I feel like the character in the Moliere play who discovers that he's been speaking prose all his life. In another thread AdminNWR banned me from discussing 'compatibilism' with messenjah-of-one. Having never heard this term before I immediately went to Stanford (well, the online encyclopedia of philosophy) to find out what it meant, and discovered, to my surprise, that I'd been a compatibilist all my life.
For those of you, like my self of two days ago, who don't know what I'm talking about, here's a brief introduction.
One of the implications of the materialist world view underpinning science is that events are linked by an unbroken chain of physical cause and effect. This implication is known as
determinism.
Now some people argue that, if determinism is true, then my sense of having free choices is an illusion, because each act, preceeded by an unbroken chain of cause and effect, could not have happened otherwise. This position is known as
hard determinism.
Others, taking the opposite view, argue that it is clear we have free choices, and therefore the assumptions of determinism must be invalid in some way. Someone who holds this position is known as a
libertarian.
Those, like myself, who take the third view, that determinism and free will are compatible, are known, unsurprisingly, as
compatibilists.
Now before Purpledawn intervenes to complain about all these -isms, let me explain why the question matters.
If the hard determinist position is true, then no-one can really be held responsible for their actions (if you couldn't have done otherwise, then how can you be responsible?). On the other hand, if the libertarian position is correct, then the deterministic model that underlies science must be wrong. That's why much of ethical philosophy is concerned with arguing for one compatibilist position or another.
Now, I don't want to discuss the whole of the determinism/free-will debate here, but there is one particular question that I'm intrigued by and think might be woth pursuing as a thread topic.
The classic compatibilist position on this question is to argue that what freedom means is freedom from
coercion not freedom from
causation. So, if I can do what I want, then I am free; if I am stopped from doing what I want, then I am not free. This is the position taken by English empiricists from Locke and Hobbes through to Hume and Mill, and forms the basis for liberal political philosophy.
This is a powerful argument in itself, and stands up to scrutiny. But there is a problem that compatibilists have had more difficulty dealing with, and it goes something like this.
In order for my action to be considered free, then there must be alternatives for me to choose from. But if determinism is true then, when I make my choice, that action is caused by an unbroken chain of cause and effect, and if it is caused by an unbroken chain of cause and effect, then it couldn't have been otherwise, and therefore my belief that I had alternative choices must have been an illusion.
My intuition, like that of most people, is that this argument is faulty in some way. I spend a good part of my day putting a lot of effort into choosing between alternatives - it doesn't make much sense to imagine that these choices would have been the same without me putting in the effort to make the choices.
So what's wrong with the argument. My intuition is that the account of determinism in this argument is wrong. It seems to me that the act of making a choice is more complicated than the simple model of cause and effect assumed in the argument. I'll try to address this issue in later posts, but for now I'll just ask this question:
Now that I've got to the end of this essay, am I entirely free to post it or not to post it? Or is my action of posting it (or not posting it) already predetermined as I write these words?
Edited by AdminPD, : No reason given.
'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang
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