Free Will and the Self

Free Will and the Self by

Danielle Linda Brown B.A. University of Victoria, 2011 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of Philosophy

© Danielle Linda Brown, 2013 University of Victoria

All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author.

Free Will and the Self By

Danielle Linda Brown B.A., University of Victoria, 2011

Supervisory Committee Dr. Patrick Rysiew, Supervisor (Department of Philosophy)

Dr. Jeffrey Foss, Departmental Member (Department of Philosophy)

Abstract Supervisory Committee

Dr. Patrick Rysiew, Supervisor (Department of Philosophy)

Dr. Jeffrey Foss, Departmental Member (Department of Philosophy)

In this thesis, I attempt to map a relationship between theories of selfhood and theories of free will. In doing so, I hope to establish that the metaphysical commitments that characterize major branches of libertarian theory entail a commitment to an

‘executive’ model of selfhood as opposed to a ‘psychological’ model. In essence, I argue that there exist two major lines of disagreement between libertarian and compatibilist thinkers. The first disagreement is over the truth of the determinism thesis, and a second disagreement is over the nature of the self or agent. I then argue that while much attention has been given to the first of these disagreements, the most significant problem facing free will has to do with the nature of the self, and that if stronger efforts were devoted to uncovering the nature of selfhood, there would be much to be learned about the

Table of Contents Supervisory Committee………ii Abstract………iii Table of Contents.………iv Acknowledgments………vi Dedication………vii Introduction……….1

Chapter 1: Selfhood and Agency……….2

The Notion of Agency……….2

Freedom and Selfhood: The Folk Conception………6

Conceiving of Freedom: Neuroscientific Objections……….12

The Next Step……….18

Chapter 2: Libertarianism and Compatibilism: A Historical Overview…….20

The Issue of Determinism………...20

Hume on Selfhood………..29

Hume on Freedom………..34

Reid on Selfhood………38

Reid on Freedom………41

Conclusion……….47

Chapter 3: Contemporary Connections Between Free Will and Selfhood…49 Key Questions………...49

Robert Kane and the Problem of Luck………..50

The Status of the Narrative Self………62

Daniel Dennett’s Compatibilism………...68

Harry Frankfurt and Second-Order Desires………..73

Randolph Clarke and the Role of the Self……….…78

Timothy O’Connor and the Ontological Status of the Self………...82

Summation…..………...89

Chapter 4: Conclusions and Implications………..95

A Generalized Account………..98

Is Determinism the Real Threat?.………..103

Implications and Avenues for Future Study………..107

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Patrick Rysiew and Dr. Jeff Foss, for helping me put this thesis together and providing thoughtful criticism, fascinating insights, and occasionally some much needed encouragement throughout the process. Additionally, I would like to thank the entire Philosophy Department of the University of Victoria for inspiring me to write not only this thesis, but also all of philosophical work I have produced throughout my academic career.

Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to Jen, who may never read this, but whose name I lovingly include in all of my thought-experiments.

Introduction

In this thesis, I attempt to explicate a relationship between theories of selfhood and theories of free will. In doing so, I establish that the metaphysical commitments

that characterize major branches of libertarian theory include a commitment to an ‘executive’ model of selfhood as opposed to a ‘psychological’ model. I argue that this dichotomy between the executive and psychological models of selfhood represents just as significant a division between libertarian and compatibilist theories as does the

acceptance or rejection of the determinism thesis, upon which these metaphysical positions have been historically based.

In Chapter 1, I begin with a discussion on some recent work in experimental philosophy by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe in ‘Free Will and the Boundaries of the Self’ (2011). The purpose of this discussion is to motivate the argument I will be making in the following chapters, and to introduce some of the terminology I will be using.

Next, in Chapter 2 I provide background and context to the free will debate and the various positions therein. From there, the discussion segues into an explication and interpretation of the works of David Hume and Thomas Reid, thinkers I use as paradigm examples of the division between not only compatibilism and libertarianism, but of the psychological and executive models of selfhood.

The goal of Chapter 3 is to provide reason to believe that any satisfactory

libertarian theory of free will must include an executive self. To accomplish this, I draw upon the work of several scholars with diverse positions on free will: Robert Kane, Daniel Dennett, Harry Frankfurt, Randolph Clarke, and Timothy O’Connor.

In the final chapter, I provide a more concise and generalized account of the connection I have argued exists between theories of selfhood and theories of free will, and why, for a libertarian, an agent that consists of a set of psychological states cannot be a free agent.

Chapter 1: Selfhood and Agency

The Notion of Agency

The central problem of free will, which has motivated centuries of discourse, is to account for the experience of agency. Questions about the existence of free will and to what extent humans possess free will are prompted by this inescapable sense of agency. To experience oneself as a causal locus of action, control, or decision is to experience oneself as an ‘agent’. In the broad sense, this term is used to denote a discrete causal actor; an ‘agent’ is any entity capable of action which is not directly attributable to another source. In this sense, we designate a varied array of causal actors, anything from a strain of bacterium as an infectious agent all the way to a human being as an agent capable of complex deliberation with a wide assortment of possibilities for action. Under this broad definition, agency admits of no degree; the status of ‘agent’ rests on whether the entity is capable of initiating action. In this sense, whether these actions are free is an open question, and not productively addressed under this definition.

To approach the question of free will, agency requires more than simply a capacity to act. It requires the experience of choice, a quality attributed uniquely to persons. It is in this sense that we speak of a ‘rational agent’, or a ‘moral agent’. What is added to the definition in the case of persons is an experience of choice or deliberation. While a bacterium may be an agent in the sense that it acts, it would be odd to claim that it experiences itself as an agent. To experience oneself as an agent is to have the

experience of bringing about an action or outcome that causally affects some state of affairs in the world. This addition of deliberation to agency is what leads to the question of free will.

In much of the free will literature, discussion revolves around the capabilities and limitations of the agent in respect to the otherwise deterministic causal laws that

seemingly apply to the rest of the universe. What is the causal status of the agent? To what extent can an agent be responsible for his or her action? What sorts of possibilities are open to an agent? In other words, what can an agent do? While these are all

worthwhile questions with many plausible and thought provoking answers, I claim that one pertinent factor of the discussion is persistently neglected. What is the agent? Of course, it is taken for granted that when we talk of the problem of free will, we’re talking about the problem as it applies to human beings. Therefore, the obvious and

unenlightening answer to the question is: ‘the individual person’.

While this answer may suffice for more abstract debates about the notion of causality, possibility, and responsibility, it is certainly a simplification. After all, not every action performed by a person is entirely attributable to that person. An act performed out of external coercion does not seem to be attributable to the agent in

question. Among many other proposed criteria necessary for free will, one of them is that the agent deliberately performs the action in question. In order for an action to be free, the action must originate within the agent herself. However, when we speak of agency in this sense, it appears a much narrower notion than simply ‘an individual person’. For instance, it doesn’t seem that agency of this sort is involved in accidental acts. A person who performs an act while sleepwalking, for instance, does not exert the sort of agency we are referring to when we consider free will. We learn two things from this example: one, that agency is experienced through deliberate action, and two, since not every action performed by a person is deliberate, we must further narrow the definition of agent.

How are we to conceive of the agent? While this is a neglected topic in the free will literature, it is more heavily discussed when considering the status of selfhood and personal identity. To gain a more refined sense of the notion of agency, I argue that we first need to understand what is referred to as ‘the self’. Though the term ‘self’ has been used to refer to various different concepts throughout history, I am using ‘self’ fairly straightforwardly as the ‘subject of experience’; the self is that entity which experiences, knows, acts, and persists through time. For the purposes of this investigation, a particular emphasis shall be placed on action. Whatever else may be included within the boundaries of selfhood, the self is, at the very least, the agent who acts. The idea of defining the self through agency has been promoted by Christine Korsgaard (1989)1

. In a paper written as a response to Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (1984), Korsgaard puts forward an account of selfhood that is defined through action. She argues against a common view in the personal identity literature that one’s self can be defined through a more or less continuous stream of sensory experience. She draws upon an example employed in Parfit’s work regarding ‘split-brain’ patients, individuals who have had the two

hemispheres of their brains separated through a surgical procedure that severs the corpus callosum. Under certain experimental conditions, patients who have undergone this procedure report possessing two separate and independent streams of experience

corresponding to each brain hemisphere. Research of this kind has thrown doubt upon the idea of personal identity as simply a continuous stream of experience, since there appear to be cases in which one individual may possess more than one stream. From this, Korsgaard concludes, an alternative view must be sought. A view of personal identity

based on agency, she argues, is a much better candidate. She claims that because, “you are a unified person at any given time because you must act, and you have only one body with which to act” (Korsgaard, 1989), agency makes a better ground for personal identity than a continuous stream of experience. In order to choose to perform an action, there must exist some unity over and above a potentially disparate stream of experiences. In this way, it is appropriate to identify the concept of ‘agent’ with the concept of ‘self’, as opposed to treating them as separate entities. However, what still needs to be established is just what kind of a ‘self’ we’re dealing with and what features are included within the concept.

In this thesis, I argue that different conceptions of selfhood can lead to different views about free will. In particular, I claim that the two major branches of free will theory, libertarianism and compatibilism, employ two different views of selfhood. While there are numerous variations of these theories, they each rest on two major assumptions. Libertarianism is a view that postulates: (1) the truth of determinism prohibits the

existence of free will, and (2) that free will exists. Accounts of this sort can be sub-divided into ‘agent-causal’ and ‘event-causal’ categories. Compatibilism is the model of free will where (1) free will is compatible with the truth of determinism, and (2) that free will exists. For a libertarian, the challenge is to explain how an agent’s free will can be exempt from the laws of deterministic causality, whereas for a compatibilist, the goal is to articulate a meaningful notion of free will despite the fact that an agent’s actions are entirely determined.

Though this issue has been touched upon by a number of thinkers2

, the extent of this connection between selfhood and free will has not been wholly mapped out. At best, it has been considered a tangential issue against a wider background of more pertinent metaphysical considerations. Here, the goal is to examine this connection in depth. By demonstrating the interdependency between theories of selfhood and free will, I hope to uncover several significant assumptions that underlie the notion of human agency. In order to understand what an agent can do, we must address just what an agent is, and vice versa. To accomplish this, a discussion must be conducted about the nature of the self: its scope, its boundaries, and its unity. I argue that the opposition between libertarian and compatibilist freedom does not rest solely upon the nature of freedom, but also upon the nature of the agent. The central claim of this thesis is that the ‘agent’ of libertarian theories is a different sort of entity than the ‘agent’ of compatibilist theories. Throughout the following chapters, I will provide both historical and contemporary examples of this distinction, and then proceed to outline a generalized account of the two senses of ‘agent’ at work.

Freedom and Selfhood: The Folk Conception

To illustrate the importance of the connection between theories of self and

theories of free will, it is useful to appeal to folk intuitions. Under what circumstances do non-philosophically trained individuals consider an agent to be free, and what sorts of limitations and capabilities do they attribute to the agent? These questions have been approached in experimental philosophy and yielded interesting results. In a recent paper

by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe3

, it is demonstrated how differing perspectives on the self can influence a participant’s attributions of freedom to an agent. In particular, the authors focus on delineating the ‘boundaries’ of the self; of the factors that contribute to an agent’s actions, which can be said to come from within the agent, and which can be considered external to the agent? Unsurprisingly, the answer changes depending on which notion of selfhood is employed.

In the study, the authors distinguish between what they take to be three common notions of selfhood: bodily, psychological, and executive. These will be presented in order, since each is narrower than the last. The ‘bodily’ conception is the broadest, taking almost every action performed by an agent to be potentially free, whereas the ‘executive’ requires a more precise set of criterion to be met before an action can be considered free. To briefly summarize each of them, the bodily conception of selfhood simply claims that, “…the self contains everything from the skin in” (Nichols & Knobe, 2011). On this view, any action an agent performs can be considered a free one in the absence of external coercion. ‘External’ in this sense meaning anything outside the control of the agent’s body. While the role of the body in cognition and decision-making has experienced resurgence in recent philosophy4

, when it comes to intuitions about free will, the idea that the body plays a role in decision-making remains unpopular among philosophers and non-philosophers alike. The reason for this is evident even in common speech patterns. For example, “I was going to wake up at 6am, but my body wanted to sleep in”. We take free actions to be, at the very least, voluntary actions, as opposed to actions performed

3

Knobe, J. & Nichols, S. 2011. “Free Will and the Bounds of the Self”. In R. Kane (ed.)

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4

under coercion or outside influence. Physical reflexes, such as a yawn, are not taken to be representative of an agent’s volition, and are thus not attributable to the person qua agent, but to their body5

. The physical body of the agent is more often thought of as a separate entity that may sometimes perform actions independently of the agent herself. This intuition is expressed in our ethics in the form of attributions of responsibility. If a person has a medical condition that causes her limbs to spasm occasionally, we do not hold her responsible for knocking over a glass in the same way that we would somebody who knocked over a glass in a state of anger or rage. The difference in our attributions of responsibility here lies in the perceived voluntarism of the action. In the second case, we perceive the action as voluntary because it originated within the agent’s psychological states; he knocked over the glass to express his feeling of anger. This key intuition leads the way to the next conception of selfhood.

The psychological conception of self takes a narrower slice of human action as the basis for free will. According to this view, the self is the sum total of a person’s mental states, or their ‘psychological profile’. Composed of memories, beliefs, desires, dispositions, thoughts, and emotions, just to name a few examples, this view holds that the self is a collection of psychological states that, when taken as a whole, cause us to act as we do. So long as an action originates as a result of conscious psychological processes within the agent, it can be called ‘free’ in the sense that it originated within the agent6

.

5

While it is true that yawning can be suppressed or even convincingly faked, the bodily urge to yawn is not initiated by the agent.

In literature dealing with personal identity, the psychological conception of selfhood has been popular. John Locke famously presented it in his Essay7

, and it has been explored since then in the work of Bernard Williams (1970) and Derek Parfit (1986) among others writing about personal identity. It is worth mentioning at this point that the phenomenon of agency is seldom approached in these discussions of personal identity, and is instead relegated to a separate discussion. There is an assumption within this body of literature that the psychological states of an individual (ie. the self) are intimately associated with the willed actions of that individual. In other words, that psychological states are capable of functioning as motives for action. However, just how motives affect an agent’s action is still unclear. One explanation of the connection between an agent’s psychological states and the actions they produce might be the Humean view, that the most relevant or intense psychological states necessitate a particular action. In this case, the ‘will’, as we know it, is an autonomous system in which decisions are arrived at based upon a set of psychological states, arranged by their inherent strength or relevance. Now, the word ‘necessitates’ might bode ominous for a will that is supposedly free. However, a defense of the view that the strongest motive determines action would be to argue that this autonomous system just is the self; any action necessitated by it falls within the boundaries of selfhood, and can therefore be considered free. The Humean necessitarian view will be more carefully considered in Chapter 2.

Another way of explaining the connection between psychological states and agency would be to argue that psychological states incline an agent toward an action without strictly necessitating that action. Originally, this turn of phrase appears in the

7

work of G. W. Leibniz in reference to the free will of humans based upon the ultimate contingency of divine moral choice.8

In contemporary discussions of free will, the reliance upon God is de-emphasized, the idea now being that psychological states might provide interests, reasons, or motivations toward a particular course of action, but their influence does not necessitate the action. In this case, it is possible that an agent may perform an action that might defy all compelling reasons or inclinations and nonetheless remain entirely free. This is a line of argument taken up by both compatibilist and libertarian thinkers, and will be explored in depth in later chapters. For now, a question arises as to how the strength or motivating power of a given psychological state is to be decided. If it is possible that these states can incline without necessitating, just what determines the strength of these states in the first place?

The next conception of selfhood up for discussion addresses precisely this question. The idea of self as executive is by far the narrowest of the three discussed, and also one of the most puzzling; yet it captures many intuitions about how decision-making works among philosophers. On this model, the self consists not in the raw sum of an agent’s psychological states, but the faculty that reigns executive over them and

determines which of them to act on at a given time. This kind of self is able to organize, prioritize, and ultimately act in accordance with or in spite of any set of psychological states one might possess. The most important feature of this view is that it diminishes the causal power of psychological states. No matter how compelling, the executive self exists

8

“Thus, although we never have a freedom of indifference which saves us from necessity, we never have an indifference of equilibrium which exempts us from

determining reasons. There is always something which inclines us and makes us choose, but without being able to necessitate us” (Leibniz, G. W. Translated by: Roger Ariew & Daniel Garber, 1989).

over and above any of its psychological states, and holds final veto power over any of its reasons, dispositions, or motivations. In other words, “…on such a view, the

psychological states don’t constitute the self, they belong to the self, and the self makes its decisions in light of the psychological states, but not as a simple consequence of the states” (Nichols & Knobe, 2011).

What might motivate such a view? On the psychological conception of selfhood, it is believed that it is some aspects of a person’s psychological states that govern his or her actions. However, matters get complicated when we consider questions about conflicted or compromised agents. For example, for an agent with two or more conflicting motivations, we must examine the agent’s psychological states: desires, beliefs, and emotions to understand his or her choice between the two perceived options. Which of the options reflects the will of agent’s true self? For a compromised agent, whose current psychological states are controlled through some external means, it seems unintuitive to attribute the agent’s actions to the agent herself. For instance, an agent who has been ‘brainwashed’ by a sinister organization into undertaking criminal actions that she would previously have never done. Situations like this tend to bring out the need for some kind of executive agent which is able to ‘break the tie’ between the options for the conflicted agent, and rebel against the external control for the compromised agent. In the Nichols & Knobe study, it was demonstrated that participants who were presented with hypothetical situations in which they were asked to evaluate the agent’s degree of responsibility tended to separate psychological states from the agent in question. For example, participants were presented with two scenarios in which an agent rapidly blinks his eyes. In the first condition, dubbed the ‘choice-cause’ case, participants were

presented with the following situation: “Suppose John’s eye blinks rapidly because he is trying to send a signal to a friend across the room” (Nichols & Knobe, 2011). In the second condition, dubbed the ‘emotion-cause’ case, the scenario was altered as follows: “Suppose John’s eye blinks rapidly because he is startled and upset” (Nichols & Knobe, 2011). Participants in both cases were asked to gauge on a scale of 1 (disagree) to 7 (agree) the level of John’s involvement in the action as an agent. As predicted,

participants tended to separate the agent’s psychological states (in this case, emotional) from the agent himself. Instead of attributing the action to John himself, the participants attributed the action to ‘John’s emotions’ as a distinct causal force. Similar results were obtained in further experiments where the psychological states did not consist of

emotions, but of thoughts. This evidence shows that when the causal status of psychological states is broached in discussions of free will, different intuitions are elicited regarding the boundaries of the self. For example, when an action is attributed to some psychological state within the agent, the intuitions tend toward an executive model.

Conceiving of Freedom: Neuroscientific Objections

All this talk of selves and free will may seem to generate some worrisome objections on an empirical front. Before exploring the relationship between the self and free will in depth, time should be taken to alleviate those worries. For those with

materialist leanings, the idea of invoking ‘selfhood’ within discussions of free will brings up thoughts of ‘ immaterial souls’, ‘transcendental selves’, or ‘Cartesian Egos’. To satisfy those with materialist leanings (as well as affirm my own), I will offer a preemptive defense.

From a neuroscientific perspective, even the fairly modest claim made earlier in this investigation: “ In order for an action to be free, the action must originate within the agent herself,” is fraught with controversy. If ‘self’ in this context refers to anything like a local, material entity presumably located in some discrete area of the brain, then the claim is simply false, since no such point has been (or is ever likely to be) discovered. If ‘self’ refers to something irreducibly mental, such as a Cartesian Ego –isolated,

immaterial, and fundamentally unverifiable—then the claim is to be dismissed as an appeal to the supernatural. Indeed, there is a convincing case to be made regarding the experience of selfhood as a mere epiphenomenon of consciousness. This line is argued by thinkers like Daniel Dennett9

and Tors Nørretranders10

who claim that the phenomenon of selfhood emerges as a byproduct of consciousness. For Dennett, the sense of self exists as an abstraction, a “…centre of narrative gravity” (Dennett, 1992). The experience of selfhood, as an epiphenomenon, is the result of largely unconscious processes within the brain creating connections between actions and events in a person’s life to form a

cohesive whole. This phenomenon, on its own, does not act as a source of causal power in any way, though it can be incorporated into decisions as a factor up for deliberation. Dennett argues that just as we recognize the ‘selves’ of fictional characters through narrative, we undertake a similar process regarding our own existential continuity. For Nørretranders, the distinction is even more radical. Drawing upon research from cognitive science and information theory, his central claim is that consciousness itself

9

Dennett, D. W. 1992. “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”. in F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson, eds, Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives.

Dennett, D. W. 2003. Freedom Evolves. Penguin Books, Ltd. London

10 _{Nørretranders, T.1991. The User-Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size} Penguin Books, Ltd. London.

and our immediate perceptions are themselves illusory in the sense that these faculties represent only a small fraction of the information our brains are processing at a given time. Whatever the phenomenon of selfhood is, for Nørretranders, it cannot be the sort of thing that is causally efficacious.

To counter arguments such as these, it must be demonstrated how it is possible and furthermore, useful, to conceive of selfhood without appealing to something empirically observable or blatantly immaterial. I claim that there are several ways this can be accomplished. One way is to appeal exclusively to the phenomenology. A great deal of debate surrounds the question about whether or not the phenomenology of

selfhood (of ‘being’ or ‘having’ a self) is a universal experience as well as precisely what features this experience possesses. However, the notion of selfhood has persisted

throughout the ages, through different cultures, and features in the work of nearly every major philosopher, even for those who mention it only to deny its existence. The ‘sense of self’ as an object of conscious experience is an old idea, and one that pervades common discourse. On this level, insisting that the sense of self must correspond with some empirical object simply misses the issue. Regardless of its empirical status, whether or not it is a cognitive illusion produced by the brain, the experience of selfhood cannot simply be dismissed. However, this discussion can be postponed.

It has yet to be established that it is this ‘sense of self’ in the phenomenological sense that drives our actions. It seems as if the concept of selfhood required for agency can be separated from the phenomenological ‘sense of self’, and I intend to treat them as such for the majority of this project. Whether the ‘self’ to be identified with ‘the agent’ presents a certain phenomenological character or individualizing features beyond the

propensity for action is not an assumption I am making. The question of the features and boundaries of the self is exactly what is at issue. To reiterate my central claim, I argue that the features assigned to the self, in a phenomenological as well as metaphysical sense, are connected with different theories of free will. Therefore, to prioritize any experience of a ‘sense of self’ would be to skew the discussion in favour of either compatibilism or libertarianism. The connection between the phenomenological

experience of selfhood and the origin of action remains to be demonstrated, and as such, judgment on such matters will be postponed. For the Dennettian who denies the empirical correspondent of a phenomenological ‘sense of self’, there still exists the brain: producer of consciousness and psychological states, in other words, the ‘agent’ of his naturalistic compatibilist freedom. As previously explained, there are good reasons for identifying the‘self’ with the ‘agent’ in this sense, and Dennett certainly does not deny that there are agents.

Questions have also been raised in the sciences about the idea of agency itself. It has even been claimed that research in cognitive science has settled the issue of free will once and for all. For instance, the groundbreaking and controversial 1985 experiment by Benjamin Libet11

has often been interpreted as establishing that there is no such thing as free will. The experiment itself was designed to examine the relationship between unconscious ‘readiness potential’ of motor neurons and the conscious exertion of ‘willing’. In the experiment, participants connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine were asked to press a button at a time of their choosing. They were asked to

11

Libet, B.1985. “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, pp: 529-566.

report the time when they consciously ‘willed’ their action. Their responses were then compared to the results on the EEG, which measured activity in the participants’ motor cortex (the part of the brain responsible for performing the action). It was shown that there was a significant gap of time (up to 300 milliseconds) between the readiness

potential of the neurons in the motor cortex and the participants’ conscious experience of ‘willing’. In other words, it is as if the brain ‘decided’ to perform the action before the agent.

On this basis, it has been claimed that the notion of free will has been all but overturned. An interesting feature about this conclusion is that it doesn’t reject free will on the grounds of any underlying metaphysics about determinism or any variety of universal causal laws. Instead, the rejection of free will is grounded upon the role of the agent in initiating action. The idea that the first causal push to action stems not from an agent’s conscious decision to act, but from the unconscious firing of neurons within the motor cortex is taken to cast serious doubt upon the existence of free will. Regardless of the causal status of processes within the brain, so long as these processes escape

consciousness, we have difficulty accepting that they could be part of (or perhaps, belong to) the agent. The fact that this is a worry at all underlines the importance of our

intuitions about psychological states and executive selfhood. After all, if the notion of selfhood were expanded to include the entirety of an agent’s neural processes, the results of this experiment would pose no threat at all.

However, certainly not everyone has lost hope for the possibility of free will in light of Libet’s work. In fact, some have argued that the discovery means little for the philosophical possibility of freedom. One response to these worries comes from Andrea

Roskies (2006)12

. She points out that although it may be said that our actions stem from unconscious action-potentials of neurons, common notions of freedom and moral responsibility are still preserved. In support of this claim, she draws on the compatibilist argument from P.F. Strawson13_{, claiming that perhaps our attributions of responsibility} are not based upon judgments about free will, but upon our own ‘reactive attitudes’ toward the actions of other agents. She claims that because “judgments about moral responsibility are almost always of highly contextualized, emotionally-charged, concrete scenarios, people’s worries about the effect of a mechanistic view of the brain might have on belief in moral responsibility might well be misplaced” (Roskies, 2006). Though this line of thought certainly has bearing upon how people actually make judgments about responsibility, it fails to satisfy the hard-line incompatibilist. Even if it were the case that emotions, context, and personal investment may influence our evaluation of moral responsibility, a libertarian might see these factors as hindrances that interfere with our ability to make informed judgments of responsibility, rather than as characterizing their ideal nature.

A more convincing response from the incompatibilist side has to do with the process of decision-making through time. While it may be the case that the readiness potential of neurons in the motor cortex precede the conscious decision to initiate action right at that moment, the conscious intention to perform the action was produced well before the ‘decision’ was made to act at that particular moment. The role of prior

intentions, will-setting, and non-instantaneous decision-making is a complex subject, and

12

Roskies, A. L. 2006. “Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility”.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, pp. 419-423.

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will be further explored in Chapter 3. For now, we can rest assured that the threat to free will (compatibilist or incompatibilist) raised by Libet’s research is but one interpretation of the experimental results, and does little to negate the more pertinent metaphysical arguments in favour of the existence of free will.

The Next Step

Throughout the discussions to come, the distinction between the psychological and executive conceptions of self will be paramount. The degree to which the bodily conception of selfhood can be legitimately considered as a candidate for agency is an interesting question, but it bears little upon the influence of psychological states upon an agent’s freedom. It also does very little to inform the connection between ideas of selfhood and conceptions of freedom between libertarians and compatibilists.

To explore this topic further, I believe it worthwhile to trace the relationship of freedom and selfhood throughout the history of philosophy and display how these notions interact within the work of both compatibilist and libertarian thinkers. I believe that investigating which theory of self is at work within a thinker’s philosophical account can inform what kinds of views on free will are available to that thinker, as well as vice-versa. This is the approach I will be taking within the following chapters. In Chapter 2, I will undertake a summary of the free will debate, outlining the major variants of

libertarianism and compatibilism as they’ve developed. This discussion will segue into a contrast between the views of David Hume and Thomas Reid, a pair of contemporaries with opposing theories of free will. Through an analysis of these two thinkers, I aim to examine the role of an agent’s psychological states in decision-making. I will show how Hume and Reid’s answers to this question will ultimately impact the type of freedom they

advocate (compatibilist for Hume and libertarian for Reid). I claim that Hume’s views on the self as a ‘bundle’ of impressions and ideas and the causal role of psychological states commit him to a very strong version of the psychological conception of selfhood. For Reid, an incompatibilist, the causal status of psychological states as the origin of action is questionable. He denies that the strongest motives ultimately determine an agent’s action, instead placing emphasis upon the self as an ‘active power’, over and above its set of psychological states -- in other words, an executive self. The goal of this analysis will be to explore the role these conceptions of selfhood play within disagreements between libertarians and compatibilists, and provide support to the argument that any satisfactory libertarian theory requires an executive theory of self.

Chapter 2: Libertarianism and Compatibilism: A Historical Overview

The Issue of Determinism

Libertarians and compatibilists agree that agents are free; their disagreement rests on the status of determinism as an accurate model of reality. The idea that human actions are pre-determined by some external causal force has a long history, and has served to demarcate the three major positions within the free will literature: libertarianism, compatibilism, and hard determinism. Determinism has been articulated in many ways throughout history. Some models are grounded in religious doctrine. For example, an argument among early Christian theologians such as William of Ockham and St. Augustine concerned the apparent incompatibility between human free will and divine foreknowledge. If one takes it to be true that the Judeo-Christian God possesses infallible knowledge of every event -- past, present, and future -- then such a being must

necessarily possess knowledge of human actions before they occur. In this way, divine foreknowledge of future events ensures that the future is fixed and unchangeable. Yet, Christian theology also claims that God granted humans free will. A conflict emerges between these two claims, providing an arena for debate concerning the meaning and nature of human freedom.

Another version of determinism has been presented through the empirical investigations of the causal laws governing physical events. A clear and rather startling articulation of causal determinism comes from a thought experiment from Pierre-Simon Laplace, commonly referred to as ‘Laplace’s Demon’. The idea is stated as follows: “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were

the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.” (Laplace, 1814)14

,

Simply put, if a being existed with the present knowledge of every particle in the universe along with the forces currently acting upon them, then that being would be able to extrapolate from the current state of affairs as far as it wished to flawlessly conceive of any state of affairs in both the future and the past. The positing of an all-knowing being is reminiscent of the theological arguments, but the more pertinent feature of this idea concerns the determinism built into the causal laws governing the behaviour of physical matter. What matters is not that such an all-knowing being could actually exist, but that the universe is constituted in such a way that one event necessarily leads to the next – that, given the laws, from the state of affairs at one time -- only one possibility for some future state of affairs is ever available. The ‘demon’ of Laplace’s thought experiment does not exist, and thus no individual could ever gather enough information to reliably predict any future state of affairs. However, the point remains that taking this idea

seriously results in the conclusion that the experience of human agency is an illusion born from our lack of knowledge about the current state of affairs. It is this causal sense of determinism that I will be referring to henceforth in the discussions to come. With this in mind, it is time to move on to a more detailed explication of the three major responses to this dilemma concerning free will: hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism.

The first of these views is ‘hard determinism’, one of two positions expressing an incompatibilist stance towards the possibility of free will in a deterministic universe. This

14 _{Laplace, P. S.1814. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, translated by Truscott and} Emory, Dover Publications (New York, 1951) p.4

view essentially concedes the point of Laplace’s Demon: there exists no such thing as free will. In contrast to a libertarian position, the hard determinist maintains that free will is simply an illusion stemming from our spatiotemporal finitude and nature as limited knowers of the universe and its laws.

The hard determinist rejects the compatibilist approach as well. For the hard determinist, the only meaning of the term ‘free will’ that captures the elusive sense of agency we intuitively possess is the kind that determinism prohibits, and it just so happens that determinism is true. In contrast to compatibilist views, hard determinism maintains the undesirable consequences of a lack of freedom, such as a lack of moral responsibility. Under this view, the compatibilist’s strategies to craft a meaningful notion of freedom out of concepts less robust than a completely undetermined agent are

unsatisfactory. The necessary condition of our concepts of moral responsibility,

accountability, and attitudes of praise or blame is a framework of ultimate metaphysical freedom -- a framework that simply does not exist. This does not necessarily relegate advocates of this position to moral nihilism, but whatever normative system it can uphold must completely divorce moral judgments about an agent’s action from the supposed freedom of that agent. It is unclear whether such a separation between free will and moral responsibility is actually possible, and to what extent such strategies to ground moral responsibility and ethical attitudes towards an agent’s behaviour in the absence of incompatibilist freedom differ from those of ‘soft determinism’, or compatibilism as it is more commonly known.

It is in this blurry territory between hard determinism and compatibilism that I believe P.F. Strawson’s view falls. In Chapter 1, reference was made to Strawson’s

account in “Freedom and Resentment” (1960), in which a satisfying notion of moral responsibility could be located within our ‘reactive attitudes’ towards the actions of others. On this account, our attitudes of praise and blame in response to an agent’s actions are not rooted in a metaphysical assumption about the free will of that agent, but rather in our social and moral nature. According to this view, our judgments of moral responsibility are based primarily in our emotions and interpersonal relationships with others. When encountering agents such as small children or animals, we are reluctant to hold them morally responsible for their actions. However, this is not because they lack free will, but because we do not include them within the moral community in the same way as we do a rational adult. Strawsonian views of moral responsibility are presented as a form of compatibilism, though I would argue they could also be interpreted as a method of providing moral responsibility within a hard deterministic framework. In its original form, Strawson argues that though free will need not actually exist for our adoption of these reactive attitudes of praise and blame, our collective belief in the freedom of agents provides these attitudes with their moral force. However, there is evidence to suggest that our immediate reactive judgments about good or ill conduct remain in tact regardless of our beliefs about freedom15

, especially in cases where the conduct of the agent has a strong emotional component. If Strawson’s point about the resilience of our reactive attitudes holds even without a belief in freedom, then it comes out looking more like an argument for moral responsibility even in the total absence of anything resembling freedom. Whereas most compatibilist positions attempt to define free will in such a way

15

Knobe, J. & Nichols, S. 2007. “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions”. Noûs 41, no. 4, pp. 663–685.

that it is reconcilable with determinism, Strawson’s theory posits no dependence-relationship between the notions of free will and of moral responsibility, separating the concepts all together.

The difference between hard determinism and compatibilism is their stance on the notion of freedom. While both positions uphold the truth of causal determinism, the main feature of compatibilism is its aim to articulate a meaningful notion of free will that is reconcilable with determinism, rather than disposing of the notion all together. One way to render free will compatible with determinism is to appeal to intuitions about free actions and ask whether they truly depend on indeterministic liberty on the part of the agent. For example, one of the implications of determinism is that a given event

necessarily leads to the next. There are no such things as ‘alternative possibilities’ for an agent, since however an agent chooses to act, that act will follow necessarily from the conditions preceding it. Thus, however it may seem to an agent that her future contains many possibilities, she has no ability to choose otherwise. In an attempt to examine whether this ‘ability to do otherwise’ is a requirement for free will, John Locke presented the example of a man who enters a room with a friend with whom he wishes to spend time. If asked what he chooses to do, his answer would be to remain in the room. Little does he know, the door to the room is locked. He could not leave even if he chose to. Given that between the options ‘stay’ or ‘leave’, only one course of action is available, is the man’s decision to stay a free choice? Certainly, it is a voluntary choice, in the sense that he is not being forced to stay, but does that necessarily make it a free choice? If the analogy between the locked door and causal determinism is taken to be apt, the

‘yes’. To support this answer, the compatibilist might claim that what’s being referred to by ‘free will’ in this example is something other than both possibilities being open. Some might say that the agent’s freedom consists in the absence of coercion. While the man strictly cannot leave the room, his choice remains voluntary and thus, free. This classical compatibilist argument is endorsed by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes16

. Another response might equate free will with the amount of insight an agent has into the

antecedent conditions of his choice. So long as the man in the room has knowledge of his own reasons for remaining in the room and what sequence of events led to his decision, his choice is free. This kind of response is attributable to G.W. Leibniz. As these

examples illustrate, there is no single compatibilist edifice from which to draw a concept of free will, but rather a variety of compatibilist theories. Many of these theories share little in common other than a rejection of the radical notion of metaphysical free will advocated by the last category of theories: libertarianism.

Libertarianism is the second branch of the incompatibilist theories that admits of no reconciliation between the truth of determinism and the possibility of free will. However, unlike the hard determinists, libertarians maintain that free will exists. Thus, the libertarian must insist determinism is false. This is typically accomplished in one of two ways, by either (1) arguing that agents are an exception to otherwise deterministic causal laws, or (2) arguing that determinism is not exhaustive of the sorts of causal relationships the universe contains. Before examining both of these possibilities, it is worth asking why one might insist on such a rigid and uncompromising picture of free will. One compelling argument in favour of libertarian freedom over compatibilist

16 _{“…but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing} what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe,” (Leviathan, Ch. 21).

freedom is the ‘Consequence Argument’, as articulated by Peter Van Inwagen. The argument states that, “if determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the

consequences of those things (including our present acts) are not up to us” (Van Inwagen, 1983). 17

This argument captures the intuitions of many incompatibilists who believe that an indispensable criterion of free will is ultimate responsibility for one’s actions. If it is the case that our actions are simply the consequence of factors beyond our own control, then free will is out of the question. On the libertarian interpretation, determinism acts like a coercive force upon agents directly and is every bit as constraining as any more local source of coercion. In contrast, many compatibilists would argue that the

‘constraint’ determinism places upon an agent’s freedom is different in kind from the sort that affects voluntary action, and should not be placed in the same category. For a

compatibilist, an agent who is subject to the same causal constraints as everything else in the universe is not constrained in the same way as an agent who has her choices limited by local external restrictions or the coercion of another agent.

Libertarianism can be split into two broad categories: agent causal and event causal. This divide is based on two different ways of conceiving of causality. ‘Event-Causality’ refers to the way that objects act upon one another, and events causally lead to other events, regardless of whether those causal relations are deterministic or

indeterministic. ‘Agent-Causality’ is a way to think about causality that takes agents, in particular, to be a unique source of indeterminism in the world. Agent-causation holds

that an agent’s actions are directly caused by that agent, and not by some combination of events that only happen to include the agent. As these labels apply to libertarian

positions, the crucial difference involves the source of the indeterminism that allows for incompatibilist freedom. Whereas agent-causal views introduce indeterminism within or as a product of the agent, event-causal views locate indeterminism somewhere outside the agent, but nonetheless factor indeterminism into the agent’s decision-making procedure. Instead of attributing some unique source of indeterminism to the agent, the agent taps into some aspect of the world that is itself indeterministic. Contemporary examples of the agent-causal and the event-causal libertarian views, respectively, are those of Roderick Chisholm and Robert Kane. Radically, Chisholm’s view18

presents agents uniquely as ‘unmoved movers’, capable of initiating action freely without prior necessitating influence. Under this view, an agent is directly responsible for whatever action he or she carries out. Kane’s view19

, which will receive further explication in the following chapter, locates the source of indeterminism outside the agent. He argues that under an idealized set of circumstances in which an agent’s motivations are split perfectly equally between two conflicting courses of action, there arises a state of indeterminacy which enters into the agent’s mental deliberations, but does not originate from the agent herself. Whatever course of action is ‘chosen’ via this indeterministic process proceeds to set the character and dispositions of the agent in favour of that course of action in future situations. Through these few crucial indeterministic choices, he argues, an agent can be responsible, albeit indirectly, for every action they undertake.

18

Chisholm, R. 1976. “Freedom and Action”, in Freedom and Determinism. Edited by Keith Lehrer, 1976. Humanities Press.

19

The distinction between agent-causal and event-causal views is also important in regard to the role of the self in decision-making. In Chapter 1, the distinction between the psychological and executive conceptions of selfhood was introduced. Under the

psychological conception, the self consists in some set of a person’s psychological states (either as the raw sum, or a privileged subset thereof) and these states function as the causes of an agent’s actions. An executive self is characterized as (1) existing independently of its psychological states, and (2) able to decide which of these psychological states (if any) will guide its actions. Within agent-causal views, the executive conception of selfhood is implied, whereas this is not necessarily the case within an event-causal framework. Given that event-causal views locate the source of indeterminism outside of the agent -- the sorts of properties and abilities the self possesses do not play a pivotal role in the agent’s freedom. In this way, by introducing the possibility of indeterminism into the world outside of the agent, the event-causal libertarian avoids some of the strange metaphysical properties that are often associated with an executive self (see: Chisholm’s view of the self as causa sui). However, dismissing the idea of the self as a source of executive control presents unique difficulties, such as the problem of randomness. A common objection to systems like Kane’s is that by placing the required indeterminacy somewhere outside the agent, the agent lacks the sort of control over the resulting action that is necessary to make it a free one. Though differing in detail, the feature that agent-causal models share is a

commitment to such an executive self – a self that at once ensures an agent’s control over the choices he or she makes, and allows for an agent to consist of something above and beyond their set of psychological states. To examine what it means to possess this kind of

self, I shall now present a contrast between David Hume and Thomas Reid, two figures who exemplify not only the distinction between compatibilism and libertarianism, but also the psychological and executive models of selfhood. I take these thinkers to be paradigm examples of the connection I argue exists between theories of selfhood and free will. In the following section, I will be arguing that Hume’s compatibilism and Reid’s libertarianism have as much to do with their respective theories of selves as they do with their acceptance or rejection of the determinism thesis. For Hume, I argue that his adherence to the psychological model of selfhood contributes to his compatibilism. For Reid, I argue that the executive model of selfhood ensures his commitment to

libertarianism.

Hume on Selfhood

Using the word ‘self’ in a discussion of Hume might first strike one as a mistake. After all, one of his famous passages states “…when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other […] I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception” (Treatise, pg. 300)20_{. However, it is important to remember that Hume is} reacting against the views of his rationalist predecessors such as Descartes, who posited the self as a thinking substance, and, moreover as the only substance of which we may have unmediated knowledge. The point Hume is advancing in the cited passage concerns our immediate experience of the self and what features it contains. Far from the

irreducible and indubitable mental substance of Descartes, Hume insists that introspection discloses nothing other than a ‘bundle’ of perceptions without any

20 _{Hume, D. 1739. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by Ernest C. Mossner, 1969.} Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London, England.

underlying substance or unifying principle. ‘Perceptions’, on Hume’s account, do not only refer to what we would contemporarily label ‘sense-data’, gathered from our environment, but encompass the entirety of mental activity, including thoughts, feelings, and dispositions generated from within the mind itself.21

In Book I, Section VI of A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume attempts to dispel the substance-model of selfhood. Of the idea of ‘substance’ itself, Hume claims that the idea does not come from any direct impression, but is constructed through inferences we make via other relations. As it pertains to the self, the concept of the ‘self’ as a simple and identical substance, uninterrupted and persisting through time, Hume dubs a “…bias from the imagination” (Treatise, pg. 302). The faculty of the imagination plays an important role in Hume’s work; it enables the mind to “transpose and change its ideas” (Treatise, pg. 57). For example, to form an idea of a fictional entity, such as a unicorn, we employ the imagination to recombine pre-existing ideas, such as ‘horse’ and ‘horn’ to create the idea of the mythical creature. Hume argues that the activity of this faculty is responsible for our idea of ‘substance’, and that this idea is, in fact, complex and not simple. As a species of complex idea, thus, substance can emerge as an idea in the mind, though without any direct corresponding impression.

It is through the association of ideas by the imagination that we come upon the idea of the ‘self’ as a substance, and the imagination transposes its ideas according to three principles: resemblance, contiguity, and causation. I shall proceed to summarize how these principles (particularly, resemblance and causation) operate upon our perceptions to produce the fiction of the self as a substance.

Of resemblance, Hume invokes our faculty of memory, which serves to conjure our past perceptions. He claims that memory “produc[es] the relation of resemblance among the perceptions” (Treatise, pg. 308) by forming the connection between our

derivative ideas and original impressions. Because all ideas are derived from impressions, our idea of a thing necessarily shares a relation of resemblance to our impression of the thing. It is memory that allows us to recognize this resemblance. If I have an idea of a dog, memory allows me to bring to mind occasions in which I have experienced the impression of a dog, thus granting an illusion of continuity between the subject who first experienced the dog, and the subject who now possesses the idea of a dog. It is in this sense that we come to believe that we have an identical ‘self’ that persists through time.

Of causation, Hume argues that since impressions causally produce their

corresponding ideas as effects, we tend to infer an identity between them. As well, some ideas can give rise to other ideas. For example, when thinking of the idea ‘tree’, we might also experience the ideas of ‘leaves’, ‘roots’ and ‘branches’ as an effect of that idea. In this way, we come to take the idea of ‘tree’ as unified, even though its corresponding impression is composed of many different parts. This tendency of the mind to form associations between resembling, contiguous, or causally-linked impressions lends itself to the idea of the self as its own unique substance. These relations combined lead us to believe in the fiction of a simple and identical self.

What I have explained above is Hume’s rejection of the substance-model of selfhood and the source of our fictitious idea thereof, but not the idea of a self in general. Throughout both the Treatise and the Enquiry, Hume frequently refers to a subject that fills the same theoretical role as the immaterial soul of rationalist accounts insofar as it

experiences and acts. Now, the task is to detail Hume’s positive account of the self. Hume famously characterizes the “self as “nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and suppos’d tho’ falsely to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity” (Treatise, pg. 257). This has come to be known as the ‘bundle theory’ of the self. From the preceding discussion, we know that any theory of selfhood Hume may offer cannot rely on the existence of an independent subject, distinct from their various perceptions. Therefore, for Hume, whatever cluster of perceptions occurs within the mind of an individual wholly constitutes his or her self. Hume acknowledges that perceptions change from moment to moment, but any theory of the self requires some way of ensuring temporal persistence. For this purpose, Hume compares the self to a republic. He states, “as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and dispositions, as well as his impressions and ideas without losing his identity,” (Treatise, pg. 309). What he is suggesting here is that so long as the change between different sets of ideas and impressions takes place gradually and order themselves in a sequence of cause and effect, an adequate sense of an individual’s personal identity can be preserved without positing the self as some enduring and unchanging substance.

Before moving on to Hume’s views on free will and agency and how they relate to his concept of selfhood, it is important to note that Hume’s views represent one of the purest psychological accounts of the self. Aside from a very loose sense of continuity among perceptions, Hume vehemently denies that the self consists in anything over and above a set of psychological states. The self, in this sense, cannot possess a given set of

states; it simply is them. From this, it is possible to anticipate what Hume will have to say about action and agency. In Chapter 1, I claimed that psychological accounts of selfhood readily lend themselves to compatibilism, and Hume’s theory of free will is no exception. Though I have not yet explicated the relationship between perceptions and volition within Hume’s system, the concept of a ‘motive’ must somehow fall out of it. How does the perception of ‘hunger’ become a motive for one to eat? What sort of psychological state can become a motive for action? This is the next question to be investigated.

When an impression or idea is strong enough to cause action, Hume calls it a ‘passion’. The faculty of the will itself, which causes action in accordance with these passions, Hume defines as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind” (Treatise, pg. 447). Hume’s categorization of the will as itself an internal impression attests to his commitment to the psychological picture of the self. The act of willing is but one impression among many which, taken together, constitute the self. Everything Hume calls a passion is first impressed upon sensation or reflection by an emotion of pleasure or pain. These emotions give rise to propensities or aversions toward the object of these impressions. The nature of the causal relationship between these two pairs of terms is left vague. How exactly a feeling of pleasure exerts influence upon the agent to seek out the source of that pleasure is a step Hume leaves out. This implies that the causal force that produces action is contained entirely within the passion itself. To introduce some mediating force between motive and action, for Hume, would be to admit of some

mysterious faculty with the power to counteract or limit the force of the motives. Making this move would compromise Hume’s model of the self, which consists in the entirety of

a person’s psychological states, rather than a privileged subset thereof. To claim that there exists some force intervening between motive and action would be to grant priority to some idea or impression distinct from the others by virtue of its endurance. If Hume were to introduce such an impression or idea into his account, it would be very tempting to think that the self is just that enduring impression or idea that continuously moderates the influence of motives; such a thing would resemble the substance-model once more. As I have shown throughout this section, Hume would rather deny that any idea of impression should be treated as separate from the ‘bundle’.

Hume on Freedom

Considering Hume’s skepticism regarding the necessary connection between causes and their effects, his commitment to compatibilism may appear surprising. For the philosopher who pioneered the idea of causation as unobservable, and insisted that all we can learn for certain about causes and effects are their repeated constant conjunction with one another, Hume’s strict adherence to causal determinism might appear to lack

justification. Despite his skepticism, Hume attributes our tendency to infer a necessary connection between causes and effects to an inescapable habit of our nature. He states that this is a habit that “we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendent, is the sentiment or impression, from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion” (Enquiry, pg. 55)22

. Though it may be a weak basis to uphold the truth of causal determinism, Hume endeavors to do just that in his discussion of the possibility of free will.

22

Hume, D. 1740. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Millican, 2007. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Just as physical causes lead to physical effects, Hume maintains that mental activity can act as a cause for mental effects. Certain actions follow from the possession of certain motives23

, with the same constant conjunction. With this in mind, Hume compares the ‘doctrine of necessity’ and the ‘doctrine of liberty’ (or of determinism and free will, respectively), and argues that the conflict between the two is ultimately a verbal dispute and “that the whole controversy has hitherto turned merely upon words”

(Enquiry, pg. 59). This is a familiar compatibilist response to the problem of free will, claiming that when we refer to the free will that we believe humans possess, we are not actually referring to the strict, incompatibilist definition. From here, Hume proceeds to give reasons why we ought to reject the definition of free will that requires

incompatibilism.

Hume observes that if there were not some uniform connection between the motives of a person and the actions that follow, mankind would not to be able to

generalize certain facts about human nature. From the very fact that we seem to be able to do this with some reliability, Hume concludes that it is a reasonable inference that we can do the same regarding individual people and their individual actions. He grants that there exist occasional exceptions where a person may appear to act from no discernable

motive, but Hume is inclined to attribute this anomaly to insufficient information about the individual in question. He draws an analogy between the philosopher and the physician wherein “when irregular events follow from any particular cause; the philosopher and the physician are not surprized at the matter, nor are ever tempted to

23

How a mental motive can cause –much less necessitate—an action leads to questions about Hume’s views on the mind-body distinction. Though the matter is complex, it will suffice to say here that while Hume certainly rejects the substance dualism of Descartes, he is not entirely a physicalist either.

deny, in general, the necessity and uniformity of these principles, by which the animal oeconomy is conducted” (Enquiry, pg. 63). Though a physician may often be surprised about a discovery that diverges from his theories, he trusts that there must be some unknown cause underlying the anomaly.

Concerning the doctrine of liberty, or the possibility of incompatibilist free will, Hume also examines it in depth. He concludes that when we speak of free will, the kind of freedom we are referring to is “a power of acting or not acting, according to the determination of the will” (Enquiry, pg. 69). If we recall that the ‘will’ being referred to is just another impression, which is driven by the passions, it is clear that the ‘power’ Hume speaks of cannot be anything as radical as libertarian free will. In the Treatise, he argues that the kind of radical freedom that defies causal determinism is both absurd and unintelligible. He distinguishes the ‘liberty of spontaneity’ from the ‘liberty of

indifference’. Only the former, concerning voluntary action, is the kind worth preserving. The liberty of indifference, Hume argues, can be likened to mere chance. If an agent is not driven by one or more motives to act, then how can an agent be said to be responsible for it? Hume acknowledges that the phenomenology of free will tends toward

incompatibilism, but insists that though “we may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves; but a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even where he cannot, he concludes in general, that he might, were he perfectly acquainted with every circumstance of our situation and temper” (Treatise, pg. 456).

When it comes to the issue of moral responsibility, not only an agent’s motives, but an agent’s character plays a crucial role in determining our attributions of praise or