Author: Bill Vallicella

Could Freedom of the Will be an Illusion?

Could freedom of the will in the strong or unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense be an illusion?

Suppose A and B are incompatible but possible courses of action, and I am deliberating as to whether I should do A or B. (Should I continue with this blogging business, or devote more time to less ephemeral pursuits?) Deliberating, I have the sense that it is up to me what happens. I have the sense that it is not the case that events prior to my birth, together with the laws of nature, necessitate that I do what I end up doing. Seriously deliberating, I presuppose the falsity of determinism. Determinism is the thesis that, given the actual past, and the actual laws of nature, there is only one possible future. When I seriously deliberate, however, my deliberation behavior manifests the belief that there is more than one possible future, and that it is up to me which of these possible futures becomes actual. There is the possible future in which I hike tomorrow morning and blog in the afternoon and the equipossible future in which I blog tomorrow morning and hike in the afternoon. And which becomes actual depends on me.

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Weak and Strong Readings of ‘Could Have Done Otherwise’

Determinism is the view that whatever happens is determined by antecedent conditions under the aegis of the laws of nature. Equivalently, past facts, together with the laws of nature, entail all future facts. It follows that facts before one's birth, via the laws of nature, necessitate what one does now. The necessitation here is causal, not logical. Could a determinist have a use for 'could have done otherwise'? Yes, if he gives the phrase a weak or conditional interpretation. No, if he gives it a strong or unconditional interpretation.

WEAK READING. Agent A could have done otherwise than action X =df A would have done other than X had A had a sufficiently strong desire to do other than X (or had a sufficiently strong desire together with a different set of background beliefs, etc.)

Example. A man insults me and I insult him back. Could I have "turned the other cheek" and done otherwise? Yes, under conditions like the following. Had I been a better man, I would have let the insult pass unanswered. If I had not perceived the insult, I would not have answered it. If I had had a desire to impress a bystander with how forebearing I am, I would have remained silent. And so on.

STRONG READING. Agent A could have done other than X =df A could have done other than X even if every factor prior to X had been the same.

I will use 'could have done otherwise' only in the STRONG sense. This will allow me to define libertarian freedom (L-freedom) in terms of 'could have done otherwise': An agent A is L-free in respect of action X =df (i) A performs X; (ii) A could have done otherwise. It is clear that L-freedom is incompatible with determinism. For if I am L-free in respect of just one action, then it is not the case that whatever happens is causally necessitated by antecedent conditions via the laws of nature.

Nietzsche on Causa Sui and Free Will

Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 21 (tr. W. Kaufmann):

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Muenchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

It is easy to be seduced by the beauty and energy of Nietzsche's prose into thinking that he is talking sense when he is not. The above excerpt is a case in point. Let's take a long hard logical squint at it.

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Life Without Questioning

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — this is what I feel to be contemptible . . .

My sentiments exactly.

Positive and Privative Constructions and the Case of Causa Sui

God is traditionally described as causa sui, as self-caused. Construed positively, however, the notion appears incoherent. Nothing can function as a cause unless it exists. So if God causes his own existence, then his existence as cause is logically prior to his existence as effect. God must 'already' (logically speaking) exist if he is to cause himself to exist — which teeters on the brink of incoherence if it does not fall over.

So I suggest that causa sui be read privatively rather than positively, as affirming, not that God causes himself, but that God is not caused by another. This reading may gain in credibility if we look at some similar constructions.

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Marriage a Long Conversation?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human (tr. W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 59):

Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation.

Fairly good advice, but how would old bachelor Fritz know about this, he who in another place recommends taking a whip along on a date?  (To be accurate, Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Portable Nietzsche, p. 179, puts in the mouth of an old woman the saying, "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip! Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!")

In my experience, marriage is not a long conversation so much as it is a long and deep and wordless understanding.

The Superiority of the Pipe

If the cigarette is a one-night stand, the cigar is a brief affair. The typical cigarette smoker is out for a quick fix, not for love. The cigar aficionado is out for love, but without long-term commitment. The pipe, however, is a long and satisfying marriage. But rare is the pipester who is not a polygamist. The practice of the pipe, then, is a long and satisfying marriage to many partners among whom no jealousy reigns.

This completes the first proof of the superiority of the pipe.

Jacques Maritain on Right and Left

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, or by party affiliation, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. My suspicion is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the upshot. Pointing to this skepticism I betray my own conservative bias. For surely one of the differences between conservatives and leftists is that conservatives are sober where leftists are sanguine about the power and role of reason in the transforming of society.

I recently found a beautifully pithy formulation of the difference between Left and Right in Jacques Maritain's The Peasant of the Garonne (1968, tr. De Brouwer):

The pure man of the left detests being, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Rousseau, what is not to what is. [footnote by J.M.: "What is not is the only thing that is beautiful," said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And Jean-Paul Sartre: "The real is never beautiful."] The pure man of the right detests justice and charity, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Goethe (himself an enigma who masked his right with his left), injustice to disorder. Nietzsche is a noble and beautiful example of the man of the right, and Tolstoy, of the man of the left. (pp. 21-22.)

Maritain is of course speaking of ideal types. No sane political philosophy could be purely leftist or purely rightist in the above senses. But it is useful to have the extremes of the spectrum so clearly delineated, especially since political opponents love to paint each other as extremists.

On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument

Cosmological arguments for the existence of God rest on several ontological assumptions none of them quite obvious, and all of them reasonable candidates for philosophical examination. Among them, (i) existence is a ‘property’ of contingent individuals; (ii) the existence of individuals is not a brute fact but is susceptible of explanation; (iii) it is coherent to suppose that this explanation is causal: that contingent individuals could have a cause of their existence. It is the third item on this list that I propose to examine here.

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A Liberal Asks: What are the Bases of Liberal Opposition to Religion?

Harriet E. Baber, professor of philosophy, "unrepentant liberal," and proprietor of The Enlightenment Project writes,

I'm an academic. Most of my friends and colleagues are atheists, have no sympathy for religion of any kind and, in particular, detest Christianity. Being a good liberal I read good liberal sources because I like to read people who agree with me but when it comes to religion they don't agree with me. [. . .] As a Christian, I am exceedingly pissed off about about being characterized as Other, and not only Other but Dangerous Other. What is the problem?

Is it because we hold beliefs you regard as false or flat out stupid? I have some sympathy with that because I don't have any sympathy with stupidity. [. . .]

Is it because you take Christianity to be a moral and, more importantly, political agenda, putting a lid on sexual expression and generally making people miserable?

Which is it? Or is it something completely different? I'm just curious. OK, not just. I want to convert the wor[l]d.

I would certainly not characterize myself as a liberal as this term is popularly understood, but I am deeply sympathetic to religion, though also quite critical of it as readers of this blog know. Like Baber, I am puzzled by the depth of the animus against religion, Christianity in particular, that emanates from the Left.  Why the blind, raging hostility to it?  Why the inability to see anything good in it?  Why the fulminations of people like A. C. "Gasbag" Grayling?  As I see it, the following are some of the main reasons why otherwise intelligent liberals oppose religion.  It is obvious that not every person who self-identifies as 'liberal' is opposed to religion; it is equally obvious that most are.  So when I speak of liberals I mean most contemporary liberals.

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Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness

Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. This is one of the reasons why I am interested in the history of Communism. I want to understand PC, and to understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.

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Opposition to Abortion Need Not be Religiously Based

It is commonly assumed that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises. To show that this assumption is false, only one counterexample is needed. What follows is an anti-abortion argument that does not invoke any religious tenet:

(1) Infanticide is morally wrong; (2) There is no morally relevant difference between abortion and infanticide; ergo, (3) Abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion is religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike can make use of the above argument.

Is it a good argument? Well, it is valid as logicians use this term: if one accepts the premises, then one must accept the conclusion. That is a logical ‘must’: one who accepts the premises but balks at the conclusion embraces a contradiction. But there is nothing to stop the argument from being run in reverse: Deny the conclusion, then deny one or both of the premises. Thus, one might argue from ~(3) and (2) to ~(1). Someone who argues in this way is within his logical rights, but is saddled with having to swallow the moral acceptability of infanticide.

Louis Lavelle on the Need for Enemies

Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, p. 125:

I need the reassurance and the help of friends, but I need men's hatred too. It tests me, forces me to become aware of my limitations, to grow, to perform a work of ceaseless self-purification; it makes me more and more faithful to myself, protects me against all the temptations to take the easy way to 'success'; it compels me to fall back on what is deepest, most secret and most spiritual in me, where those who hate me are powerless to hurt, where they meet no object into which to fix their claws, and nothing they can destroy.