Free will and moral responsibility are important for many reasons —legal, as well as theological. Thanks to advances in both science and philosophy, the specter of determinism is no longer a serious threat to belief in free will, but that doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods yet. I consider three additional challenges to free will and moral responsibility, and I argue that Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and metaphysics point the way to resolving them.
Why is free will important?
1. Legally — distinguishing cases of moral responsibility from cases of non-agency. The idea of “deserving” punishment (or reward). Extended to eternal punishment by God
2. Distinguishing creation and original sin. Endemic moral defects not part of God’s creation or the human essence. Establishing the abnormality of sin, no matter how pervasive it is. “Jesus wept.” (John 11:36, death of Lazarus)
3. Part of a free-will theodicy — explaining why moral and spiritual evil exist at all,
The challenge of determinism, whether based on physical or psychological causation, or divine providence and foreknowledge, has been in decline for some time
I won’t address that here — there is less reason now to take any kind of determinism to be true. There are several reasons for dismissing determinism::
1.Quantum mechanics (although in some respects more deterministic than classical)
2. Indispensable role of probabilistic causation in the special sciences (i.e., everything except physics)
3. English Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s distinction between causation and determination, in her inaugural lecture at Cambridge.
4. Revival of Thomistic metaphysical theology — compatibility of divine providence with genuine contingency
Let’s assume that the world is thoroughly indeterministic. The past does not determine a unique future.
We’re still not out of the woods
3 problems remain.
1. The Hume/Mill challenge, repeated in a series of articles in the 1920s in the journal Mind. Sometimes called “the Mind argument.” Every event, including ever action or choice, is either determined or random. In neither case am I free or responsible. How can the fact that my choice is the result of some random, unpredictable in my brain or soul make me responsible for the choice>.
2. A related worry: my colleague Galen Strawson’s No Ultimate Moral Responsibility argument. I can be morally responsible only if my action is genuinely an expression of who I am —my beliefs, goals, and character. But I can’t be responsible for the moral character I have, if we are to reject circularity or infinite regresses. My original morally significant choices must be the expression of a character that I had no role in forming. This assumes a kind rtansitivity of non-responsibility: if I’m not morally responsible for my original choices, then I can’t be responsible for the moral character that resulted from them.
3. As Catholics, we seem to be committed to the reality of morally significant freedom without the possibility of sin, in three cases: Jesus (in His human nature), the BVM (from her conception), and the blessed in heaven.
The first two problems each call into question the all three rationales for positing free will. Can there be such a thing as morally significant freedom at all? Can there be such a thing as sin?
The third problem creates a difficulty for rationale 3, a freewill theodicy. If Jesus and Mary were free without the possibility of sin, why couldn’t the whole human race have been like that? It seems that God did not have to pay the pay of possible sin in order to secure the blessings of free will.
The freewill theodicy seems to depend on a principle of alternative possibilities.
Choice-PAP. If I am genuinely free to choose between A and B, then there must be, at the moment of choice, the possibility of my doing A and of my doing B. [handout]
Many also accept a moral version of PAP-
Moral PAP. If one is morally responsible for choosing A, then there must be a morally relevant alternative B os such a kind that, at he moment of choice, it was possible for me to choose B instead.
Aristotle recognized in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book 3, chapter 5) that MPAP is too strong. We need to add a proviso: unless one is morally responsible for having the sort of character that makes choosing B impossible.
Is this proviso one that can ever come into play? And it doesn’t seem relevant to Jesus and Mary— who were incapable of sin before they made their first choices.
Let me go over the three challenges in a bit more detail.
I. The Hume-Mill-Mind challenge
This is a by-product of a post-Aristotelian, modern philosophy of nature.
There are 4 characteristics of this modern philosophy of nature:
(1) Event-event causation: events are always caused by other events
(2) Static view of time. Time is 4th dimension, essentially like the three spatial dimensions.
T. S. Eliot reflected on the consequences of this view of time:
Let us go then, you and I, /
When the evening is spread out against the sky /
Like a patient etherized upon a table
(T S Eliot, The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
A static view of time drains all real agency from the world. The future is already laid out “like a patient etherized upon a table.”
(3) [Consequence of the first two] Causation is driven by abstract, mathematical laws of nature. We don’t have any say about those laws, or about the initial conditions of our lives, and so it seems that we are not really responsible for the things we do.
(4) All causation and explanation ultimately occurs at the microscopic scale: either microscopic particles, or tiny psychological elements within the soul. The behavior of the person as a whole is simple a consequence, whether precisely and certainly predictable or not, of the unintended interactions of these micro-elements
The Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature. William Simpson and I have been arguing that modern science, especially quantum theory, is moving us back from a “modern” PON to a more Aristotelian one. Nancy Cartwright at LSE/Durham has demonstrated that this alternative has always been the norm in the branches of science beyond elementary physics.
1. Substance-event causation. Substances, including macroscopic entities like animals and persons, cause events to occur. My choices and actions are not fundamentally caused by other events but by me, the agent.
2. Dynamic view of time. Time unfolds, as mere potentialities are differentially actualized by the actions of substances.
3. Causation is driven by causal powers and potentialities, grounded in natures or essences
4. Causal explanation involves irreducibly holistic of top-down explanation. A substance controls to a degree the activity of its parts— it is not all the other way around.
An action is not simply an event that happens to me.
And choices are actions— things that I do, by exercising my powers.
It is I, the person or rational animal, who exercises the relevant powers—not my brain, my neuron, my constituent particles, and not my beliefs, desires, inclinations, or habits
Agent causation has a long history: Thomas Reid (Essays on the Active Powers of Man, 1788), Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object, 1976), Timothy O’Connor (Persons and Causes, 2000)
The main problem for agent causation: trying to embed an Aristotelian account of rational action within a nature described by moderen Galilean-Baconian-Newtonian philosophy. This makes mind-body interaction an especially acute problem
If we Aristotelians are right, all causation is ‘agent’ causation.
Causal PAP: if substance x causes effect A, there is a contrary event B such that it was possible (at the point of action) for x to cause B instead.
Aristotelian substance causation does not require Causal PAP (in fact, Aristotle rejected it), but Causal PAP is in fact consistent with an Aristotelian PON. Aristotle did accept a restricted version of causal PAP, restricted to the rational actions of human agents.
But Causal PAP is not sufficient for moral responsibility.
Animals (and probably even plants and microorganisms) can act randomly, as part of an optimal strategy for survival and reproduction, without moral responsibility.
Rational choice is necessary for moral responsibility. Only a rational organism can act irrationally, and any immoral act is an irrational act (contrary to reason).
However, Choice PAP is correct.
If it were false globally (normally), all deliberation would be built upon an erroneous foundation. For Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics III.3): it is a basic principle of rationality that you do not deliberate about what is necessary or impossible- only about what is contingent. We can reasonably deliberate about what we falsely believe to be contingent, but such errors must be the exception, not the rule. Rationality cannot require ignorance, but it would if determinism were true and Choice PAP were false.
Therefore, we can see how an Aristotelian PON dissolves the challenge from Hume, Mill, and the Mind articles. Rational choices are not merely “random” events: they are caused by rational agents, exercising their rational powers. Rational agents are such difference makers—they affect the course of history in ways that are irreducible to the actions of their component parts.
Next time, I will turn now to the second challenge, from Galen Strawson: No Ultimate Moral Responsibility.
