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.
The thing about compatibilism is that naturalism or determinism is surely compatible with some, but not all, conceptions of freedom. If it is sufficient for your moral/political theory that people are reason-responsive, then determinism or stochastic naturalism shouldn't be an issue. But "luck egalitarianism" does seem to require something more, namely a defensible distinction between what happens to you because of luck and what happens because of your deserts. Denying that consequences that could be attributed to luck are in any sense the act of your free will seems to require a more robustly anti-causal theory of freedom than a naturalist should endorse. It seems to require an interactionist substance dualism where some of the things that happen in the world are because of my mind-stuff and others are because of the ordinary operations of the universe.
Perhaps all one can do with the incommensurable notions 'free will' and 'determinism' is shrug off the contradiction, by proclaiming their apparent contradiction 'not relevant'.
Of course, this is a simply a dodge, and it is disconcerting to find an intellectual hero might engage in one because of a personal preference and political affinity, rather than a principled and well-founded epistemological framework.
This conundrum emerges from our species' knack for clever formulations. Too clever by half, it seems-
All contributing factors known, one possible outcome. Cause, effect. Even unto the sparks bouncing in goo-filled crania. Hence, no free will.
Alas, no free will, no morality. All things happen in the only manner possible, the only manner conceivable. So, the perpetrators of rape, murder, and even (shudder) neoliberalism are innocent of any crime. Heck, the word 'crime' no longer has meaning, in a deterministic universe.
If Cohen, and Marx, studiously avoided addressing the incommensurability of free will and determinism, it's because they were left with no choice. The entire edifice of historical materialism, and the moral condemnation of capitalism, amount to empty farce in a deterministic universe.
Ironically, we are left with a choice.
But no, it's not compatibilism, which is simply a more elaborate form of the dodge, which Cohen and Rawls saw clearly.
So what's left?
It's determinism that goes to the wall.
Fortunately, some smart types have done the heavy lifting for us-
'The Naturalistic Case for Free Will, Part 3: Indeterminism as an Emergent Phenomenon' (Christian List, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, London School of Economics)
"I have argued that realism about free will – treating it as real, not as an illusion – is justified because the picture of humans as agents with alternative possibilities and causal control over their actions is not just compatible with science but indispensable in some of our best explanations of human behavior. My argument is analogous to the one often given for realism about other properties or entities in science. Physicists are realists about particles, fields, and forces because postulating them is indispensable in our best physical theories. Similarly, biologists tend to be realists about cells, organisms, or eco-systems because postulating them is indispensable in the best theories within their domains. The principle underlying these arguments is the “naturalistic ontological attitude”: if postulating certain properties or entities is indispensable in our best explanations of a given phenomenon and compatible with the rest of science, then we have good reasons for taking those properties or entities to be real. I suggest that, from the perspective of this principle, free will and its prerequisites are no different in their reality than other emergent, higher-level phenomena whose reality we seldom doubt: the weather, markets, economies, and so on."
Turns out, human experience and the universe writ large are somewhat more complicated than an abstract representation of billiard balls.
When choosing epistemological frameworks and ontological commitments, choose wisely.
Now you can safely return to making moral pronouncements without fear of lapsing into self-contradiction and absurdity. At least not because of determinism, which, it turns out, never was a thing.
Ben, I've ordered Cohen's book, thanks for the tutorial. What mystified me about the whole Rawlsian and other approaches to social justice is their nearly absolute refusal to link social justice to human needs. I long ago concluded that it is preferable to theorize not social justice but human liberation (per Doyal and Gough, A Theory of Human Need).
See my open access sociological piece in Humanity & Society, A Needs-Based Partial Theory of Human Injustice, which is non-deterministically produced by oppression, mechanistic dehumanization and exploitation (ODE). Non-deterministically, because with enforcement of human rights and primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, human injustice is not inevitible, even short of aboliion of ODE.
But what is the mechanism of human injustice? Here is where equality (or inequality) come into play. It is systematic inequality in opportunities to access culturally and environmentally varying satisfiers of human need, which has both physical and mental health components. See my substack home page for links in Other Works: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/, I can be reached at m.a.dover@csuohio.edu. I would like to write something about From Each According to Our ABilities, To Each According to our Needs for Jacobin or the Catalyst Journal. Well, I have already but it was sort of published correspondence, but I'd like to expand on it: https://works.bepress.com/michael-dover/33/
I think there is also a deeper question to raise about what it is we mean by freedom in the first place. As many have pointed out (e.g. D.B. Hart), before the rise of voluntarism, it seems that many in the West assumed that freedom meant the capacity to realize your own deepest need or truth (often referred to, a bit confusingly, as "intellectualism"). Under such a view, genuine freedom isn't really about choice at all, but simply not being prevented from doing what you truly want to do—even if everyone could predict beforehand what that choice would be. (After all, what would it mean to say that a hungry person could choose not to eat? Is that an important dimension of genuine freedom?) But in the last few centuries, freedom has come to mean the capacity to make what amounts to an arbitrary decision: an expression of power, rather than truth. It seems to me that the older understanding of freedom wouldn't be in conflict with determinism in the first place, and is more meaningful anyway.
What would a physicist discovery of free will look like? It's not clear to me how the measuring of pointer readings could discover choice, especially if will is a property of mind that supervenes on but is irreducible to brains (or atoms, etc.) — it'd be like trying to find England by sifting through the soil. As such, Cohen deciding, a priori, that free will is more plausible than determinism (and certainly more plausible than wordgame compatibilism) is as reasonable as the other work he did in his armchair.
The problem is that in our best physics, the wave equation evolves deterministically, but observations are stochastic. So whether this means "microphysical determinism is true" depends on whether the wave equation reflects "reality" or observables do. Physicists maybe should weigh in on this, but many think they don't have such a responsibility ("shut up and calculate"). But even if they do weigh in on it, though, they aren't really engaged in *empirical* work. It is really just about ideological preferences and there is no reason philosophers or plumbers can't have those.
Either way, of course, we don't get the kind of self-causing action that Cohen and Rawls apparently wanted since the problem they have is that interactionist substance dualism doesn't seem to be consistent with any scientific theory of the world. As you say, we don't seem any freer if our actions are a result of chance than if they are a result of the working out of deterministic differential equations given an initial condition of the universe.
The thing about compatibilism is that naturalism or determinism is surely compatible with some, but not all, conceptions of freedom. If it is sufficient for your moral/political theory that people are reason-responsive, then determinism or stochastic naturalism shouldn't be an issue. But "luck egalitarianism" does seem to require something more, namely a defensible distinction between what happens to you because of luck and what happens because of your deserts. Denying that consequences that could be attributed to luck are in any sense the act of your free will seems to require a more robustly anti-causal theory of freedom than a naturalist should endorse. It seems to require an interactionist substance dualism where some of the things that happen in the world are because of my mind-stuff and others are because of the ordinary operations of the universe.
Perhaps all one can do with the incommensurable notions 'free will' and 'determinism' is shrug off the contradiction, by proclaiming their apparent contradiction 'not relevant'.
Of course, this is a simply a dodge, and it is disconcerting to find an intellectual hero might engage in one because of a personal preference and political affinity, rather than a principled and well-founded epistemological framework.
This conundrum emerges from our species' knack for clever formulations. Too clever by half, it seems-
All contributing factors known, one possible outcome. Cause, effect. Even unto the sparks bouncing in goo-filled crania. Hence, no free will.
Alas, no free will, no morality. All things happen in the only manner possible, the only manner conceivable. So, the perpetrators of rape, murder, and even (shudder) neoliberalism are innocent of any crime. Heck, the word 'crime' no longer has meaning, in a deterministic universe.
If Cohen, and Marx, studiously avoided addressing the incommensurability of free will and determinism, it's because they were left with no choice. The entire edifice of historical materialism, and the moral condemnation of capitalism, amount to empty farce in a deterministic universe.
Ironically, we are left with a choice.
But no, it's not compatibilism, which is simply a more elaborate form of the dodge, which Cohen and Rawls saw clearly.
So what's left?
It's determinism that goes to the wall.
Fortunately, some smart types have done the heavy lifting for us-
'The Naturalistic Case for Free Will, Part 3: Indeterminism as an Emergent Phenomenon' (Christian List, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, London School of Economics)
https://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/blog/2019/11/21/the-naturalistic-case-for-free-will-part-3/
"I have argued that realism about free will – treating it as real, not as an illusion – is justified because the picture of humans as agents with alternative possibilities and causal control over their actions is not just compatible with science but indispensable in some of our best explanations of human behavior. My argument is analogous to the one often given for realism about other properties or entities in science. Physicists are realists about particles, fields, and forces because postulating them is indispensable in our best physical theories. Similarly, biologists tend to be realists about cells, organisms, or eco-systems because postulating them is indispensable in the best theories within their domains. The principle underlying these arguments is the “naturalistic ontological attitude”: if postulating certain properties or entities is indispensable in our best explanations of a given phenomenon and compatible with the rest of science, then we have good reasons for taking those properties or entities to be real. I suggest that, from the perspective of this principle, free will and its prerequisites are no different in their reality than other emergent, higher-level phenomena whose reality we seldom doubt: the weather, markets, economies, and so on."
Turns out, human experience and the universe writ large are somewhat more complicated than an abstract representation of billiard balls.
When choosing epistemological frameworks and ontological commitments, choose wisely.
Now you can safely return to making moral pronouncements without fear of lapsing into self-contradiction and absurdity. At least not because of determinism, which, it turns out, never was a thing.
Ben, I've ordered Cohen's book, thanks for the tutorial. What mystified me about the whole Rawlsian and other approaches to social justice is their nearly absolute refusal to link social justice to human needs. I long ago concluded that it is preferable to theorize not social justice but human liberation (per Doyal and Gough, A Theory of Human Need).
See my open access sociological piece in Humanity & Society, A Needs-Based Partial Theory of Human Injustice, which is non-deterministically produced by oppression, mechanistic dehumanization and exploitation (ODE). Non-deterministically, because with enforcement of human rights and primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, human injustice is not inevitible, even short of aboliion of ODE.
But what is the mechanism of human injustice? Here is where equality (or inequality) come into play. It is systematic inequality in opportunities to access culturally and environmentally varying satisfiers of human need, which has both physical and mental health components. See my substack home page for links in Other Works: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/, I can be reached at m.a.dover@csuohio.edu. I would like to write something about From Each According to Our ABilities, To Each According to our Needs for Jacobin or the Catalyst Journal. Well, I have already but it was sort of published correspondence, but I'd like to expand on it: https://works.bepress.com/michael-dover/33/
Excellent piece! Having my freedom depend on randomness is no more plausible than drowning only because possessed by the idea of gravity.
I think there is also a deeper question to raise about what it is we mean by freedom in the first place. As many have pointed out (e.g. D.B. Hart), before the rise of voluntarism, it seems that many in the West assumed that freedom meant the capacity to realize your own deepest need or truth (often referred to, a bit confusingly, as "intellectualism"). Under such a view, genuine freedom isn't really about choice at all, but simply not being prevented from doing what you truly want to do—even if everyone could predict beforehand what that choice would be. (After all, what would it mean to say that a hungry person could choose not to eat? Is that an important dimension of genuine freedom?) But in the last few centuries, freedom has come to mean the capacity to make what amounts to an arbitrary decision: an expression of power, rather than truth. It seems to me that the older understanding of freedom wouldn't be in conflict with determinism in the first place, and is more meaningful anyway.
What would a physicist discovery of free will look like? It's not clear to me how the measuring of pointer readings could discover choice, especially if will is a property of mind that supervenes on but is irreducible to brains (or atoms, etc.) — it'd be like trying to find England by sifting through the soil. As such, Cohen deciding, a priori, that free will is more plausible than determinism (and certainly more plausible than wordgame compatibilism) is as reasonable as the other work he did in his armchair.
As a compatibilist, I agree that the idea of physicists "discovering we have free will" doesn't make sense.
But discovering *whether microphysical determinism is true* is absolutely within their wheelhouse.
The problem is that in our best physics, the wave equation evolves deterministically, but observations are stochastic. So whether this means "microphysical determinism is true" depends on whether the wave equation reflects "reality" or observables do. Physicists maybe should weigh in on this, but many think they don't have such a responsibility ("shut up and calculate"). But even if they do weigh in on it, though, they aren't really engaged in *empirical* work. It is really just about ideological preferences and there is no reason philosophers or plumbers can't have those.
Either way, of course, we don't get the kind of self-causing action that Cohen and Rawls apparently wanted since the problem they have is that interactionist substance dualism doesn't seem to be consistent with any scientific theory of the world. As you say, we don't seem any freer if our actions are a result of chance than if they are a result of the working out of deterministic differential equations given an initial condition of the universe.
I’ve been slogging my way through Bukharin’s Historical Materialism- and this article by you has helped me grasp some of his points. I think…LOL
I’m embarrassed that you’ve been exhorting getting that book by him and I’ve not gotten it yet- so I will today.
Also- banger piece!
Thanks--and fixed!
Check subheading- belief used back to back