Compatibilism
Having your cake and eating it?
Many people affirm a deterministic Universe, based on a physicalist interpretation of science, but do not wish to give up the idea of free will. Especially their own.
This has led to a huge amount of dubious argument which attempts to say that we can possess freedom while being entirely made up of deterministic materials. Not surprisingly, these attempts do not stand up to scrutiny.
Compatibilism
This is the de facto way by which most people view the Universe, ourselves and others but it relies on taking a blinkered view and is only possible because the deterministic character of the Universe is not apparent in everyday life.
In order to do this, some have redefined “freedom” to mean “not limited by external physical constraints“.
This move avoids the problem of physical determinism by pretending that it does not exist and acting as if our intuition of having some freedom of choice is true.
Is this a legitimate way of allowing for consciousness and free will to emerge from deterministic material systems — or does it simply dodge the deeper question? Bernardo Kastrup described physicalism as being a psychological defence mechanism [Kastrup 2016].The philosopher Immanuel Kant criticised vague appeals to freedom within a causally determined world as a “wretched subterfuge” — a poor excuse that fails to resolve the conflict between natural determinism and human moral responsibility. Instead, he proposed a more radical solution: that we must understand ourselves as belonging to two realms — the natural, where causality rules, and the moral, where freedom is real. But can such a dual-aspect view still hold in a modern scientific worldview?
Compatibilism can only work because, just as we cannot know whether someone else has conscious experience, we cannot tell whether someone else has free will or is an automaton.
Responsibility and Accountability
In order to argue that determinism can be compatible with freedom, a restricted definition of “freedom” has been introduced. In this view, so long as an agent is free from external physical constraints, or coercion, then they can be said to have freedom of choice. Constraints due to the laws of physics are not considered. This limited kind of freedom leads to so-called “weak accountability”.
This view could be applied to a computer system which makes “decisions” based deterministically on the data provided to it. It is “responsible” for the decisions it makes in the sense that the decision is the result of its internal mechanism. In that case “correction” or “punishment” would amount to the reprogramming or the retraining of that mechanism. Compatibilism makes no distinction between a machine and a human and effectively treats both as machines.
According to this view, there is no inconsistency between a belief in determinism and holding people responsible for their actions (even if they are not in fact responsible) since all that is considered are the pragmatic results of reward and punishment regardless of its fairness. A person’s responsibility for their actions is then defined in terms of whether, or not, their behaviour can be changed by reward or punishment.
Strawson, who describes compatibilists as “optimists”, writes this: “Some optimists about determinism point to the efficacy of the practices of punishment, and of moral condemnation and approval, in regulating behaviour in socially desirable ways. In the fact of their efficacy, they suggest, is an adequate basis for these practices;”[R v Parks, [1992]] This is the same way as we would treat a thermostat and it is tantamount to objectifying or dehumanising people. Moreover, as before, there is often no sure way of knowing whether a punishment will be efficacious in particular cases.
On [Blackburn 1999 page 109], Blackburn describes this position as of not seeing a problem so long as there is no incompatibility between the first person and the third person perspective. Since freedom is something which is only experienced by the agent and can only be indirectly inferred by a third person, the third person stance says nothing about causation or freedom, so it is declared that there is no problem. This can be compared with the statement that “There is nothing left for consciousness to do”. A complete objective description of behaviour is possible without recourse to the idea of consciousness.
These arguments do not so much solve the problem of fundamental determinism, rather it is simply ignored by redefining freedom.
There is no real freedom according to this model, any more than that of Hard Determinism. There is only the appearance of freedom which results by zooming in on local situations and ignoring the elephant in the room which is that, despite appearances, determinism dictates that all choices are fixed ahead of time. For this reason, there cannot be any strong accountability and the implication is that everyone is morally neutral since they do not choose what they do [iii].
Robert Kane [iv], argues that it is not necessary for all decisions to be undetermined but only that some do, so-called “Self Forming Actions”. For instance, a specific decision at a specific time may well be outside our control, however our propensities will have been formed by previous free choices for which we can be held strongly accountable. These actions form our character and our character causes our decisions.[91] [85 page 92]. Aristotle said something similar: “if a man is responsible for wicked acts that flow from his character, he must at some time in the past have been responsible for forming the wicked character from which these acts flow”[v].
While this fits in with the “training the autopilot” model (Section 4), the problem about the origin of these Self-Forming Actions remains unanswered. For instance an example of a self-forming choice is given as: A business woman “is on her way to an important meeting when she observes an assault taking place in an alley. An inner struggle ensues between her conscience, to stop and call for help, and her career ambitions which tell her she cannot miss this meeting. She has to make an effort of will to overcome the temptation to go on. If she overcomes this temptation, it will be the result of her effort, but if she fails, it will be because she did not allow her effort to succeed. And this is due to the fact that, while she willed to overcome temptation, she also willed to fail, for quite different and incommensurable reasons. When we, like the woman, decide in such circumstances, and the indeterminate efforts we are making become determinate choices, we make one set of competing reasons or motives prevail over the others then and there by deciding.” There is no clear view of why the alleged self-forming choice is any more free than any other and is not the result of deterministic physics with some uncertainty due to random noise which tips the balance one way or another. Nor is it said what is meant by “willed” or “allowed” in this context. Making a decision is said to be the result of two networks pulling against each other. Which one wins might depend on noise or on will. This may lead to uncertainty but there is no mechanism for free choice.
This, too, leads to a dead end with merely the illusion of freedom.
iiiSaul Smilansky, “Free will: From Nature to Illusion”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 101 (1):71-95 (2001)
ivRobert Kane, “Responsibility, luck, and chance: Reflections on free will and determinism”, Journal of Philosophy 96 (5):217-40 (1999)
vAristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics”
Illusionism:
There are others, eg. [Hood 2011], who would affirm hard determinism but say that because the world is unpredictable, and can therefore have the appearance of indeterminacy, that is just as good. In reality, it has all the problems of hard determinism even if some people choose, or have no choice but, to deny it.