June X, 2014
One of the most heated debates in philosophy is about the nature of free will. Determinism has not been proven false, and maybe never will, but the issue of the compatibility between determinism and free will is still generating very productive discussions. The question about how much responsibility can be attributed to men for their actions has not been answered yet. The debate between those who hold that nothing happens without a cause, and those who affirm that men are free and, therefore, completely responsible for their actions, is far from being settled. Although most people would agree that people should be held responsible for their actions, some interesting philosophical discussions have focused on more specific cases to find out if there are cases where an agent can be morally responsible for an action in circumstances where his free will is being effectively or potentially affected. This work will discuss some of the works that have tried to test the principle of alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. The aim is to find out to what extent people can be held responsible in cases where their actions are partially or totally subject to factors outside of their sphere of influence.
Before examining some of the works that have attempted to test the limits of free will, some concepts should be defined first. Most human actions can be perceived as good, bad, convenient or inconvenient, by other people. This perception, and the subsequent reward or punishment, are either reactions based on a normative conception generated collectively , or can only be directed at individuals that are capable of explaining or justifying their actions . In any case, to hold someone morally responsible for their actions means that at least two conditions have to be met: a) the action is voluntary; and b) the agent must be aware of what it is she or he is doing or bringing about . One way to determine if someone can be held morally responsible for his or her actions is to verify if he or she could have acted otherwise . This form of determination is what some call the principle of alternate possibilities , and it is the center of the discussion at hand.
Many proponents of determinism, or the idea that all actions must necessarily have an initial cause, have devised hypothetical experiments to test how far the free will can go, and in what situations actions can be said to have been determined by external causes. Theological conceptions of determinism, divine omniscience for example, assumed the existence of an omniscient being which had foreknowledge of all future events. According to this view, nothing this higher being knows can then be false, thus creating a paradox where nothing that has been previously known by it could be changed by arbitrary decisions of individuals in the present or in the future . This created an incompatibility problem between omniscient determinism and the concept of free will, making it impossible to accept the first and defending moral responsibility at the same time . Of course, this served to give theists logical grounds to accept free will and open other very interesting possibilities to explore for theologians.
More recently there have been other exercises where hypothetical technologically powerful agents have the potential to determine an individual´s actions by manipulating them at a neural level. These sci-fy-esque exercises are called Frankfurt-style cases , and they all propose a situation where an individual, say Jones, is presented two alternatives while, unbeknownst to him, and agent called Black monitors his behavior. Say Black wants Jones to order pizza, but Jones can choose between ordering a pizza and a salad. Black had previously implanted a device in Jones´s brain that could modify his behavior by making him act to order pizza, but it would only be triggered if Jones attempts to order a salad. Say Jones decides for reasons of his own to order pizza, how can someone tell if he is morally responsible when he could not have acted otherwise? It seems then that there are problems with the principle of alternate possibilities given that Jones is morally responsible for having chosen to order pizza since the implant did not influence him, but he did not have alternative possibilities with regards to his choice. These Frankfurt-style cases seemed to prove then that the principle of alternate possibilities was false . However, according to some, these cases fail to effectively falsify the principle. For instance, if the device could detect that Jones had the intention of choosing salad in order to be activated, then there is at least a flicker of freedom which is itself an alternative option, even if the correspondent action is not performed . This flicker of freedom would be then a previous decision taken by Jones, meaning that indeed he had at least one other alternative, at least in his mind, for a second. But this is not the only problem found in Frankfurt-style cases, or even in this kind of attempts to undermine incompatibility between free will and determinism.
Another counterexample was proposed by John M. Fischer in order to falsify the principle of alternate possibilities. In this case, Black, who previously installed an electronic device inside Jones´s head, realizes that he is going to decide to order salad. He then sends a signal to the device making it explode, killing Jones instantly. This is supposed to improve Frankfurt-style cases because the agent would be morally responsible for what he does, since he does it for his own reasons, although he could not have acted otherwise before dying. However, both cases fail to see that Jones still had the chance to choose whether or not to act differently. Maybe in Frankfurt´s case there was just the small alternative of a flicker, and in Fischer´s case the alternative was a certain death, but the agent did still have alternatives . According to McKenna , what Frankfurt and Fischer fail to see is that their arguments are constructed around a view of control that is, in essence, different to that used by defenders of incompatibility. He states that incompatibilists, especially libertarians, are not concerned to defend the conception of control they are trying to disprove. However, he does not offer a way to reconcile both conceptions of control so as to offer a more effective way to challenge the principle of alternate possibilities. Instead, he claims that:
If Frankfurt's argument against PAP is correct, the free will debate has been systematically miscast through much of the history of philosophy. If determinism threatens free will and moral responsibility, it is not because it is incompatible with the ability to do otherwise. Even if determinism is incompatible with a sort of freedom involving the ability to do otherwise, it is not the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility .
Again, the different concepts of freedom or control that might be involved in this discussion are not defined by Mckenna, but this certainly offers a clear path of argumentation for compatibilists to develop.
Continuing with Frankfurt-style cases, there are other issues that cast doubt on his assertion to have definitively proven that the principle of alternate possibilities is false. For example, his cases imply that Black´s device would manipulate Jones´s brain in order to determine that he chooses to act in the one way he wants and not the other . It would mean that an external force would stimulate Jones´s nervous system to act in a way that force him to make a decision, or that the device would replicate the neural impulses that would have taken place had Jones made the decision wanted by Black. María Álvarez finds this problematic since it would be questionable to assure that said decision was caused by “Jones´s practical reasoning or his emotional response to a situation” . It could also be compared to more classical cases where A pulls B´s finger and triggers a gun that kills C. Just as B cannot be held responsible for C´s death, nobody can say Jones is morally responsible for doing something if Black is in control of his nervous system, which is part of his body, as are his fingers and feet.
One other observation made by Álvarez is that Frankfurt assumes that actions can be caused by forces that are alien to the agent . That would include threats, bribes or persuasion of some kind. But the nature of persuasions is that they actually present options or alternatives to the agent. A bribe offers the option of taking it or leaving it, no matter how attractive it could be for the agent. A threat poses the same problem. There are no unavoidable options when it comes to threats, just appalling options that present very difficult dilemmas to the agent. He is still able to choose between doing what he is asked to and suffering the consequences no matter how cruel they are. It can be argued that people are not blameworthy if they do bad things under threat, but their actions were still their own, so they are still morally responsible .
María Álvarez argues that none of the cases falsify the principle of alternative possibilities on the grounds that the principle offers a necessary condition that has not been refuted by Frankfurt or Fischer-style cases or assumptions . These cases are strong attempts to prove that someone can be held responsible for actions that cannot be controlled by him or her, and have been debated for over 30 years now. However, they fail to prove that it is reasonable to affirm that an individual can be held morally responsible for something that is not product of his or her own reasoning or that is caused by alien forces without his or her consent. It is also difficult to assert that neural devices could replicate the process of taking decisions inside the brain. This is not because they have not been invented, which is irrelevant, but because the occurrence of a sequence that would imitate that of making decisions would not be enough to be considered having made one (just as a sequence of bodily movements caused by an earthquake is not enough to say a person is dancing). In none of these cases would be correct to say that Jones could be held morally responsible. It is more obvious if one takes Oshana´s definition of moral responsibility. How could Jones explain why he chose salad or why his head exploded? In any case, Black would be the only one able to explain Jones´s behavior, and the only one morally responsible for Jones´s actions.
In conclusion, even when Frankfurt made a commendable effort to prove that determinism and responsibility could coexist, the discussion over the compatibility between free will/moral responsibility and determinism is far from being over. It is true that it cannot be proven that determinism is impossible, but it seems unreasonable to praise or punish individuals for their behavior if they cannot act otherwise. At least it needs to be demonstrated that a person can be made to act against his or her will, and still be held responsible.
There are things that are truly unavoidable. For instance, people can be many things without them being able to choose otherwise, and nobody can be held responsible for being born American, Caucasian, or dyslexic. Those are things that people cannot prevent from happening. The cases presented by Frankfurt and Fischer (and many others) do not pose that same sense of unavoidability to actions taken by their hypothetical agents, or at least fail to define freedom and control in the same terms the principle of alternate possibilities assumes them. Consequently, they fail to falsify the principle of alternate possibilities.
Bibliography
Álvarez, M., 2009. Actions, thought-experiments and the 'Principle of alternate possibilities'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 87(1), pp. 61-81.
Berlin, I., 1969. Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press.
Eshleman, A., 2014. Moral Responsibility. [Online] Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/moral-responsibility/[Accessed 27 June 2014].
Fischer, J. M., 1999. Recent Work on Moral Responsibility. Ethics, 110(1), pp. 93-139.
Frankfurt, H., 1969. Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. The Journal of Philosophy, 66(23), pp. 829-839.
McKenna, M., 1997. Alternative Possibilities and the Failure. Journal of Social Philosophy, 28(3), pp. 71-85.
McKenna, M., 2008. Compatibilism. [Online] Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=compatibilism[Accessed 29 June 2014].
Oshana, M., 1997. Ascriptions of Responsibility. American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 34, pp. 71-83.
Pike, N., 1965. Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action. The Philosophical Review, pp. 27-46.
Strawson, P. F., 1962. Freedom and Resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 48, pp. 187-211.
