Theism vs. Naturalism – Free Will
Apologists defending their views should use two tactics: defend and attack. Defending involves creating a plausible argument for the view and refuting opponents' objections. Attacking involves finding the implausibilities and weaknesses in the views of the opponents. These seem to me to be the basic principles behind all good debate. As a theistic apologist, I want to outline the most promising lines of attack in the current debate between naturalists and theists. Today, I will tackle the issue of free will.
We all hope that we have free will, and that the free will that we have is a free will worth wanting. I believe that any free will that naturalism can offer is not worth having. Let's start with a few definitions.
Naturalists are, at minimum, committed to the following beliefs: 1) The natural world is causally and energetically closed. 2) All teleological (purpose) explanations can be reduced to mechanistic causes.
Determinism is this: every event E can be explained as a result of the 1) laws of nature and the 2) state of the natural world immediately prior to E.
Determinism is generally agreed to follow from the two fundamental beliefs of naturalists. Another plausible assumption I will make here is that any story of free will must allow room for moral responsibility.
Thus, theists should have the goal of showing that determinism is incompatible with free will. This would be a huge blow to the plausibility of naturalism. Naturalists would have to give up moral responsibility. Amanda Witt acutely notes the consequences of living without moral responsibility: Humans would have no reason (and no right) to be angry with an unfaithful spouse, the murderer of their child, or the Republicans who ordered the invasion of Iraq; because... no one is responsible for his actions. If the reader thinks for a few minutes, I am sure that he can grasp the implications of living in a world without moral responsibility better than I could explain it.
Naturalists are thus forced into a corner: they must show that free will and determinism are compatible. This free will will generally look very different, and naturalists have then a subsequent goal. They want to show that a compatibilist free will is worth having. Incompatibilists often use the tactic of invoking the Principle of Alternative Possibilities as a requirement for free will. The PAP is really pretty simple. It states that if I act and I couldnt have done anything else, then I am not morally responsible for my action and its consequences. This is intuitively very plausible as a definition of free will. The odds look long for the compatibilists, as determinism rules out PAP. In fact, at this point, most observers would call game over.
However, Harry Frankfurt (a compatibilist) changed all that with his paper Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. In fact, his paper was so revolutionary that Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples is a buzzword among philosophers interested in this debate. A FSC is a scenario that follows Frankfurts original argument. I will try to generalize all FSCs here.
The scenario involves two men: Jones and Black. Black wants Jones to do some action A (A could be any action. Popular choices seem to either involve voting Republican or assassinating another person). Black has a way to control Jones so that if Jones ever decides to not do A, Black can step in and make Jones do A. Jones is completely unaware that he is so controlled. It plays out that Jones decides on his own to do A, and Black never has to step in. Note that Jones seems to be morally responsible, but could not have done otherwise.
Deep stuff. I don't want the reader to think that FSCs are unanswerable. Although there is no definitive refutation at this point, incompatibilists have presented many promising ideas on refutation. I will point my fellow theists to a paper I read just yesterday on the topic. Graduate student Tedla G. Woldeyohannes claims that FSCs beg the question against the metaphysics of dualism. His argument is that, if substance dualism is true, the control that Black has in FSC is not possible. This seems to me to be one interesting and very promising line of attack against FSCs, and by extension, compatibilism.
The Free Will debate is far too vast for me to adequately cover here, even if I had the ability to do so. I have just scratched the surface of the literature on this topic. Thousands upon thousands of pages have been published on free will in the last 10 years alone. There are many philosophers involved, each with his own version of the story and solution. If you are interested in pursuing this further, the place to start is to read the papers and books that shape the debate. I know of two good anthologies for this (there are surely many more). The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by Robert Kane and Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna. Kanes own book, The Significance of Free Will is the book that sparked my interest in philosophy.
Naturalists then are willing to accept both determinism and the absence of PAP in the world, but vigorously deny that determinism leads to a lack of moral responsibility. The onus is equally on both naturalists and theists at this point. One the one hand, we need to show how FSCs do not work. On the other hand, naturalists need to show that compatibilism can offer a freedom worth wanting. Frankfurt's picture does offer moral responsibility, but still seems unsatisfying. Is moral responsibility really all we want in an account of free will? My intuition thinks not.
We all hope that we have free will, and that the free will that we have is a free will worth wanting. I believe that any free will that naturalism can offer is not worth having. Let's start with a few definitions.
Naturalists are, at minimum, committed to the following beliefs: 1) The natural world is causally and energetically closed. 2) All teleological (purpose) explanations can be reduced to mechanistic causes.
Determinism is this: every event E can be explained as a result of the 1) laws of nature and the 2) state of the natural world immediately prior to E.
Determinism is generally agreed to follow from the two fundamental beliefs of naturalists. Another plausible assumption I will make here is that any story of free will must allow room for moral responsibility.
Thus, theists should have the goal of showing that determinism is incompatible with free will. This would be a huge blow to the plausibility of naturalism. Naturalists would have to give up moral responsibility. Amanda Witt acutely notes the consequences of living without moral responsibility: Humans would have no reason (and no right) to be angry with an unfaithful spouse, the murderer of their child, or the Republicans who ordered the invasion of Iraq; because... no one is responsible for his actions. If the reader thinks for a few minutes, I am sure that he can grasp the implications of living in a world without moral responsibility better than I could explain it.
Naturalists are thus forced into a corner: they must show that free will and determinism are compatible. This free will will generally look very different, and naturalists have then a subsequent goal. They want to show that a compatibilist free will is worth having. Incompatibilists often use the tactic of invoking the Principle of Alternative Possibilities as a requirement for free will. The PAP is really pretty simple. It states that if I act and I couldnt have done anything else, then I am not morally responsible for my action and its consequences. This is intuitively very plausible as a definition of free will. The odds look long for the compatibilists, as determinism rules out PAP. In fact, at this point, most observers would call game over.
However, Harry Frankfurt (a compatibilist) changed all that with his paper Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. In fact, his paper was so revolutionary that Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples is a buzzword among philosophers interested in this debate. A FSC is a scenario that follows Frankfurts original argument. I will try to generalize all FSCs here.
The scenario involves two men: Jones and Black. Black wants Jones to do some action A (A could be any action. Popular choices seem to either involve voting Republican or assassinating another person). Black has a way to control Jones so that if Jones ever decides to not do A, Black can step in and make Jones do A. Jones is completely unaware that he is so controlled. It plays out that Jones decides on his own to do A, and Black never has to step in. Note that Jones seems to be morally responsible, but could not have done otherwise.
Deep stuff. I don't want the reader to think that FSCs are unanswerable. Although there is no definitive refutation at this point, incompatibilists have presented many promising ideas on refutation. I will point my fellow theists to a paper I read just yesterday on the topic. Graduate student Tedla G. Woldeyohannes claims that FSCs beg the question against the metaphysics of dualism. His argument is that, if substance dualism is true, the control that Black has in FSC is not possible. This seems to me to be one interesting and very promising line of attack against FSCs, and by extension, compatibilism.
The Free Will debate is far too vast for me to adequately cover here, even if I had the ability to do so. I have just scratched the surface of the literature on this topic. Thousands upon thousands of pages have been published on free will in the last 10 years alone. There are many philosophers involved, each with his own version of the story and solution. If you are interested in pursuing this further, the place to start is to read the papers and books that shape the debate. I know of two good anthologies for this (there are surely many more). The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by Robert Kane and Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna. Kanes own book, The Significance of Free Will is the book that sparked my interest in philosophy.
Naturalists then are willing to accept both determinism and the absence of PAP in the world, but vigorously deny that determinism leads to a lack of moral responsibility. The onus is equally on both naturalists and theists at this point. One the one hand, we need to show how FSCs do not work. On the other hand, naturalists need to show that compatibilism can offer a freedom worth wanting. Frankfurt's picture does offer moral responsibility, but still seems unsatisfying. Is moral responsibility really all we want in an account of free will? My intuition thinks not.
posted by Joshua Frear at 1:02 PM
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