Sometimes we do things accidentally. For example, sometimes people crash their cars by accident, for instance, when the roads are icy. But most of the time we do things intentionally, that is, with a purpose. When we intentionally do some action it seems that it has to do with our mental states. For example, my intentionally going to the grocery store yesterday had to do with two of my mental states, a desire and a belief. My desire was to get something for dinner and my belief was that the grocery store had what I wanted for dinner. So there seems to be a relationship between a person’s mental states, such as beliefs and desires, and his or her intentional actions. What sort of relationship is this? Some philosophers believe that when we act intentionally our mental states cause our actions. If this is correct, then my desire for food and my belief that there was food in the grocery store caused me to go to the grocery store.
If mental states cause our actions, then does one have any control of one’s mental states? When I think about many of my beliefs it doesn’t seem that I can control them. I can’t just get myself to believe that there is no food in the grocery store. I would need some evidence that there is no food in the grocery store to change my belief. Perhaps, as some philosophers maintain, some beliefs are in a person’s control, such as a belief about God’s existence. Whether or not this is true, it doesn’t seem that I have control over beliefs that I’ve formed on the basis of empirical evidence. If you’re not convinced, consider your belief that you have right now that you’re on Earth and not on the moon. You can imagine yourself being on the moon. You might even try to believe that you’re on the moon. But you can’t just get yourself to believe that you are on the moon. What about desires? Does a person have the ability to control his or her desires? Think about your sexual desires. Can you just decide to have different sexual preferences? Perhaps one can have some control over some of one’s desires. When I have a desire for food, I might be able to focus my attention on something else (e.g. my desire to lose weight) and this might diminish my desire for food. But the longer I go without food, the stronger my desire for it becomes, and this causes my ability to control my desire for food to become weaker.
The question of whether a person can control his or her beliefs and desires is important. If a person doesn’t have any control of his or her beliefs and desires, but they cause his or her intentional actions, then it’s not clear whether a person’s intentional actions could ever be free. Could you freely do something if you’re being caused to do this something, but you’re not in control of this cause? And if actions cannot ever be free, then the common sense view that people are sometimes morally morally responsible for what they do is simply mistaken. Moral responsibility is the idea that people deserve blame or praise for their actions. You need to perform an action freely in order to be morally responsible for it. For example, if unbeknownst to you, someone puts a sleeping pill in your drink at a bar and you get into your car and drive it into a tree because you’ve passed out at the wheel you’re not to blame for the crash; you didn’t freely crash the car. However, if you get into a car and freely drive it into a tree because you want to get the insurance money for the car, then you are to blame for the crash.
So if a person doesn’t have any control of his or her beliefs and desires, but they cause his or her intentional actions, could his or her intentional actions ever be free? There are philosophers who believe the answer is yes. I will use the name “compatibilist” to refer to these philosophers because they believe that free action is compatible with having no control of the mental states that cause intentional action. I will use the name “incompatibilist” to refer to philosophers who believe the answer is no. These philosophers believe that having no control of the mental states that cause intentional action is incompatible with free action. [*See below]
There are two types of incompatibilists. There are incompatibilists who believe that sometimes people do act freely and therefore can be morally responsible for what they do. And there are incompatibilists who believe that people never never act freely and therefore can never be morally responsible for what we do. What all incompatibilists have in common is the belief that if you’re not in control of your mental states, but they cause your intentional actions, then your actions cannot be free. Note the word “if”.
Some incompatibilists believe that if people are just their physical bodies or some part of it, such as their brains, then they cannot act freely. The reason for this view is that physical things are dependent upon the laws of nature, environmental conditions and events in the past. But these external things are not up to the person. A person doesn’t have any control over the laws of nature, the environment he or she was born into, the events of the past. So a person’s actions, which are consequences of these things, are not up to the person, not in his or her control. Thus, if a person is entirely physical, nothing he or she does can be freely done. You might think that if these incompatibilists are correct, we have the following empirical argument for dualism.
- People sometimes freely act. [Why? Because it feels to people that they are able to freely act.]
- If a person freely acts, then he or she must be something more than a physical body or some part of it, such as a brain. [Why? Because if a person is entirely physical, then he is dependent upon the laws of nature, environmental conditions, past events, and nothing dependent upon these things can act freely.]
- So, a person must be more than a physical body or some part of it, such as brain. i.e. Dualism is true!
I said in a previous post that this empirical argument for dualism is not compelling because both premises are controversial.
As I pointed out above, there are incompatibilists who deny premise 1. They argue that people are just physical and premise 2 is true. So no one freely does anything, and hence no one is morally responsible for anything that they do. They agree that it might feel to you that you sometimes act freely. But they believe this feeling is illusory, just as illusory as the feeling we have that the Earth is not moving.
All compatibilists reject premise 2. How can something that is entirely physical act freely? It may be helpful in understanding this view to appreciate the fact that we use the term “free” to describe the behavior of entirely physical things that are not people. Consider the second hand of a watch, something that is entirely physical. We say things like the second hand is freely moving around the face of a watch. What we mean when we say this is that the second hand is not constrained by anything, such as a piece of dirt. If the second hand was constrained by a piece of dirt, we would say that the piece of dirt prevents it from moving freely. Compatibilists who reject premise 2 believe that we can say something similar about people’s free actions. That is, they believe that a person is acting freely just in case his or her actions are not being constrained and they are caused by his or her beliefs and desires.
To say that a person is acting freely just in case his actions are not constrained and are caused by his beliefs and desires is not to say that the free actions are caused by just any beliefs or desires. There are cases where people don’t seem to be acting freely, but who are not being constrained and seem to be acting on their beliefs and desires. Some people do compulsive behavior which conflicts with their behavior. Think about people with addictions or OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). On the one hand, they have a desire (or perhaps a strong urge) for whatever compulsive behavior they are doing. But they often wish they didnt’ have this desire. In this case, they are not freely doing the compulsive behavior. There are people who don’t have compulsions, but they don’t seem morally responsible for what they do. Think about a person with paranoid delusions who accuses others of wrongdoing, but whose accusations are based on beliefs that are not sensitive to reason. They don’t have the sort of free action that is required for moral responsibility. Yet, they seem to be acting on their beliefs and desires and aren’t being constrained. To handle these sorts of cases of mental illness, some compatibilists propose that for a person to act freely the desire a person acts on has to cohere with his or her values and the belief the person acts on has to be responsive to reason. If a person acts on desires and beliefs that meet these conditions, then he or she is acting freely, and as a consequence morally responsible for his or her actions.
There are at least two worries for the compatibilist.
Compatibilist Worry #1: The compatibilist believes that if you have certain types of beliefs and desires and they cause your intentional actions and you’re not being constrained, then your actions are free and you’re morally responsible for them. But it doesn’t seem that these actions are free if your beliefs and desires were implanted in you by a manipulating powerful scientist. Suppose such a scientist could cause you to have whatever mental states the scientist wants, and these mental states would cause you to act in whatever ways that the scientists wants. Let’s further suppose that your actions cohere with your desires and your beliefs are responsive to reason. Would you be acting freely? It doesn’t seem so. Would you be morally responsible for what you do? It doesn’t seem so. You wouldn’t be the source of your actions; the scientist would be. The problem is that given the way the compatibilist understands what it means to act freely, it seems that he has to say that you would be acting freely. So the compatibilist either needs to find a way to fix his definition of acting freely or explain why this kind of manipulation by the scientist doesn’t undermine free action.
Compatibilist Worry #2: When I do something intentionally I do so because of certain beliefs and desires I have. However, it doesn’t feel as if my beliefs and desires cause my actions. Rather, it feels as if I am in control of my actions. It feels that given my beliefs and desires, I could act otherwise. So based on the way things feel to me (and I assume this is the way things feel to you), it doesn’t seem as if compatibilism is correct. The compatibilist has to maintain, just as the incompatibilist who denies that we ever freely act has to maintain, that this feeling of control of our actions is illusory, just as illusory as the feeling we have that the Earth is not moving. But why would we have a feeling of control if we really don’t have any control. According to one explanation, the reason that we feel that we’re free, even though, we’re not actually free, is that we are aware of the content of our mental states (e.g. what we want and believe). We’re not aware of the causes of our mental states. Is this a plausible explanation? If it is, then this feeling of freedom is not a legitimate worry for the compatibilist or the incompatibilist who denies that we ever act freely However, if this explanation is not plausible, then another explanation for this feeling needs to be given. I’ll let you decide whether it’s a plausible explanation.
You might think that the feeling that you’re in control of your actions is good enough reason to reject the compatibilist position and believe, at least tentatively, the incompatibilist position that says that you’re sometimes freely acting. But there are at least two worries for this view as well.
Incompatibilist Worry #1: If you can freely act, and it’s you that is in control of your free acts, not your beliefs or desires, then it seems that you are something distinct from your mental states. But if you are distinct from your mental states, then what are you? If you are just your body or some physical part of it, such as your brain, then it doesn’t seem that you would have any control of what you do. Your actions would be a result of the laws of nature, the environment you were born into, and events of the past. So it seems that for you to be in control of your actions, you would have to be something distinct from your body, or some physical part of it. This means that for you to be in control of your actions, dualism would have to be true. The worry is that it’s not clear whether we have any compelling reason to believe that dualism is true.
Incompatibilist Worry #2: If incompatibilism is correct and you can act freely, then it follows that your free acts are caused by you, not by your mental states. But this means that when you freely act and you do so because of certain mental states you have you could just as easily have acted differently given those very same mental states. The problem is that it’s not clear why your actions are not just random events if you could just as easily have done otherwise. And if your actions are merely random events, then you’re not morally responsible for them.
Summary: If we are ever morally responsible for anything we do, then we need to be able to freely act.
The compatibilist believes that we can freely act if our actions are caused by some of our mental states, even though we do not have control of these mental states. There are at least two problems with the compatibilist view. One problem is that we can imagine a master manipulator who controls a person’s mental states and gets this person to do what he wants him or her to do. It seems that such a person is a puppet, not a free agent. But it’s not clear that the compatibilist can say this, given their view of what it means to act freely. Another problem is that the compatibilist says that a person’s free actions are caused by his or her mental states. But to many people this is not how it feels. It feels to many people that they are in control of their actions, at least some of the time.
The incompatibilist believes that if we don’t have control of our mental states, then we cannot act freely.
Some incompatibilists believe that we cannot act freely and so we are never morally responsible. The problem with this view is that it just doesn’t feel to many people that they cannot act freely.
Some incomptatibilists believe that we can act freely some of the time and therefore are sometimes morally responsible for what we do. There are at least two problems with this incompatibilist view. One problem is that it seems that it requires that we are more than our bodies, but it’s not clear whether there is any compelling reason to believe that dualism is true. Another problem is that it’s not clear why a person’s actions would not be considered random actions if they are being caused by the person who could just as easily done otherwise, given the same mental states.
* According to standard nomenclature, compatibilism is the view that free action is compatibile with determinism. And incompatibilism is the view that free action is not compatible with determinism. If determinism is true, then you do not have any control over all the causes of your actions. So I believe that my usage of the term compatibilism is consistent with the standard usage.
