Pasta al dente is firm to the bite, meaning that it is just soft enough to eat without snapping. Pereboom draws a metaphor to his position on determinism.
Soft determinism is another term for compatibilism, the view that determinism is true and yet we still have moral responsibility.
Hard determinism says that because determinism is true we do not have moral responsibility.
Pereboom makes the further distinction of extreme hard determinism which says that moral values and principles do not apply to us at all. Pereboom defends in this paper a version of hard determinism where moral values and principles still apply to us.
For Pereboom, us not having moral responsibility means we "never deserve blame for having performed a wrongful act."
Part I: Compatibilism
Pereboom lays out three versions of compatibilism:
David Hume's desire view: an action is free when "desires that genuinely belong to the agent make up the immediate causal history of the action."
Frankfurt's second-order desire view: not only must you have the freedom to act on your desire in order to be morally responsible, but the very desires you act on must themselves be desired.
John Fischer's responsiveness-to-reasons view: an action is free when it results from the agent's own reasoning.
But what if our desires, second-order desires, and rationality are determined? The incompatibilist intuition is that "if an action results from a deterministic causal process that traces back to factors beyond the control of the agent, he is not morally responsible for the action."
The compatibilist responds by pointing out that it's nonetheless our desires, second-order desires, and rationality that play an essential causal role. Because the causal history of our actions includes us in the right way, we are still morally blameworthy.
However, "What is needed is an argument against the fundamental incompatibilist claim, that if one's action results from a deterministic causal process that traces back to factors beyond one's control, to factors that one could not have produced, altered, or prevented, then one is not free in the sense required for moral responsibility."
Part 2: "Could have done otherwise"
Compatibilists accuse incompatibilists of relying on the "Principle of Alternate Possibilities" – also known as leeway freedom – which says that "moral responsibility requires that, given all of the factors that precede one's choice, one could have done otherwise than what one actually did."
Compatibilists will then use Frankfurt cases to undermine the belief that free will requires leeway freedom, thus undermining incompatibilism. But Pereboom argues that incompatibilists do not rely on leeway freedom for free will. So even if Frankfurt cases succeed, this will not defeat the free will skeptic.
Van Inwagen's famous Consequence Argument strongly suggests that given determinism, we do not have leeway freedom. But now consider a Frankfurt case (my paraphrase):
A billionaire has microchipped millions of Americans using vaccines. When an American goes to vote for a president that this billionaire doesn't want elected, the chip will detect this intention and change the voter's intention to vote for the other candidate. A voter then votes for the billionaire's candidate, on their own free will, without the need of the chip activating. So even though the voter does not have the freedom to vote otherwise, because they voted on their own freedom, they are morally responsible for their own vote. So, you can have moral responsibility without the ability to do otherwise.
Side note: I'm not convinced that Frankfurt cases show that "could have done otherwise" is not needed for moral responsibility. Clearly the person could have done otherwise (in the sense of immediate imaginability): we can easily imagine them willing otherwise such that the chip would have to activate and change the will of the voter. I believe this is called the "flicker of freedom" response. If a person wills otherwise, there's a flicker of freedom in the mind of the voter that is snuffed out by the chip's activation. So, for all I know, my intuition that the voter is responsible for their vote comes from the fact that they could have willed to vote otherwise even though that willing would not have been successful.
So I reject Frankfurt cases in one sense. In another sense, I think Frankfurt cases accidentally succeed in promoting a compatibilist insight, which is the insight that even if someone is determined, there is still the matter of the quality of the person qua organism. If someone is mind-controlled, under duress, coerced, imprisoned, has been drugged, or otherwise has their freedom restricted, then their actions tell us little about the quality of the person and only about the quality of their circumstances. If someone is free, on the other hand, to do what they want, then their actions tell us something important about the kind of person this person is (really, the kind of organism this person possesses).
Let's say the billionaire's candidate for president is a big fan of Hitler, and has campaigned using Nazi rhetoric and policies. If the voter votes for the Nazi candidate on their own will, then that tells us something about the voter: they are probably a Nazi themselves. But if the voter votes for the opposite candidate and is forced by the chip to vote for the Nazi, then it's very likely that this voter is not a Nazi. So if I don't know who has been chipped and who hasn't, suddenly I cannot tell by vote alone whether someone is a Nazi or not.
This is a very important insight, and in this sense I think Frankfurt cases succeed. But note that if someone does vote for the Nazi candidate, this doesn't mean they have free will. If they were determined to be a Nazi by factors beyond their control, then it's not fair to blame this person for being a Nazi. Nevertheless, it's still very useful knowledge to know whether someone is in fact a Nazi or not, because that information will change your views about the person and how you go about interacting with them, even if everything is determined. (How you have been determined in your views and attitudes combined with your knowledge that the voter is a Nazi itself determines how you will go about interacting with the voter.)
However, recall the fundamental intuition of the incompatibilist: moral responsibility requires that one's action not result from a process that traces back to factors beyond one's control. We might call this the "Traceability Principle" – if my actions can be traced to factors beyond my control, then those factors, not me, are to blame.
When your will is determined not by you but by the chip, then you are not at fault for your will. Likewise, when your will is determined not by you but by the laws of nature, then you are not at fault for your will.
Even Fischer argues that the Frankfurt case doesn't show that the incompatibilist must give up this intuition. The case doesn't specify whether the voter's actions were determined by causes other than the chip. We should not smuggle in an indeterministic assumption into the Frankfurt case. For the incompatibilist, even if moral responsibility does not require leeway freedom, it still requires one's action to not result from a causal process beyond one's control, and requiring our actions to not result from a causal process beyond our control does not require leeway freedom. Even if moral responsibility is entirely dependent upon sourcehood freedom, arguably sourcehood freedom is violated by traceability.
Part 3: Libertarianism
Pereboom discusses indeterminism, quantum mechanics, and freedom, concluding that: "This point reveals the fundamental difficulty for libertarian agent causation. Whether the physical laws are deterministic or quantum indeterministic, the antecedent probabilities of the physical components of human actions are fixed."
This reminds me of something John Heil says (Philosophy of Mind, 4th ed., pg 27-28):
"If probabilities are written into fundamental laws of nature, these probabilities are not the result of our ignorance in the face of the complexity of physical systems, nor do they simply express statistical frequencies. The probabilities are, as it were, built into the fundamental entities. In the imaginary case we are considering, it is an intrinsic—built-in—feature of an [S1] micro-system that it is 65% likely to go into state [S2] (during a particular interval). This does not imply that 65% of [S1] systems go into [S2]. It is consistent with this imaginary law that the relative frequency of [S1] to [S2] transitions is much less or much greater than 65%. In fact, it is possible, although of course highly unlikely, that no [S1] system ever goes into [S2]. If you imagine a force from outside nature intervening in a physical transaction governed by a statistical law, then you must imagine the force as somehow altering the probabilities that hold for the system in question . . . if these probabilities are built into the system, then their being altered would amount to a 'violation' of physical law."
The context of this quote is in discussion of Cartesian dualism and the interaction problem. But I think it fits here: Even if quantum mechanics gives us objective chance, if we cannot alter those probabilities, and if those probabilities determine our actions (i.e. it's not up to me whether I choose the sprite over the coke, it's up to how chance invents in my brain play out), then, even on indeterminism, our actions are still determined by processes out of our control.
This leads to a clarification of the traceability principle:
"assuming the truth of our best scientific theories, determinism turns out to be false. However, the kinds of indeterminacies these theories posit provide us with no more control over our actions than we would have if determinism were true. Our actions may not result from deterministic causal processes that trace back to factors over which we have no control, but yet there are processes, either deterministic or indeterministic, over which we have no control, that produce our actions, and this is enough to rule out freedom of the sort required for moral responsibility."
Note: I believe Pereboom has since taken an agnostic stance on whether science reveals that our world is indeterministic.
Given confusions surrounding whether determinism is necessary or detrimental to free will, and over whether indeterminism is necessary or detrimental to free will, it might be worth using language of self-determined versus non-self-determined actions. It appears that whether determinism or indeterminism is true, our actions are non-self-determined, and yet our actions must be self-determined for moral responsibility.
The way van Inwagen describes determinism, per Pereboom: "a proposition that expresses the entire state of the universe at some instant in time, in conjunction with the physical laws, entails any proposition that expresses the state of the universe at any other instant."
Put another way, if someone had total knowledge of the universe and the laws of nature, they could perfectly predict the future. But if there is objective chance, then such a person (often called Laplace's Demon) would not be able to predict the future. Or, if we have self-determined actions, then Laplace's Demon would not be able to predict the future either, as doing so would require an essential bit of information: the choice of the agent, and the choice of the agent doesn't occur until the present moment.
This leads Pereboom to take on hard incompatibilism (though he doesn't use this term in this paper), which says regardless of whether determinism or indeterminism is true, in both cases our actions are non-self-determined, and thus we do not have moral responsibility.
Part 4: Objection from deliberation
The first objection Pereboom responds to is about deliberation. If we don't have free will, then we "have no reason to attempt to accomplish anything—to try to improve our lives or the prospects of society—because our deliberations and choices could make no difference."
I'd say: But our choices do make a difference, and because we are determined to understand this, we are determined to make the choices we believe to make the best difference.
Pereboom notes that this challenge has been issued to compatibilists as well, and their response—that our deliberations being determined doesn't change their causal efficacy—can be appropriated by the free will skeptic.
Pereboom says: "It is undeniable that we feel we have the ability to choose or do otherwise; for example, that you feel that it is now possible for you either to continue or to stop reading this article."
I admit that it's undeniable that we experience the sense of having options. We can imagine going with one option or going with another. We compare the likely pros and cons of different options and select the option with the overall best consequences. However, I do not have the sense that I could in fact choose any option other than the one I in fact choose, because I understand the causes for why I chose the option I did, and those causes are fixed. For me to have chosen otherwise, I would have had to have reasoned differently, either by having access to a different set of information than the one I in fact had access to, or to be in possession of a different reasoning process than the one I in fact possessed at the moment of my choice. I don't see how either of these things could have actually been different, though I can imagine these things being different, just as I can imagine other fictional scenarios.
So I accept the internal sense, even certainty, of having different options – I can imagine choosing otherwise – but I reject the idea that I have a similar sense that it's possible for me to choose other than how I will; I don't have that sense. In fact, I feel the opposite: I feel like I do not have the power to choose other than how I will; I feel forced in my choices.
Per Pereboom, Van Inwagen says that "anyone who denies the existence of free will must, inevitably, contradict himself with monotonous regularity." This is because the person who deliberates acts as if they believe it's possible for them to choose from different options. But based on what I've just said, I reject this. Van Inwagen is incorrect. When I deliberate, I do not believe nor act as if I believe that I could in fact choose other than I do. When I deliberate, I imagine myself making different choices and see the pros and cons of each option I'm aware of. But I believe that all I'm doing is witnessing my deliberation process unfold. I'm interested in engaging in this process as well as I can because, as mentioned above, my choices are causally efficacious, and I'm the one who has to live with my choices. So I'm interested in making the best choices I can make, and by deliberating I maximize the chances of making good choices. Of course, the quality of the choice that I will make is set in stone, just as is the quality of my ability to make choices. I have no choice over my ability to make choices. So, I have no choice over the quality of my choices. All I can do is hope and pray that I'm lucky enough to have the quality of deliberation needed to make the choices needed to live a life worth living. Much of what we are doing when we live our lives is bearing witness to the quality of our decision-making process, a quality that, again, we have no control over.
Pereboom allows for something like this; the free will skeptic is not irrationally believing, when deliberating, that they have the power to do otherwise when they do not.
Part 5: Deserving of praise and blame
If there is no moral responsibility, then no one deserves praise or blame for morally exemplary actions or morally reprehensible actions, respectively.
One might think that we have no choice but to act as if people are to blame for their wrongdoing. This would leave the free will skeptic with the irrational position of believing people do not deserve blame while acting as if they do.
But "Instead of blaming people, the determinist might appeal to the practice of moral admonishment and encouragement."
In other words, while we cannot praise and blame in one sense, we can praise and blame in another. We cannot attribute persons as the ultimate causes of their actions such that their actions say anything meaningful about the person itself, only the person's circumstances. We cannot blame or praise in that sense. But we can praise as in "sing the praises of" or as in admiring the goodness of what something happens to be, and we can encourage good behavior by rewarding it. Likewise, we can "blame" evil behavior in the sense of acknowledging the badness of it and discourage it through punishment.
Pereboom brings up the question: "But what of the character who regularly and deliberately does wrong, and refuses to make a commitment to doing what is right? Doesn't the hard determinist have little to say to such a person?"
His answer is having moral blame in addition to admonishment provides no obvious practical advantage. One idea might be that if we remove moral blame, then someone might use determinism as an excuse for their wrong actions.
I'd say: One way to respond to this is that folks who use excuses for their wrong actions like this would find some way to rationalize their behavior either way. If not determinism, they would use another excuse. So determinism doesn't actually make things worse in practice.
But let's say there is someone who would only ever rationalize their evil actions if they came to believe determinism is true. When dealing with someone who does evil, we have few options: Arrest this person, use lethal force (if necessary), appeal to the person's reasoning, threaten the person, or train, condition, rehabilitate, or help the person in some psychological or material way that encourages them to change their behavior.
Whether someone freely comes to believe in determinism and freely uses it as an excuse, or whether someone is determined in doing so, either way our response to them is the same as responding to any other evildoer.
I'd also say, in agreement with Socrates, that no one deliberately does wrong. Everyone is engaging in moral calculations, some of them quite complex, and people have varying degrees of sophistication in their calculating. In every case, everyone arrives at an answer they see fit in that moment, even if moments later they realize they should have done otherwise.
Pereboom says:
"Abhorrence of a person because of the actions he has performed at least typically involves blaming him for those actions, which, in turn, presupposes that his actions and character did not result from processes beyond his control. If one were to discover that an especially wrongful "action" was caused by some non-psychological, physiological reaction in the person, one's abhorrence would tend to vanish, and this
would suggest that one's abhorrence was founded in blame."
We naturally hate bad things, and therefore we naturally hate that which causes bad things to happen. If someone has free will, then their person is the cause of the bad thing. So, naturally, we hate the person. But when we discover that someone was a victim of circumstances, that hatred naturally falls away and is replaced with sympathy as we realize that anyone, including ourselves, could have found ourselves in the same circumstances and turning out the same way. Persons, if determined, are either lucky or unlucky depending on the bodies they happen to be attached to.
This shows how belief in free will leads to hatred in a way free will skepticism does not. Free will skepticism is an anti-hatred, anti-judgment view, and indeed is as anti-hatred and anti-judgment one can get, at least within reason. (I suppose solipsism would be even more so than determinism, but solipsism is not a reasonable view.)
Sure, on free will skepticism you can be saddened by a person's immoral actions in the same way one is saddened by the destruction caused by an earthquake. But just as it would be silly to hate the earthquake, it would be silly to hate the immoral person. Free will skepticism amounts to the view that we should eliminate all hatred of all persons for all time and replace any hatred with sympathy.
Pereboom quotes Honderich as saying:
"There is no obstacle to my abhorrence of the desires and intentions of the treacherous husband foreseeing his divorce, or, more important, to my abhorrence of him, a man whose personality and character are consistent with these desires and intentions, and support them."
This is what the free will view amounts to: seething hatred. It is, for that reason, a morally bankrupt view.
Instead, the correct attitude, and the morally superior attitude, is to view it as tragic that the man would happen to have evil desires and intentions. Note that Honderich blames the man himself. But what, exactly, is he blaming? This is why a theory of personhood is essential to understanding free will. If we take persons to essentially be subjects, then it's incorrect to blame the man as a subject, as subjects are victims of their brains, bodies, and circumstances that led them to have the experiences they have, including the experiences of making evil choices.
But none of this prevents us from accurately acknowledging the true evil of the man's actions. Just as we acknowledge the real badness of the destruction the hurricane causes without hating any person there, so too we can acknowledge the badness of evil actions without hating any person there. Psychologically, adopting free will skepticism means shifting your hatred to sadness. Instead of feeling hatred for the mass shooter in the news, we should simply feel sad that this person's horrible circumstances would lead to such horrible actions.
This bifurcated view of blame applies to praise as well. Susan Wolf argues for an asymmetry view where we can appropriately praise, but not blame. She has us imagine two swimmers, each sees a child drowning and swims out to save it, purely out of desire to save the child for the sake of the child (and the parents, etc.). We suppose one can do otherwise and the other cannot. It seems like both are still praiseworthy. In fact, suppose that the swimmer that cannot do otherwise cannot do otherwise because of the swimmer's strong moral character; "her understanding of the situation is so good and her moral commitment so strong" that she must attempt to save the child. Far from detracting from her moral praiseworthiness, this would seem to increase it all the more.
But the bifurcated view comes to the rescue again. I agree with Pereboom's response:
"If it were specified that her action results from a deterministic causal process that traces back to factors she could not have produced, altered, or prevented—perhaps by adding that she is controlled by neuroscientists—the intuition that she deserves praise might well vanish."
Just as we must replace hatred with sympathy, we must replace praise with something closer to appreciation or awe. Indeed, often our praise really takes the form of awe anyway. We should not give the swimmer any credit; the swimmer just so happens to be a kind and brave person in a way that is not up to them. But at the same time we can still appreciate the goodness of good actions.
This view beautifully eliminates problems surrounding ego, in two directions. Internally, I cannot take credit for whatever good qualities I happen to have. This needn't discourage me from being ambitious or from trying to be as good a person as I can be. Being good should be its own reward; no one should be good purely out of ego. That would be doing "the right thing for the wrong reasons." Externally, I needn't feel jealous whatsoever of the good qualities of others. Really, they are just lucky, and it's easier to be happier for them.
Part 6: Making sense of 'oughts'
Here I disagree with Pereboom. If ought implies can, and yet we cannot do otherwise, then this threatens the truth of common sense ought statements like "He shouldn't have murdered his wife." Pereboom says:
"But even if moral 'ought' statements are never true, moral judgments, such as 'it is morally right for A to do x,' or 'it is a morally good thing for A to do x,' still can be."
This sounds like a contradiction to me. Moral judgments can only be true if moral oughts can, and vice versa; they are the same. I suppose if I took "ought" to imply leeway freedom, I would agree with Pereboom here and translate ought sentences to ones of acknowledging the superiority of alternative actions. But "ought" to me in the first place just means an imagining of alternative choices and seeing the superior one. Oughts have to do with choice elimination. We constantly are bombarded with options and we need a system for finding the best option and a language for when we find it. "Ought" is nothing more than a judgment of the best option from a list of options. "He shouldn't have murdered his wife" doesn't mean "He could have not murdered his wife, and that would have been better", it just means "Not murdering his wife was the better option." Someone could be determined to pick the worse option. Even still, he ought to have picked the better one. If oughts really do pick out leeway freedom, then in my view oughts would simply have to be paraphrased over or translated, and once this is done we retain common sense moral beliefs of some options being objectively better than others without the mistaken belief that one had the power to choose other than they did.
I agree with Pereboom that "One might argue that if moral 'ought' statements were never true, we could have no reason to do what is right. But this view is mistaken."
If oughts are mistaken, they are only partially mistaken; only the part that implies leeway freedom. But the superiority-of-choice part could be kept. If someone restricts themselves only to believe truths, then this person might discard "oughts" as false, and no longer believe that it's true they ought to do anything. But if the superiority-of-choice aspect contained in oughts is dropped too, that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would be absurd to deliberately choose choices you know to be worse (something I think is in any case impossible to do) just because you want to restrict yourself to true actions. It is exactly because you have restricted yourself to true actions that you act according to your calculations. It's just unfortunate that we often miscalculate things.
Part 7: Negative reactive attitudes
PF Strawson famously discusses reactive attitudes in his paper "Freedom and Resentment." I grant the point I gather Strawson is making, that we cannot help our reactive attitudes, and yet if these attitudes depend on belief in moral responsibility, then we appear committed to moral responsibility. (I haven't read the paper yet, so I'm shooting in the dark here. For another time.)
Pereboom then asks: "first, whether the reactive attitudes really are immune from alteration by a belief in determinism, and second, whether it would be good for them to be altered by such a belief . . ."
Based on what I've said above, I think it's absolutely the case that reactive attitudes can be changed by belief in free will skepticism; I've seen it first hand within myself. Second, of course it would be good to have these attitudes changed, as free will skepticism is the more loving, sympathetic, empathetic, understanding, anti-judgment, anti-hatred, anti-ego view. It's the better view, morally.
However, if it's wrong to hate the soul of the person for what they've done, is it wrong to love the soul too, as the soul deserves neither love nor hate? Pereboom says:
"Strawson is right to believe that objectivity of attitude would destroy interpersonal relationships. But he is mistaken to think that objectivity of attitude would result or be appropriate if determinism were to undermine the reactive attitudes."
Importantly, reactive attitudes of hatred, borne out of a view of free will, can ruin interpersonal relationships, whereas people who did not believe in free will would have lacked this hatred. In fact, if someone took a more objective stance and looked upon their family member, friend, roommate, or whoever, as something "to be managed or handled or cured or trained", then this person could achieve an unusually high level of emotional maturity. Typically we let how others make us feel get the better of us. If someone makes us feel bad, all we want to do is say hurtful things or to leave. But if someone has the emotional maturity to set those feelings aside and look at the situation more objectively, they may figure out a way to navigate the social puzzle involving the family member, friend, or roommate, and even improve or restore the relationship instead of exacerbating the situation or simply leaving the relationship entirely. In short, hatred can blind you to the truth of what's really going on, or to how you should really approach the social situation. A more objective outlook could give you the power to set emotions to the side and to see the person not as something hostile, but something to be understood.
There are two ways in which free will skepticism can still lead to hatred. While it's true we should not hate the person, because it's true that we can still take on a critical stance of someone, it can be difficult to rein in this critical stance and not let it slip into hatred. In fact, someone could argue that free will skepticism opens you up all the more to a hateful attitude, because suddenly there's no moral burden to your hatred. After all, you're not hating the person, only the person's organism, or something like this. So, you can hate all the more, believing your hatred to be innocently directed at the person's body, brain, actions, or what have you, and not really directed at the person. And if anything is worse than hatred, it's hatred with a clean conscience.
That's one potential issue. Another potential issue has to do with loving the person as a subject versus hating the person as a subject. If we view love as, minimally, the regarding of something as good, and if we regard good things as those things that are good in virtue of the intrinsic, extrinsic, or saving goodness, and if hatred is, minimally, the regarding of something as bad, and if we regard bad things as those things that are bad in virtue of the intrinsic, extrinsic, or depriving badness, and if we then allow ourselves to love the other as something of immense extrinsic goodness, and indeed primary goodness, as goodness must ultimately cash out in terms of intrinsic goodness, which requires personhood, then it appears that while we can love someone in the sense of delighting in them, allowing them to make us happy, delighting in their happiness, then we would in theory be forced to hate someone if they are miserable. But this is not true when we take hatred to include an intense negative emotional experience. Instead, we might pity someone, which is to view them as lacking in extrinsic value now, while acknowledging it's not their fault that this is the case, and acknowledge that in theory this person could be happy and thus a source of value rather than disvalue. After all, when we see someone suffering, often our first instinct is simply to feel sad for them. So free will skepticism needn't invite hatred on this account, and if anything blocks hatred from manifesting.
To the first problem, I think it's appropriate to hate bad things, and as long as hating someone's organism is very much like hating someone's cancer, then I don't see anything wrong with this. Your hatred is completely not directed at them but at something bad that has happened to them out of their control. What's being described above is really a kind of hatred of the person itself and disguising it as something it's not. I acknowledge that it's extremely difficult sometimes to separate a person from their body or brain, and thus it's tempting to lump them together and hate the whole. But this is a mistake. It is so unfair to hate someone for something beyond their control, and yet humans tend to recourse to this as we see in the ubiquity of bigotry towards things like skin color, looks, and sexual orientation. It's okay to hate stupidity, selfishness, small-mindedness, and all the vices that people have, but it's never okay to hate the person for having these, as the person was forced to have them by circumstance.
Continuing with free will skepticism and love, Pereboom makes great points:
". . . parents love their children rarely, if ever, because these children possess the freedom required for moral responsibility, or because they freely (in this sense) choose the good, or because they deserve to be loved. But moreover, when adults love each other, it is also seldom, if at all, for these kinds of reasons. Explanations for love are complex."
So while I acknowledge some give and take when it comes to both views, free will versus free will skepticism, and interpersonal relationships, I see free will skepticism as very much arriving on top as the superior view.