Free Will by Mawson T. J

Author:Mawson, T. J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

We have seen that the Consequence Argument supports Incompatibilism, through supporting the claim that Determinism is incompatible with us having an ability to do other than what we do. The classical compatibilist response to this argument relies on advancing a sense of ‘could have done otherwise’ in which, even in a deterministic universe, people sometimes could have done otherwise than whatever it is they actually did. This response was found to be lacking for three reasons. First, Rule Beta, which the classical compatibilist is forced to reject, is intuitively very plausible. Examples of its apparently working can be multiplied without end. Second, putative counter-examples to it require of us, if we are to accept them as counter-examples, that we either accept that if the world is deterministic, then we could change at least the laws of nature (and possibly the past) or accept that if the world is deterministic, then it is implausibly close in logical space to indeterministic worlds. Third, the hypothetical sense of ‘could have done otherwise’ is implausible in its own terms, for it would render most of us capable of doing things to which we have the most extreme aversions just whenever someone offers us the chance to do them.

As we saw, this though was just the first stage of the argument for Incompatibilism. The non-classical compatibilist accepts with the Consequence Argument that Determinism does indeed entail an inability to do other than whatever one actually does, but denies that ability to do other than what one actually does is necessary for moral responsibility. In order to find support for such a contention, he or she needs effective counter-examples to Incompatibilism, that is to say situations which maintain our confidence both that the person we are considering is morally assessable for the action in question and that the person we are considering could not have done other than whatever it is he or she actually did.

In looking for such counter-examples, we first looked at a somewhat-imaginary re-telling of the story of Martin Luther’s famous declaration, ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ Here we concluded that while we did indeed wish to assess Luther morally and yet admit that at the time he made this declaration he could not have done other than make it, what we really wished to assess him for was not his action in making this declaration; that was simply the action which drew him to our moral attention. Rather we wished to assess him for his earlier ‘self-forming’ actions, those by which he made a ‘self’ for himself such that at that moment he was then unable to do other than stand where he stood and say what he said. And when we turn our attention to these earlier actions, on which our praise (we assumed it would be praise when we told the story) is really focused, we suppose that when doing them he did satisfy a robust ‘could have done otherwise’ condition. Luther then is not, on reflection, a counter-example to Incompatibilism.

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