawson’s point about beliefs: we don’t just trundle ourselves around and wait for beliefs to be mechanically, involuntarily initiated in us. There are an infinity of potential beliefs to be had out there, out of which each of us, spread across a life, will have to select a finite set to actively seek after the possession of – possession, that is, within any of a great range of potential knowledge structures. In judgement under uncertainty, lots more is uncertain than such models typically acknowledge. I have to decide what, actually, my reasons are. I have to ask myself what I really believe. I have to ask myself questions about what I really value.
Strawson’s framework of presupposition here is a good example of the position opposed in Chapters 3 and 4 regarding the forced choice offered us between either no freedom or no reason – see remarks there on Owens (2000), Sidgwick (1907), ‘false accounting’ and the like. Look again at Strawson’s ‘necessarily’ in the above. Over the last 165 years, psychology has been thought, at least by many, to be an a posteriori discipline. Here, rather, an early-modern associationist psychology of ontologically and conatively prior, real, concrete, propositional attitudes summing to a ‘strongest motive’ is assumed to be simply undeniable: an armchair-necessary truth, a framework assumption all are compelled to share. It is philosophy we are doing here, granted, but this is a psychological assumption; and the history of twentieth century empirical psychology is littered with the discarded remnants of theories assembled on the basis of just this assumed-to-be-undeniable framework view.
9.8 Codicil to Chapter 9: Source and leeway incompatibilism
In recent years, incompatibilists have been divided over the issue of whether they embrace a leeway or a source conception of incompatibilism. The leeway incompatibilist is usually taken to be the defender of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), or some similar, proprietary formulation, to the effect that the freedom necessary for responsibility requires an ability to do otherwise – and the variant of this principle that this work defends has been given in Chapter 6 (see also Lockie 2014a). The source incompatibilist locates the freedom necessary for responsibility in the notion that the agent is the ultimate source (originator) of his or her actions, decisions and choices – and this position has been defended in this chapter. Why does this work defend both these things?
9.8.1 The source not leeway position
I am hardly the first to note that these two ways of being an incompatibilist are not necessarily in conflict (e.g. Kane 2000; Timpe 2007 – ‘wide source incompatibilism’). Nevertheless, they may be. So, some incompatibilists concede the central argument from the Frankfurt examples – taking the message of that literature to be that the freedom necessary for responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise (e.g. Stump 2003; Widerker 2009, 2011). These incompatibilist neo-Frankfurters (unlike Frankfurt himself and those compatibilists and semi-compatibilists who followed him) take his arguments not to overturn incompatibilism; but rather to establish that the conditions of freedom are not to be located in the principle of alternative possibilities – being found instead elsewhere: in the agent being the source of her own agency. On this view, the agent, to possess freedom, must bear ultimate responsibility for her acts; and to do this she must be the source or origin of these acts – as opposed, that is, to the determined world’s being the origin of these acts. In contrast to the leeway incompatibilists, these source incompatibilists take the conditions of freedom to be located solely in the agent’s ability to determine her acts: in so doing, they may (and some – Timpe’s ‘narrow source incompatibilists’ – do) concede to Frankfurt that it is possible that the agent could not have done otherwise. Not all source incompatibilists concede the case for PAP to the Frankfurters, however; and I am among those who do not.
9.8.2 The source therefore leeway position
Leeway is not chance
We should start by granting to the pro-Frankfurt, anti-PAP source incompatibilists the following point: of course indeterminism in and of itself is not sufficient for any freedom fit to underwrite moral or epistemic responsibility. This point is surely just the stock move that has historically been made in urging the unacceptability of the ‘chance’ horn of the dilemma argument – a point considered at length in this and the previous chapter. Merely having the ability to do (better: have things be) otherwise is in no way sufficient for freedom and responsibility. Pro-Frankfurt philosophers on occasion come close to making a straw man of this, the position they oppose: few if any incompatibilists are unwise enough to think that the presence of alternative possibilities will, in and of itself, establish freedom and responsibility.
Incompatibilism therefore leeway
A critical question arises for the ‘source not leeway’ libertarians, however: what does it mean for them to call themselves source incompatibilists? It surely requires them to at least deny that the start-up conditions of the Big Bang plus the laws of nature determine all that happens thereafter. For a source incompatibilist of whichever stamp to be an incompatibilist, the power of arché, of ‘new chain’ initiating causal potency, must be taken to be possessed by something more in the universe than just the singularity that was the Big Bang taken together with the laws of nature. The source incompatibilist must insist that a source power of determination comes into being with the presence of an agent in the world: agency precisely is that power – the power of the agent, qua agent, to make some ultimate, settling contribution to determining how things will turn out, whether this way or that. And I am not the first to note that an incompatibilist conception of this power – of source, ultimacy, arché, originative agency – requires as necessary condition that the agent can decide in a way that is not determined (radically not determined) from outside of, or prior to, that agent.
This positive power, if it really is a source incompatibilist power, requires, negatively, that our acts possess a freedom from determination by the Big Bang and the laws of nature. Ontologically, any source incompatibilist is committed to a power of ‘new chain’ initiating agency entering the world with the existence of free and responsible agents in that world. Any source incompatibilism thus entails a commitment to some conception of leeway. Given this, though, why resist the earlier neo-Frankfurt characterization of this indeterminism? Why hold that this characterization (the simple PAP characterization) of incompatibilism-as-indeterminism is close to being a straw man?
Source incompatibilism entails negative leeway
The answer here is that a source incompatibilist conception of agency, though it entails the ability to do otherwise, should be taken as doing so only in the sense of a Jamesian negative indeterminism. A conception of ‘could have done otherwise’ where this is taken to involve a Jamesian positive indeterminism (randomness) is precisely not what the source incompatibilist (nor any considered incompatibilist) should require for responsibility and freedom. Source incompatibilism indeed entails ‘could have done otherwise’, but in the sense of a negative, not a positive indeterminism (not a randomness or chance conception of PAP).
Source incompatibilism and leeway incompatibilism are then related, but are not biconditionally related. First, source incompatibilism entails we have leeway – but not vice versa (Timpe 2007). Second, the conception of leeway is, as has been indicated, a Jamesian negative indeterminism: that ‘nothing [apart from myself – as source] made me take this path’; not that ‘something [randomness, chance] made me take this path’. Third, to embrace source incompatibilism is precisely to embrace self-determinism. Source incompatibilism and self-determinism are not two things, they are one.
Leeway as the ability to do what’s right
A further point relates this to material found in Chapter 6 regarding the appropriate understanding of leeway. We saw that the central incompatibilist argument in this vicinity is variously baptized as Copp’s Argument from Fairness, Widerker’s W-defence (‘what should he have done otherwise?’) and various similar arguments: that moral (or epistemic) responsibility requires that one’s self, this moral agent, could have done otherwise – not merely that things could have been otherwise. This agency-based, source-based, revised notion of PAP (‘intentional PAP’ – Lockie 2014a) has, we saw, variously been glossed as Otsuka’s principle of alternative blame, Widerker’s principle of alternative expectations), Moya’s DEC (doing everything one can) and other notions besides. A source-based, ‘ultimacy’ notion of responsibility of the kind defended in this work requires something in the vicinity of this notion of ‘alternative possibility’, not some other. This notion of source entails a commitment to this notion of leeway.
9.8.3 Character-based counterexamples
This conception of matters offers us certain resources to resist the challenge represented by character-based counterexamples. Not only is positive indeterminism not sufficient for freedom and responsibility (the Mind Argument’s randomness objection); it (positive indeterminism) is not necessary either. I may be unable to deviate from a path that I, my moral nature, has determined (say, Dennett’s example that I may be unable to torture the innocent for $10). Contra Dennett, this would be far from establishing that I do not have an incompatibilist freedom or responsibility. Ethical responsibility (where this includes the ethics of belief) is something that requires freedom from determination by the Big Bang and laws of nature precisely in order to preserve the possibility of self-attributable axiological determination: of the agent determining acts in accordance with his moral nature and responsiveness to moral (and other) reasons. Moral beliefs are of course moral reasons for action (Lockie 1998), but they need not thereby be psychological motivators of action.
Determinism will be false should the morally responsible agent be able to determine himself to act in accordance with his conscience and not merely be determined externally, by natural law. It is strange to see an argument advanced that begins by acknowledging this capacity – for an agent to act in the direction indicated by his possession of a Tolstoyan moral compass – yet takes this to be a determinist challenge to libertarianism. Determination by the dictates of conscience rather than empirical law looks to be, in contrast, rather a challenge to determinism.
9.8.4 In many cases we just act (self-determine); only in some do we choose
As Chapter 6’s remarks on global versus local asymmetry noted, source incompatibilism requires the capacity for leeway incompatibilism, it doesn’t by any means always require the actuality of leeway incompatibilism (and it certainly doesn’t require positive indeterminism). A lot of the time in our conduct – including conduct we are morally and epistemically responsible for – we just determine our actions, we don’t choose in the sense of ‘select from a menu of options’. This is still an incompatibilist conception of freedom. We, ourselves, are the ultimate sources of our actions. We aren’t a spectator at a Cartesian Theatre and, as noted, to impose such a view on the libertarian is to create a straw man. Undoubtedly, we do sometimes select from a range of options, but often we just do: we, ourselves, determine our actions or decisions. As long as this is taken to involve determination by an emergent self acting in response to axiological demands, rather than the determination of action by natural law, then we will have a Jamesian negative indeterminism, notwithstanding the absence of theatre.