[Disclaimer: this post simplifies things. I'm aware there are libertarians who believe we need both leeway and sourcehood freedom. There are libertarians who emphasize sourcehood over leeway freedom. And there are compatibilists who focus on leeway freedom, giving a compatibilist analysis of leeway freedom. I'm aware there are positions on free will other than the three discussed.]
1) Either libertarianism is true, compatibilism is true, or free will skepticism is true. (Premise 1)
2) Libertarianism is not true. (Premise 2)
3) Compatibilism is not true. (Premise 3)
4) Therefore, free will skepticism is true. (disjunctive syllogism)
Why think libertarianism is true? Libertarians believe we need leeway freedom to have free will. Leeway freedom is the ability to do otherwise. Why think we need leeway freedom for free will? Because we apply ‘should’ and ‘ought’ statements to those things we believe could have been done otherwise. If something could not have acted other than it did, then it’s forced to do what it did, and thus it makes no sense to blame it for doing what it had no choice but to do. If determinism is true, then we cannot act other than we do, and thus ‘should’ and ‘ought’ statements cannot be rightly applied to us. And yet, we feel as though ‘should’ and ‘ought’ statements can rightly be applied to us. So determinism must be false.
I reject ‘ought implies can’ and here is why: When we deliberate, we evaluate reasons to select a choice and reject competing choices. We use criteria to perform this evaluation. We imagine various outcomes, and upon seeing which outcome is the best, we make our choice on that basis. We weigh reasons to select one choice over the other, and we use language like ‘should’ and ‘ought’ to describe the phenomenon of when reasons for one choice outweigh reasons for another choice. ‘Shoulds’ are comparative betters.
When we imagine non-human animals, human infants, or natural disasters wreaking havoc upon the world, we cannot empathize with them; or when we empathize with them, we do not see them deliberating like we do. But when we imagine a teenager or an adult human, someone like us and thus imaginably capable of reasoning like us, it’s easy for us to empathize with them and to imagine us being in their situation. We see how we would deliberate and would have chosen differently than they did. When we say, “He shouldn’t have done that,” we are saying “The reasons for doing that are outweighed by the reasons to refrain from doing that,” and given our recognition of how the reasons stack up, we see how we would have chosen differently. Our sense of blame arises from the sense that the person we are blaming is poor at recognizing reasons, or recognizes reasons but ignores them, which is irrational. Our blame really is a kind of criticism – a recognition of a person's lack of quality in certain respects.
There is another reason to think the libertarian analysis of free will is mistaken. Imagine that someone acts with constraints: a man commits murder because if he doesn’t, his family will be killed. Now imagine the same person acting without constraints: the person commits murder for the fun of it. Even if the actions are determined, if they still find their source in the person who committed the actions, then that tells us something morally significant about that person.
This is why some compatibilists want to set leeway freedom aside and focus on sourcehood freedom instead. As long as you are the source of your actions, then even if you are determined, we can still see a moral difference between acting unconstrained and acting according to who you are.
Different compatibilists offer different senses in which we act according to who we are.[*1] Classical compatibilists, like David Hume, said that to act freely is to act according to your desires. But this demands an obvious question: Am I free to desire as I do? Do my desires really reveal anything morally significant about me, or do they merely speak to the circumstances that instilled my desires?
Frank Jackson suggests that it’s our second-order desires that reveal who we are. If we not only desire to perform an action, but we approve of our desire or desire our desire, then that shows what kind of person we are by those actions. But, obviously, again this simply pushes the problem back a step. Did I choose to desire what I desire, or did my circumstances cultivate my second-order desires?
There are other compatibilist conditions of freedom, such as John Martin Fischer’s reasons sensitivity (if you act according to your own reasoning, then your actions speak to who you are) or Susan Wolf’s moral standards condition (if you act according to your own determination of right and wrong, then your actions speak to who you are). But I suggest that for any compatibilist condition of freedom, that condition is always kicking the can down the road. While my actions might reveal that I am not reasonable or that I have poor moral standards, and if my actions are grounded in my character, it’s never the case that I chose to be unreasonable or chose to have poor moral standards.
While I accept the compatibilist insight that unconstrained actions tell us about the quality of a person, it’s never fair to blame the person for choosing to have that quality, because we don't choose to have the qualities we do; we simply have them. As Derk Pereboom says:
. . . an agent could be considered morally responsible if it is legitimate to expect her to respond to such questions as: “Why did you decide to do that? Do you think it was the right thing to do?” and to evaluate critically what her decisions and actions indicate about her moral character. . . . But while this “legitimately called to moral improvement” notion may be a bona fide sense of moral responsibility, it is not the one at issue in the free will debate. For incompatibilists would not find our being morally responsible in this sense to be even prima facie incompatible with determinism. The notion that incompatibilists do claim to be at odds with determinism is rather the one defined in terms of basic desert. [*2]
Do we deserve praise or blame for our actions? That’s what’s at stake. And while our actions (or our qualities) can, and should, be praised or blamed for their goodness or badness in the sense of admiration or criticism, we cannot be fairly blamed or praised for our actions (or our qualities) because our actions (or our qualities) are not up to us. Derk Pereboom has advanced manipulation arguments to show how we can grant any and all compatibilist conditions of freedom and yet imagine scenarios where it’s clearly a mistake to blame the person for their action, because whether the condition of freedom is met is not up to the agent.
One version of the manipulation argument, the Zygote Argument, comes from Alfred Mele[*3]. With my own gloss on the argument: A goddess casts a spell on a zygote so that whoever the zygote becomes will necessarily have certain desires, second-order desires, sensitivity to reasons, moral standards, values, beliefs, dispositions – whatever conditions of freedom that a compatibilist could want. The resulting man born from the zygote makes choices according to his nature, and by compatibilist standards the man himself can be praised or blamed, as he is the source of his actions in a morally significant way. And yet clearly the man is not the source of his actions in a morally significant way. It’s not the man’s fault that he has the values, beliefs, dispositions, etc., that he does, and so it’s not his fault that he acts according to those conditions. The fault lies with that which caused the man to have the qualities he does – in this case the goddess. But there is no relevant difference between the goddess causing your values, beliefs, dispositions, etc., and your circumstances (genetics, brain structure, social influences, etc.) causing them.
I grant that the man’s traits have lower or higher qualities compared to someone else’s traits – that kind of criticizing blame is not at issue. What’s at issue is moral blame – whether we can fairly blame or praise the person for being the source of their actions. But clearly it’s not fair to blame or praise the person as the source of their actions when the conditions of sourcehood, such as desires, sensitivity to reasons, and so on, are themselves forced upon the person.
[*1] - Cf. Alyssa Ney, Metaphysics, 341.[*2] - Derk Pereboom, Four Views on Free Will, 86.
[*3] - Cf. Alyssa Ney, 346.
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