Free Will and Epistemology by Robert Lockie

Author:Robert Lockie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

7.2.3 The point to our actions (co-fated itself determined)

The co-fated response is meant at least to underwrite a point to our actions in the teeth of the Lazy Argument: that, in a determined world, there would be no space for the determinations of agency – no space for normative determination of action at all. Perhaps the co-fated response is meant to do more than this and defend a notion of agency (‘determined agency’) itself.

Granted, the presence of a co-fated precursor to and prerequisite of the inevitable outcome is meant to invest our actions with a point: the question is how? The co-fated determinant is itself co-fated. Any challenge to agency or the point to our actions that derives from determinism will just resurface at the level of these actions’ co-fated determinants in turn. We don’t get agency emerging from a sufficient number of epicycles added to the basic determinist account. The Lazy Argument questions how we, with our powers to decide, could make a difference to the way the world might be, yet determinism still be true – determinism which insists that the way the world is and has been and will be is wholly determined by the fundamental laws of nature and the start-up conditions that obtained at the Big Bang, long before we, with our powers to decide, were in existence. Surely, though, no-one was or is baffled, metaphysically, by how our behaviour (well, our movements) could have been caused by the Big Bang as such; nor yet by how our behaviour could in turn be a part of a causal chain that brings about other events – themselves ultimately necessitated by the Big Bang. The puzzlement is how, if determinism were true, the person could exhibit agency (could determine action).

A large part of what motivates the co-fated response is undoubtedly the straw man version of the Lazy Argument, which has it that what the determinist must oppose is the enervating conclusion criticized above: that we ought to choose inactivity. Versions of the Chrysippan counterargument have, throughout its long history, taken the task of this argument to be that of convincing those who are vulnerable to the Lazy Argument that there is a point to their actions (an emphasis, we shall see, that is shared by the proponents of the sister to this Chrysippan counterargument – the ‘epistemology not metaphysics’ position). Repeatedly we see the successors to Chrysippus urging upon a potentially ‘lazy’ agent that he should realize how his actions are causally, hence conatively, significant – as these actions may be ‘co-fated’ with their desired (and determined) intentional outcome. There’s a point to calling the doctor. The Chrysippan counterargument becomes, as it were, a pep talk: the agent would be foolish (in this literature, repeatedly he is characterized as a fool) were he to lapse into lassitude; the doctor needs to be called – to effect the patient’s (inevitable) survival.

How, though, on the determinists’ own assumptions, can taking this task as their project make sense: of reassuring

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