G.A. Cohen's Confusing Position on Free Will

Socialist philosopher G.A. Cohen put belief in human free will at the heart of his account of egalitarian justice. He also thought it was incompatible with determinism.

Determinism is the claim that all events are related across time by law-like operations of cause and effect. If the cause happens, the effect must follow. Given a total snapshot of physical reality at Time T1 and all the relevant physical laws, there’s only one possible way reality could be at Time T2. And, crucially, the determinist holds that all of this holds for the parts of physical reality in between your ears, where you make decisions.

One reason to suspect (or maybe worry) that determinism is true is an induction from the last several centuries of scientific progress. The more we find out about the world, the more we can explain in terms of cause-and-effect regularities.¹ And we certainly assume something like determinism in our ordinary everyday reasoning, whenever we’re reasoning about anything other than ourselves. If your car breaks down and you take it to the mechanic and he says, there was nothing wrong with the engine, nothing wrong with the brakes, nothing wrong with the alternator, nothing wrong with the belts, nothing wrong with the electric system and etc. through an exhaustive list of nothing-wrongs, but it just stopped working, you wouldn’t think huh, I learned something new about how reality works today, sometimes thing happen without causes. You’d think you needed a better mechanic.

So why shouldn’t all this hold about decision-making in the human brain? And if it does, do we have to give up our self-conception as agents who can make decisions for which we’re objectively responsible?

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Some philosophers insist that we can deduce from the philosophical armchair that since (a) free will sure seems to exist, (b) determinism must be false. This gets you a position called “libertarianism,” even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the let-poor-people-starve-to-death position that goes by the same name in normative political philosophy.

Let’s go ahead and assume for the moment that this is a bad inference, and that the empirical debate about whether determinism is true is best left to physicists. That still leaves philosophers with the question of whether, if determinism is true, that makes human free will an illusion.

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Anyone who’s read my stuff over the years, either here or at Jacobin, probably knows that I’m a super-fan of the late Marxist analytic philosopher G.A. Cohen. If you aren’t familiar with him, his major contributions included (i) interpreting and defending Marx’s theory of history, (ii) engaging in an absolutely devastating, point-by-point refutation of the libertarian political philosophy of Robert Nozick, (iii) critiquing John Rawls’s theory of justice from the left, and (iv) making a normative case for socialism.

His shortest and most accessible book, Why Not Socialism?, is devoted to (iv). In it, he argues for the undesirability of capitalism and the need to find something better to replace it on the basis of two values. One he provocatively calls there “socialist equality of opportunity” principle. Presumably, his intention was to turn the tables on bourgeois apologists who claim that, while they’re indifferent to equality of outcomes, they care very much about equality of opportunity. In more nit-picky academic contexts, he’s just called his view “luck-egalitarianism.” It’s his answer to a basic problem for those of us who have strong egalitarian intuitions about distributive justice. What kind of equality, exactly, do we care about?

It’s implausible to say, for example, that what we care about is absolute equality of material resources. A medical system that devotes more resources to a paraplegic than it does to me isn’t objectionably inegalitarian. Similarly, if one adjunct professor (call him Erik) is making less money than another (call him Jon), entirely because Jon teaches three classes and Erik teaches two, and Erik was in fact offered a third class but turned it down so he’d have more time to rewatch all six seasons of the Sopranos, this doesn’t seem the kind of “inequality” we have in mind when we say that “inequality” is even generally unjust.

Cohen’s solution is that the kind of equality that matters (even before we start to weigh it against competing values) is equality of access to advantage. Inequalities are problematic to the extent that they’re outside of the control of whoever gets the short end of the stick. No one, for example, chooses to be born into a poor family instead of a rich one. And the inborn talents that make it easier for some poor kids than others to be upwardly mobile through the class structure are equally unchosen. The only way to even begin to get serious about eliminating involuntary disadvantage is to abandon the conventional liberal goal of making it easier to climb professional ladders out of the working class and to instead sweep away the class structure altogether.

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The second principle, supplementing this, is a “socialist value of community.” Cohen thinks there’s a limit to how far below your own standard of living you’d let someone you care about sink even as a result of their own free choices. If your brother couldn’t make rent because he lost everything in a high-stakes poker game he opted to play in for the thrill of it, in full possession of all his faculties, you still wouldn’t just let him sleep on a park bench.

Well, in a better society, the circle of people we care about, or certainly at least which we design our institutions to care about, would be expanded to encompass everyone. We wouldn’t let anyone sleep in the streets, no matter what they’d done to get there. We wouldn’t, Cohen suggests, let some people make so much less money than others that they had a ten-to-one income gap.²

The community principle is deeply plausible. But it’s not the egalitarian core of Cohen’s view. Someone allowed to sink into the gutter because of their own poor choices has a legitimate complaint to make about society’s inhumanity toward them, but they wouldn’t have a complaint about society’s injustice in the same way as someone whose disadvantages are out of their hands.

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In Why Not Socialism?, Cohen notes that the crucial moral distinction he’s appealing to, between voluntary and involuntary disadvantages, doesn’t get off the ground if no human action is truly voluntary. In a long philosophical treatise he presumably would have more to say than this, but in the short, punchy, Why Not Socialism?, he just rolls his eyes in the general direction of free will skepticism.

You “may believe” in abstract way that there is no such thing as being “truly responsible” for your actions but this belief goes “against the grain, I wager, of your reactions to people in ordinary life…"

Returning to this point a few lines later, he writes:

I said that believing that no inequality could truly reflect real freedom of choice would contradict your reactions to people in day-to-day-life, and that I lack that belief. I lack that belief because I am not convinced that it is true both that all choices are causally determined and that causal determination obliterates responsibility. If you are indeed so convinced, then do not blame right-wing politicians for reducing welfare support (since, in your view, they can’t help doing so), do not, indeed, blame, or praise, anyone for choosing to do anything, and therefore live your life, hencefoth, differently from the way that we both know that you have lived it up to now.

While there’s certainly nothing that rises to the level of an argument against free-will skepticism here, there’s certainly a fun and vivid rejection of it. And on the basis of this passage, I’d always assumed that Cohen was a compatibilist.

The compatibilist position is that the kind of free will that matters on a human level, the kind that’s relevant to whether you own your own decisions, whether what you do is your fault (or to your credit), has nothing to do with cosmic-level freedom from determinism. John Martin Fischer’s compatibilist account of free will, for example, says that the kind of “free will” we’re talking about when we attribute to someone substantive control over their actions (“he did it of his own free will”) is the capacity to understand, evaluate, and appropriately weigh reasons for and against different courses of action. Decision-making in human brains doesn’t have to be a special magical exception to cause-and-effect physical laws for it to be true that the brain of a cognitively standard-issue adult human is generally “reasons-responsive” in this way, while the brains of toddlers, miniature schnauzers, sufferers from certain kinds of mental illness or severe cognitive impairment, and so on are not. The compatibilist thinks this justifies our usual assessments which of these kinds of beings are or aren’t responsible for their actions. Crucially, Fischer can simply shrug off the point that, if determinism is true, you’re determined to consider just the reasons you do consider, to weigh them in just the way you do weigh them, and so on. Compatibilists don’t deny that this would be true. They just deny that it’s relevant, because they don’t think freedom from determinism is the kind of freedom that matters for responsibility.

Many people think the compatibilist is “playing with words” or trying to illegitimately “change” the definition of free will. I’m unmoved by this charge, for reasons I explore here and more directly here.

More to the point, I’d always assumed that Cohen was unmoved by it.

I was wrong.

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You can read Why Not Socialism? in an afternoon with time to burn. Another of Cohen’s books on normative political philosophy, Rescuing Justice and Equality, runs to 449 pages, and the argumentation is far slower. It’s a book for academics.

Since the book’s primary target is John Rawls, whose theory of justice Cohen criticizes as being insufficiently egalitarian (and whose more abstract views about what justice is Cohen critiques on more abstract grounds), he says a few words in the introduction about his minimal but pleasant personal interactions with the already-late Professor Rawls. (Rescuing Justice and Equality came out during the last full year of Cohen’s life, but he outlived Rawls by seven years.) In the course of these reminiscences, Cohen writes:

I remember with particular pleasure one lunch that we took in what was, for a (too) short time, a lunchtime haunt of ours, namely, the austere and now defunct benches-only basement café of the Holland and Barrett health-food store in King Edward Street, Oxford. We were talking about Kant and free will, and I was delighted that, as it seemed to me, Rawls expressed the belief that if all our choices really were causally determined, then many of our customary judgments of the moral worth of people would make no sense. Since I had been inclined to think the same for about thirty years, against the grain of the dominant compatibilist consensus, it delighted me that Jack Rawls was on our minority side. There was a satisfying sense of conspiring together against the consensus.

This passage stunned me when I read it. Anyone looking in the remaining four hundred pages and change of the book for an elaboration of what, if not compatibilism, Cohen did think about free will won’t find it. The only other appearance of the phrase “free will” in Rescuing Justice and Equality comes on p. 195. Cohen is exploring the connection between “transhistorical” questions about what would count as a just society and Marxist claims about the historical circumstances under which justice can be achieved. In passing, he clarifies that Marx’s theory of history is neutral on what he calls “the free will question.”

Historical materialism is a theory about what explains what in history, not a theory about how it explains it in the sense of that question in which a full answer to it requires a stance on a deep metaphysical issue. We can all agree that, if Etna erupts, it is inevitable that people will run away, even if some of us think that the inevitability is purely causal, while others of us think that it manifests predictable but “contra-causal” human choice, and still others of us think still other things.

It’s not a flaw of the book that Cohen doesn’t say anything else there about free will. The topic is Rawls, not the metaphysics of free will and moral responsibility. The latter only even came up in a tangential way twice, and in both cases he would have had to go way off-track if he’d dived into the details of his own views on free will.

But considering the stridency of his dismissal of free will skepticism in Why Not Socialism?, the equal emphatic dismissal of the most apparently plausible way of making sense of free will in the face of worries about determinism in Rescuing Justice and Equality is baffling. And it’s maddening, at least to me, that he never seems to have expanded on the point!

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The man wrote a lot, and I haven’t read anything like all of it. (I’m working on it!) It’s possible that there’s a Cohen paper laying out exactly what his own positive view was on free will. If it exists, and some kindhearted reader can point me toward it in the comments, I’ll be grateful.

But when I asked about this on social media a little while back, no one knew of one. The closest I got was from Cohen’s student Steve Paxton, who reminded me of this sentence I somehow missed in a Cohen paper I actually have read, “Historical Inevitability and Revolutionary Agency,” which combines the two halves of what he says in Rescuing Justice and Equality:

While I happen myself to be an incompatibilist, the main claims of this essay do not oblige me to take a position on the truth of compatiblism, or on the question of whether Marx and Engels accepted it.³

Again, an emphatic affirmation in passing of (a) a deeply controversial position (and indeed one that, as he acknowledges in discussing his lunch with Rawls, one that went against the consensus of his colleagues) on (b) a question that lay right at the heart of his own view of egalitarian justice.

Is it really possible that he never elaborated?

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I find the idea that G.A. Cohen of all people would have thought he could infer the existence of libertarian free will from the philosophical armchair disturbing. As even many of his ideological opponents will acknowledge, he was an unusually carefully and rigorous philosopher, and if he endorsed that argument, that looks to me like a fairly catastrophic breakdown of those standards of rigor.

But if not that, what?

Perhaps, instead of endorsing free-will libertarianism a priori, he endorsed something like Robert Kane’s position, which I discuss in more detail here. The short version is that Kane thinks that the falsity of determinism is an empirical discovery, via the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Kane uses this scientific premise to build a highly speculative story about how decision-making works in human brains such that at least certain crucial “character-forming” decisions count as authentic instances of libertarian free will, and these indirectly ground our responsibility for ordinary day-to-day decisions. It’s the most plausible version of libertarianism I know of, which doesn’t actually make it all that plausible, but I hope Cohen was at least this type of libertarian rather than the a priori kind.

Even if so, though, it’s worth taking a moment to think about how odd this would have made Cohen’s overall position.

Consider some obvious problems with using the Copenhagen Interpretation’s quantum indeterminism to ground human free will:

(1) It’s not at all clear, contra Kane, that quantum indeterminism would “filter up” to the macro-level brain states involved in decision-making.

(2) Even if we help ourselves to the assumption that it does, it’s deeply unclear why this makes our decisions any more up-to-us than they would be otherwise! If my considering reasons for and against a possible decision, thinking them over, weighing them, and coming to a determination is, as the incompatibilist insists, insufficient for my owning and being responsible for that action (if, even given all that, I’m like a puppet being pulled around by deterministic forces), why would a random jerk on my puppet-strings make me any freer?

And crucially:

(3) Even assuming a brilliant and utterly convincing answer to (2), perhaps found in some hitherto-undiscovered “Why I Believe in Incompatibilist Free Will” Cohen paper, and further assuming that if the Copenhagen Interpretation was correct, (1) would be true, as that pesky word “interpretation” hints, this is still very much a live issue among theoretical physicists!

Maybe this is just me stamping my foot and insisting on my own compatibilist intuitions, but it’s just baffling to me that a substantive view on the nature of justice would be left hanging on the thread of physicists’ debates about microphysical determinism. Think back to our example about Erik and Jon being paid unequally since Erik took on fewer classes so he’d have more time for his big Sopranos rewatch.

Whatever you think about whether Erik has therefore been done an injustice, it seems incredible that anyone would think that the answer will only turn out to be “no” if the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics turns out to be true.

But, somehow, that seems to be what Cohen thought.

1. Or maybe not! If you assume the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the subatomic realm looks like a giant exception. But before you get too excited about this loophole, see the distinction below on what quantum indeterminacy does or doesn’t imply about free will.

2. As David Lay Williams notes in his book The Greatest of All Plagues, which I reviewed here, Plato set his ideal maximum wealth gap at four to one. The fact that even a Marxist thinker would say ten instead of four is a pretty striking indicator of exactly how much inequality we’ve all gotten used to in the twenty-three centuries between Plato and Cohen.

3. History, Labour, and Freedom, p. 80