So I just finished reading Carolina Sartorio's new paper in Phil Review, "Making a Difference in a Deterministic World", and I'm puzzled. I'm not puzzled by the paper — which is clear and well-argued enough — so much as I am puzzled by the entire view it is concerned with: compatibilism.
Here, in a nutshell, is Sartorio's main thesis: even if everything in the universe is fully determined in advance, there is nevertheless a sense in which our actions can make a difference in the world. Sartorio's argument then is that because "difference-making" is intuitively tied to moral responsiblity, and compatibilists prior to her paper haven't made adequate sense of how our actions can make a difference in a deterministic world, she has provided a better compatibilist account of how we can be morally responsible for our actions.
But of course here's what puzzles me, and what seems to puzzle most of compatibilism's opponents as far as I can tell: how compatibilism is supposed to be at all interesting, regardless of how we spell it out. After all, suppose I said to you: "All of your actions were determined billions of years ago. But, don't worry, you can make a real difference in the world. I have a philosophical analysis of 'making a difference' that proves it!" The obvious enough rejoinder seems to me to be this: "Well, of course. Surely there has to be a sense in which I can make a difference in the world. My actions are mine, after all — they belong to me — and there's clearly a sense in which they do make a difference in what happens. If the laws of nature cause me to drink a Coke, then, indeed, I have made a difference in the world: there is one less Coke to drink. But so what? It's one thing to say that there's a sense in which I can make a difference in the world. It's another thing to show that it is a sense worth philosophically caring about."
Now, I know compatibilists think they have arguments that compatibilism is interesting and fruitful. They may say, perhaps, that Frankfurt-cases show that we can be morally responsible even in cases where we couldn't behave otherwise. Yet I have to confess that I've always been baffled by how Frankfurt cases are used in the debate. Here, after all, is the classic Frankfurt case set-up. We are supposed to (A) imagine a person making a choice P, and then (B) imagine a mechanism which, if the person tried to make some alternative choice Q, would force the person to instead choose P. Here, for instance, is a typical case (copied from Wikipedia):
Donald is a Democrat and is likely to vote for the Democrats; in fact, only in one particular circumstance will he not: that is, if he thinks about the prospects of immediate American defeat in Iraq just prior to voting. Ms White, a representative of the Democratic Party, wants to ensure that Donald votes Democratic, so she secretly plants a device in Donald's head that, if activated, will force him to vote Democratic. Not wishing to reveal her presence unnecessarily, Ms White plans to activate the device only if Donald thinks about the Iraq prior to voting. As things happen, Donald does not think about Iraq prior to voting, so Ms White thus sees no reason to activate the device, and Donald votes Democratic of his own accord. Apparently, Donald is responsible for voting Democratic although, owing to Ms. White's device, he lacks freedom to do otherwise.
Here is the problem. Frankfurt cases are strongly disanalogous to physical determinism. In a Frankfurt case, the person's action is not determined by any actual physical laws. The sense in which the person "cannot do otherwise" is entirely counterfactual. It is that if they tried to choose otherwise, someone (or some mechanism) would step in and ensure that they don't succeed. But this "trying" isn't even possible under physical determinism. It's not the case that if I tried to behave otherwise than I do, physical laws would step in and stop me. It's that I can't even try to behave otherwise if physical determinism is true (it is not a physical possibility). This, then, is the problem with Frankfurt cases. They push certain intuitions — that we can be morally responsible for our actions even if we couldn't do otherwise — because, contrary to determinism, they smuggle in libertarian intuitions. They do this because alternative possibilities are only ruled out counterfactually. For all Frankfurt cases show, the reason why we judge a person free and responsible in those cases is that (A) we judge the person had libertarian free will to make the choice (they caused their action independently of physical laws), but (B) alternative possibilities are counterfactually ruled out because, if they libertarian-ly tried to choose something else, some mechanism would force them to behave the same way.
Accordingly, Frankfurt cases don't seem sufficient to me to philosophically motivate compatibilism. They're a poor analogy to determinism. In order to motivate compatibilism, we would have to tell a story like the one above (about voting for democrats) using determinism. But when we tell such a story, it doesn't seem at all like the person is free or morally responsible. For here's such a story:
Donald is a Democrat, and his vote for the democratic candidate was fully determined by the laws of nature billions of years ago.
I take it when we look just at this case, we all have the incompatibilist intuition that of course Donald isn't responsible for his actions. His vote simply isn't his fault. There is no deep sense in which he could help it at all. And this, again, is very different than the Frankfurt case. In the Frankfurt case, we feel like there's a sense in which the person "could help it" — but again, that's only because the forcing of their behavior is merely counterfactually triggered. In the Frankfurt case, the person's actual choice isn't determined by anything besides their (libertarian) free choice.
But now if Frankfurt cases aren't sufficient to motivate compatibilism, what can be? A Strawsonian picture of reactive attitudes (see section 4.3 here) perhaps? I'm happy enough with this kind of compatibilist picture of moral responsibility – with the idea that we can sensibly hold people morally responsible in a deterministic world. But now, it seems to me, we're no longer talking about free will. We're merely talking about moral responsibility. And so compatibilism about free will, it seems to me, remains insufficiently motivated.
Have I gone wrong somewhere? Am I being unfair to compatibilism about free will? Seriously, I'm willing to be open-minded. I've just never come across an argument for it that seems to me half-way persuasive. If anyone can persuade me, or even just semi– persuade me, I'd be grateful. In fact, I'd be grateful for just a nice discussion about it. 🙂
Leave a Reply