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HELEN STEWARD

Free Will and External Reality: Two Scepticisms Compared

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b i o g r a p h y

Helen Steward is Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Action at the University of Leeds. She received her D.Phil from the University of Oxford in 1992. Before moving to Leeds in 2007, she was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford for 14 years. Her research interests lie mainly in the philosophy of action and free will, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysical and ontological issues which bear on these areas (e.g. causation, supervenience, levels of explanation, the event/state distinction, the concepts of process and power). She has also worked on the category of animality and on understandings of the human being which take seriously our membership of the animal kingdom, and related biological and evolutionary perspectives on ourselves. She is the author of The Ontology of Mind (Oxford: OUP, 1997) and A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 2012), as well as many papers on free will, agency, mental causation and ontology of mind.

This year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Helen Steward as the 112th President of the Aristotelian Society.

e d i t o r i a l n o t e

The following paper is a draft version that can only be cited or quoted with the author’s permission. The final paper will be published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Issue No. 1, Volume CXX (2020). Please visit the Society’s website for subscription information: aristoteliansociety.org.uk.

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f r e e w i l l a n d e x t e r n a l r e a l i t y : t w o s c e p t i c i s m s c o m pa r e d

h e l e n s t e wa r d

IT IS POSSIBLE to be sceptical about whether or not anyone has free will. It is possible to be sceptical about whether a mind-independent external world exists. In this paper, I want to consider these two forms of scepticism side by side, and draw attention to what I believe is a curious disanalogy between them. I’m going to take as my starting point Bob Lockie’s interesting (2018) discussion of the so-called ‘Lazy Argument’, a consideration and refutation of which is attributed to Chrysippus by Cicero (44BC/1942); and also appears to be mentioned, again with a proposed refutation, by Origen in Contra Celsum (c.248AD/2008). There are of course, many disputes about how the Lazy Argument is supposed to go, but roughly, we can say that it is of something like the following form: (i) if it is fated that p, it must be futile to make efforts to avoid p; but (ii) equally, if it is fated that not-p, it must be futile to make efforts to ensure that p. But then, (iii) in respect of all those things that are fated either to be or not to be, it follows that all our efforts are always entirely futile. The Lazy Argument has generally been considered to be a sophism, having been judged fallacious not only by Chrysippus and Origen, but also by a range of subsequent commentators, including Cicero and Leibniz (1710/2005); and in our own times, by John Martin Fischer (2006) and Susanne Bobzien (1998). Lockie argues, however, that there is more to be said for it than might initially be thought; and in this paper, I shall be interested in exploring this suggestion.

I should perhaps confess that despite my interest in the Lazy Argument, I do not myself think that it can really be saved. The issue is complex, but as it stands, and were one to accept the presuppositions on which its premises rest (as I shall later explain, I do not), I think it would be a sophism. But I want to concur with Lockie, nevertheless, that there may be arguments in the vicinity of the Lazy Argument which have more going for them, arguments which turn precisely on not accepting those presuppositions; and I wish to draw, in making that case, on some of Lockie’s interesting ideas about the presumed directionality of the argument. I shall try to suggest that these questions about directionality are parallel, in some ways, to questions that are sometimes raised in epistemology, where similar argument forms can be run either in the modus ponens or modus tollens direction, depending on which propositions one takes to have the highest probability of being true. The parallels with the epistemological case are by no means exact, but I think they are at least suggestive. In general, my line is going to be that the debates about free will, on the one hand, and about our knowledge of the external world,

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helen steward free will and external reality

on the other, have advanced in disanalogous ways, ways that I think may help explain why we have difficulties seeing that the denial of free will (understood in a certain way), for all its unproveability, ought to be just as much of a non-starter for us as denial of the existence of the external world.

i. the lazy argument

According to Lockie, the proponent of the Lazy Argument argues that “if determinism is true, all our strivings are equally futile to an absolute and categorical degree” (p.153). A first thing to note is that Lockie speaks here of ‘determinism’, whereas the word generally used to translate the Stoic arguments (and which I used in my little sketch of the Lazy Argument, above) is ‘fated’; and there are interesting questions here about what the differences between these two concepts might be. For the purposes of this talk, however, I am going to presuppose that causal determinism would involve a variety of something that could reasonably be called ‘fatedness’; or even if this is denied, at any rate, that there is nothing wrong with the idea that a prima facie similar argument to that of the Stoics might be mounted which utilised determinism rather than fatedness as its central concept. 1 How might such an argument go? Here is a shot at one, based roughly on a simplified version of what Lockie calls ‘the conative transcendental argument’2:

P1 If determinism is true, we are powerless to avoid or alter p, for arbitrary (true) p.

P2. If we are powerless to avoid or alter p, for arbitrary (true) p, all our strivings are futile.

Therefore

C1 If determinism is true, all our strivings are futile.

Another version, one perhaps better deserving to be called the Lazy Argument, proceeds further to a normative recommendation of laziness, or doing nothing, under the supposition of determinism, for example:

P1 If determinism is true, we are powerless to avoid or alter p, for arbitrary (true) p.

1 I here rely on Bobzien’s argument that “For Chrysippus, the principle that if p is fated, p is not a statement about a relation between the present truth of a proposition about a future event and the future happening of that event which holds independently of any physical or causal relation in the world. Rather, for Chrysippus, this principle is about a physical or metaphysical power, fate, by which an occurrent p is determined, and which actively brings about or sustains p.” (Bobzien, 228).

2 Lockie (2018), 178.

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P2. If we are powerless to avoid or alter p, for arbitrary (true) p, all our strivings are futile.

P3 If our strivings are futile, we ought not to strive.

Therefore

C2 If determinism is true, we ought not to strive.

I shall not be too concerned in what follows with the differences between these arguments; mostly, because it is simpler, I shall concentrate my attention on the first, and will avoid the complexities involved in questions surrounding the prerequisites of normative recommendations. What I shall rather be focused on in this paper is Lockie’s claim that the Lazy Argument has typically been misread as a ‘straight’ argument for the conditional conclusion – an argument that if determinism is true, something else, something surprising or worrying, is true too, or perhaps that something surprising or worrying should be recommended. Whereas the intention of the proponent of the Lazy Argument, according to Lockie, is rather that the surprising or worrying implication ought rather to be taken as a reductio of the starting supposition of determinism. The defender of the Lazy Argument, says Lockie, “isn’t defending its … conclusion – of futility or impotence, a ‘decision to do nothing’ – he is saying that since any such conclusion is untenable, so is determinism” (p.153). The argument is that since our strivings would be futile if determinism were true – and since, plainly, they are not thus futile (or perhaps, slightly less strongly, cannot be accepted to be futile by anyone who wants to engage in argument at all) - determinism must be false. The arguments, that is, are intended to be continued beyond the conditionals with which I’ve concluded them: for example, having reached C1 (‘If determinism is true, all our strivings are futile’), we are supposed to go on:

P4: But it’s not the case that all our strivings are futile; therefore

C3: Determinism is false.

I think we can be fairly confident that Lockie is right that historically speaking, the Lazy Argument was intended to serve as a refutation of Stoic determinist principles, rather than as a proof of the futility of action; I am no scholar of Stoic philosophy, but this is certainly what Bobzien’s masterly treatment suggests, and I would be inclined to take her word for it. It is harder to be sure that Lockie is right that the Lazy Argument has been widely misinterpreted as an argument which is intended to support the futility of action, rather than as an anti- determinist strategy. After all, one who objects to an argument, it might be said, is objecting merely to an argument, rather than to its conclusion; so it cannot be inferred from the fact that one discusses the argument in what might be regarded as its ‘straight’ form fails to see that the intention

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of the argument is really to undermine the antecedent of one of the conditional premises, rather than to endorse the conclusion. But there is more that can be said in support of Lockie’s view. It’s true that if one’s objection were only to the validity of an argument, then that objection stands, no matter whether one takes the argument ‘straight’, as a defence of the conclusion, or as an indirect means, given, say, the obvious falsity of the conclusion, of undermining one of the premises. But that is not in fact how the most common line of objection to the Lazy Argument has proceeded; indeed, the validity of the argument as presented by Lockie, which is of the form ‘If p then q; if q then r; therefore if p then r’ is surely unimpeachable. Objections have generally been not to the validity of the Lazy Argument, thus formulated, but to its soundness; and of course, mainly to the truth of P1. Chrysippus’s own refutation, for example, based on the idea that under determinism, our actions are ‘co-fated’ along with their results, so that we must continue to act and to strive if we are to attain our ends, is of this kind. No one surely thinks the argument is invalid. But this might give us pause for thought about whether there not might after all be something to Lockie’s accusation that the argument has been misinterpreted. Perhaps we could put his point thus: in effect, the Lazy Argument forces a choice upon those who do not want simply to accept that all our strivings are futile; either deny P1 which asserts the connection between determinism and powerlessness; or deny the antecedent of P1, namely, determinism.3 Lockie’s point about the misinterpretation of the argument might perhaps be that more commentators ought to have been able to see, as perhaps he thinks its original proponents saw, that the second of these alternatives actually has more – or at least as much - going for it than the first.

I do not want for the purposes of this paper to focus on the simplified version of the conative transcendental argument presented above; I shall rather be interested mainly in the supplementary argument by modus tollens which Lockie thinks can be premised upon its conclusion. But for the record, let me say that I believe both the premises and the conclusion of the simplified conative argument, thus formulated, to be problematic, as they stand, not because they are false, exactly, but because the truth of determinism would in my view undermine important presuppositions of claims alleged here to be consequent upon determinism. I would want to reject the implicature, for example, that though we would be powerless, under the supposition of determinism, to avoid or alter anything that in fact occurs, we would not be simply powerless tout court, that we in some sense would still be there ‘doing’ things, though not the things we were powerless to do, of course; and I would also want to reject the

3 Or of course both, which would be, in a sense, my preferred option, as I shall explain shortly.

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presupposition that there would still be a ‘we’, under those circumstances, to be regarded as powerless in the first place. On my own preferred libertarian position, all these presuppositions would be false, since on that view, which I call ‘Agency Incompatibilism’, determinism is simply inconsistent with the existence of agents or agency. So we cannot happily deploy the Lazy Argument as though its premises were simply unproblematic in order to generate an argument that undermines determinism. But of course the points I have just made about the incompatibility of determinism with the existence of agents is itself a further argument against determinism. What my position amounts to, then, is not an endorsement of the conative transcendental argument as such; but rather a general endorsement of the idea that perhaps is somewhere lurking in the thinking of those who proffer the argument, that determinism cannot be made compatible with the presuppositions of agency. A central argument of my book, A Metaphysics for Freedom, is that agency is incompatible with determinism – because the existence of agents implies the existence of beings who can settle things in one way or another. If there are no settlers, on my view, then there are no agents. But if determinism is true, I argued, there can be no settlers, since everything has already been settled by conditions at the beginning of the Universe and the laws of nature, leaving no space for the existence of beings who can genuinely settle things at other times, things that had, in advance of the time of that settling, been unsettled. Since there are agents, then, I argued, determinism is false. This does not itself seem to have a good title to be called a Lazy Argument, of course – in particular, it does not mention any recommendation of laziness or suggest ‘doing nothing’ at any point - but it is nevertheless somewhat like the conative version of that argument, on Lockie’s preferred construal of it – in that it offers a premise about the existence of genuine agency in our world as a reason to reject the doctrine of determinism. One might represent the argument, in skeletal form, like this:

A1: If determinism were true, there would be no agents.

A2: There are agents.

AC1: Determinism is not true.

The reason I have become interested in Lockie’s thinking about the Lazy Argument is not, then, that I think the Lazy Argument can, or should, be saved; but because I think his defence of it raises an interesting question. Lockie is at pains to stress that the argument is supposed to be taken as a refutation of determinism and that this has been missed. But if it has been missed, why has it been missed? In my mind, the answer to this question connects with an objection that is constantly being made to my own view, which I call Agency Incompatibilism. That objection is that it is outrageous to claim that agency is incompatible with determinism in a

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context in which we do not know that determinism is not true. Whereas what I want to say, of course, is that we do know that determinism is not true, precisely because of the argument that it is incompatible with agency; and our knowledge that agency exists. The knowledge that agency exists is, to my way of thinking, much like the assumption that it is not the case that all our strivings are futile, a point from which argument can proceed, because we can take it to be known more securely than any of the other propositions which might be jettisoned as a result of the argument. But even given that starting point, there remains the choice, of course, between the denial of the conditional (‘if determinism is true, there are no agents’) and the denial of its antecedent (determinism is true’), just as, with the Lazy Argument, we have the choice between the denial of the conditional P1 and the denial of its antecedent. My interest is in how we are to set about making this choice – the choice, effectively, between compatibilism and libertarianism. And what I am particularly concerned to insist upon is that the libertarian choice should not be made to seem more preposterous than it actually is by assumptions that are ingrained, but dispensable. In the rest of this paper, I shall be trying to explain what I think those assumptions are.

Readers of this draft should note that changes and additions to the following section are anticipated!

ii. pure suppositional vs live option conditionals

Let us consider the following argument by modus tollens which Lockie believes to have been the ‘real’ Lazy Argument, if I can put it that way – the argument summarily stated in a way which actually draws the conclusion that he believes the argument’s proponents wish us to draw.

The ‘Real’ Lazy Argument

C1: If determinism is true, all our strivings are futile.

P4: It is not the case that all our strivings are futile.

Therefore;

C3: Determinism is not true.

Plainly, there is nothing wrong with the formal validity of this argument. What is going to be difficult for the proponent of the argument is to establish C1; and I don’t want to dispute the difficulty of that task, nor that it is where all the action really lies, when it comes to the choice between compatibilism and libertarianism. But what I want to draw attention to is a feature that I think makes C1 seem not merely controversial, and in need of support – but functionally problematic as a premise in the argument it is supposed to subserve - and that is an assumption that may

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be regarded as encoded in the grammar of the indicative conditional, C1 – the assumption, as I shall put it, that determinism is a live option.

Consider the claim (C1) that if determinism is true, all our strivings are futile. And now compare it with the claim that if determinism were true, all our strivings would be futile. It is, notoriously, not easy to say quite what the difference is between conditionals of these two kinds, and here is not the place to defend, much less to develop, any particular theory. However, I think it is fair to say that several prominent accounts of the distinction in the current literature at least include the idea that one important difference between indicative and subjunctive conditionals concerns the presupposed epistemological position of the parties to the conversation in which the conditional is proffered. In offering an indicative conditional, in particular, one appears to presuppose that its antecedent is possibly true, for all that is known to the partners in that conversation, at the point at which the conditional is offered – that the antecedent is in the ‘context set’ or the ‘common ground’ – or, to use the terminology that I prefer, that the antecedent is (for the purposes of the discussion) a live option. If it was acknowledged to be part of the common ground, for example, that it was not the case that determinism was true, one would never begin any reasoning process with a conditional that begins ‘If determinism is true …’. If one wanted to reason from the supposition of determinism to some conclusion or other, one would need, in such circumstances, to shift to the subjunctive, ‘If determinism were true …’ to signal that one acknowledges that one is going outside the bounds of what partners to the conversation agree is the established falsity of determinism.

Stalnaker (1975) offered an appealing explanation of our need for some such distinction as this between indicative and subjunctive conditionals. His view was that indicative conditionals are, in a sense, the primary kind – the kind we put to use in contexts of deliberation, contingency-planning, and so on – and that they can only serve these important functions properly if it is a normal expectation that we are only in the business of considering worlds we don’t already know to be non-actual. However, he notes, there may of course be special purposes for which we might need to reach outside and quantify over worlds which include some which are agreed for the purposes of discussion to be non-actual. But when we do this, we need to signal that this is what we are doing – and this is the purpose of the use of subjunctive grammar in connection with the conditional. The subjunctive, then, normally marks the fact that in one way or another, we are straying, or at least possibly straying, outside the realm of epistemic possibility.

In quite which way we are straying outside the realm of epistemic possibility is a matter of controversy. It does not seem possible to

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maintain that we are always straying, in using a subjunctive, into strictly counterfactual realms, because of conditionals such as ‘’If Jones had taken arsenic, he would have shown just exactly those symptoms he does in fact show”, as used in the course of an argument to support the conclusion that Jones has indeed taken arsenic.4 Some have suggested that what is presupposed in a subjunctive conditional is not that the antecedent is false but that it is epistemically possible that it is false5. But as von Fintel (1998) has pointed out, there are cases which make it seem that the issue about subjunctive presupposition cannot be about the epistemic status of the antecedent at all. He considers cases in which we reason by means of sequences of subjunctive conditionals, such as the following:

‘If Polly had come to dinner tonight we would have had a good time. If Uli had made the same amount of food that he in fact made, she would have eaten most of it.’

Clearly, it’s not epistemically possible that Uli didn’t make the amount of food that he in fact made. This kind of example seems to make it clear that it isn’t in fact the epistemic status of the antecedent which is the issue, but rather the epistemic status of the domain of relevant worlds under consideration. The relevant worlds, in this particular case, are those in which (i) Polly came to dinner and (ii) Uli then made the same amount of food that he in fact made – and it is the fact that these worlds are not included in the common ground that makes the subjunctive appropriate. Von Fintel’s own suggestion is that the presupposition of the subjunctive is that the domain of quantification is partly outside the context set – or as he puts it, that D(w) is not included in C. For the purposes of this paper, though, it should not be necessary for me to plump for any particular view of the presuppositions of the subjunctive, as long as it can be agreed that it is a normal presupposition of the use of the indicative that we remain, in some important sense, within the realm of live options. However, as will become clear shortly, I believe it is true of the indicative, as well as of the subjunctive case that the epistemic status of the consequent, as well as of the antecedent, can be relevant to the felicitousness of the conditional.

Let us return, now, to Lockie’s ‘Real’ Lazy Argument. Suppose one is trying, as Lockie believes the Stoics’ opponents were trying, to offer an argument which shows that determinism is false, and proposes to set off from the conditional premise that ‘if determinism is true, all our strivings are futile’. This is, as it stands, an indicative conditional – and hence, by the principles we have been discussing thus far, it should not involve quantification over worlds which partners to the conversation agree to

4 See Anderson (1951: 37).

5 Karttunen and Peters (1979).

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be non-actual. So far as the antecedent is concerned, and given that we are arguing, precisely, about determinism, we have not breached the rule – it must be a point agreed between us that the falsity of determinism is not known already if there is to be any point to the argument (which of course seeks to show that determinism is false). But what about the consequent? Worlds in which all our strivings are futile, one might think, are worlds which we must be supposing are quite evidently already agreed between us to be non-actual, if we are bothering to argue with one another in the first place – why should I bother to try to convince you of anything if doing so is futile? Of course, the falsity of the consequent is precisely what the argument attempts to exploit – and is what the eventual modus tollens that Lockie urges upon us requires. Modus tollens is precisely a mode of argument that allows us to close off the option represented by an antecedent, given the falsity of its consequent. But surely the falsity of consequent needs to be, as it were, an additional piece of information if there is to be any point in the argument, not something already pragmatically implicit in what is being assumed by the first premise. The question is whether we can square presupposed, mutually accepted falsity in the consequent with the use of the indicative conditional in a modus tollens argument? Is there not something non-felicitous about this combination?

To see that the epistemic status of the consequent, as well as that of the antecedent, can be relevant to whether an indicative conditional is permissible in a given context, it will help to consider a different kind of case. Consider someone gazing with a friend out of the window at dry pavements and saying: ‘If it has rained, the pavements are wet; but the pavements are dry; so it hasn’t rained’. Since we can both see that the pavements are dry, and can both see that the other can see this, I maintain that the conditional from which this argument begins is non-felicitous. One could not, under such circumstances, begin an argument for its not having rained with this conditional. If we were not gazing out of the window, of course, and were both ignorant of the current state of the pavements, it would be perfectly all right for me to argue:

R1: If it has rained the pavements are (will be) wet.

But R2:The pavements aren’t wet (after going to look).

So C: It hasn’t rained.

And it would also be perfectly all right for me to argue, while staring with you out of the window at the dry pavements:

RS1: If it had rained, the pavements would be wet.

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But RS2: The pavements are not wet (as we can see).

So CS: It hasn’t rained.

that is, to begin the argument from a subjunctive conditional. But in a situation in which we are both aware that the pavements are dry, and both aware that the other is aware of the same thing, we cannot felicitously begin from the indicative conditional. If we feel the need for an argument here at all, we will have to set off from the subjunctive ‘If it had rained, the pavements would be wet’, so as to avoid contravening the rule that indicative conditionals are only appropriate when the domains under consideration involve live options.

In speaking about this case, I have suggested that it is the fact that we were both ‘aware of’ or that we ‘knew’ or ‘could see’ that the pavements were dry that prevented the use of the indicative in this case – but in fact, of course, we do not need to be right about the dryness of the pavements, in order for the point to hold. Perhaps, for example, we have both been conned by some clever optical illusion into thinking the pavements are dry when they are not – in which case, of course, neither of us can be aware of the fact that they are dry, or know that fact, since it is not true. The crucial point, then, must rather be about what we take ourselves and our interlocutors to know (or perhaps be justifiably presupposing) at the moment we offer the conditional (whether or not we do in fact have the relevant knowledge). Since the indicative conditional signals that we intend not to go beyond the bounds of what we agree is epistemically possible, we cannot use it in a context in which we recognise that we are to take ourselves to have already agreed that the consequent is not epistemically possible. In such a context, we must shift to the subjunctive.

My suggestion is that someone offering the Real Lazy Argument, as formulated above, is in a similar position to someone offering the evidently infelicitous argument for the conclusion that it hasn’t rained, while staring at what certainly appear to be manifestly dry pavements with one’s interlocutor. In such a situation, we both already take the other to be in a position to have ruled out the wetness of the pavements as an epistemic possibility. That they are wet is not a live option for us. And likewise, in arguing from the indicative conditional ‘if determinism is true, all our strivings are futile’ it might be said, we have contravened the rule which says that we are supposed to remain within the bounds of what we should assume we both have reason to suppose epistemically possible. In this case, it is not shared perceptual evidence, but rather the necessity of assuming argumentational purpose that does the damage – but the underlying point is the same - that the situation we are in gives us reason to suppose that certain possibilities have to be understood to be non-live for us. And that means that the first premise of the Real Lazy Argument is

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a problem – it is as though in entertaining the conditional as part of our argumentation, we must have already dismissed the possibility of futility it insists we entertain at least until we arrive at the second premise!

The point, if anything, is even clearer in connection with the argument of the Agency Incompatibilist. Recall that that argument (as I should like to express it) goes as follows:

A1: If determinism were true, there would be no agents.

A2: There are agents.

AC1: Determinism is not true.

Expressed in this subjunctive mode, there is nothing exceptionable here; but my opponents often try to pin on me a version of the argument based on an indicative conditional – an argument, that is, that begins instead from the premise ‘If determinism is true, there are no agents’. And with this argument, they are inclined to find fault. They say to me, for example: look, you’re saying that if determinism is true, there aren’t any agents! But obviously, (we both agree, don’t we?) there are definitely agents! So your position is kind of crazy! You’re saying that if it were to turn out that determinism is true, there wouldn’t be any agents! But we surely know that there are! And moreover, it could turn out that determinism is true! So your conditional must be unacceptable! But of course my response would be that my argument (stated in the subjunctive fashion I prefer) gives me reason to believe that determinism will not turn out to be true. And for one who thinks that is so, the indicative conditional is non-felicitous. Moreover, for anyone debating with a person who takes an antecedent to be outside the realm of epistemic possibility, the felicitous choice will be the subjunctive conditional, which is maximally inclusive of debaters who take themselves to be in different epistemic conditions.

iii. why the misinterpretation?

What I next want to ask is why the interpretation which involves what I am calling ‘live option’ conditionals seems to arise so often in the minds of interpreters, both of the Lazy Argument and of the Agency Incompatibilist’s argument, when what seem to be preferable options based on subjunctive conditionals are available? The reason, roughly, I think, is the rather simple one that determinism has in fact been treated throughout most of the history of philosophy as though it were a live possibility. It has been treated as a thesis that for all we know might be true. The contemporary version of this view is very often explicitly stated by participants in the free will debate: it is that whether or not determinism is true is an empirical question, to be left to what Fischer (2006) describes as ‘the men in white coats’ to decide. It is an essentially scientific matter, with which

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we philosophers have no business getting ourselves entangled; our job, as philosophers, is simply to figure out what would follow from it. And in such a context as this, it is of course very natural to go for a live option reading of the crucial argument. In a context in which it is being taken for granted that determinism is a live option, indeed, the subjunctive reading which arrives at the conclusion that determinism is false might just look like a proof of the silliness of its own first premise – any argument which results so straightforwardly in the conclusion that determinism is not true, when we don’t in fact know that it isn’t true, because it is a live option, looks like it must have something wrong with it. But I am very interested in this silly-looking argument. Can a case be made for its legitimacy, in a context in which we’re being constantly enjoined to keep determinism available as a live option?

It’s at this point that I want to begin to introduce some comparisons with the external world debate which I think might help us. It is of course, as I said at the outset, possible to be sceptical about whether mind-independent external reality exists, just as it is possible to be sceptical about whether free will does. But it is rather striking that no one in fact – or at least, almost no one - genuinely doubts the existence of external reality. Radical conclusions are often drawn in the context of debates about the external world about what I can prove, what I can know, what I can reasonably believe and so on – but they remain, on the whole, thoroughly epistemic. No one seriously worries about the possible non-existence of the external world as a live option. But by contrast, people do worry about the possible non-existence of free will as a live option. Some people are indeed pretty certain that there is no such thing as free will – and even those who are inclined to think there probably is are often at least a bit tentative about it. And this is, I think, an interesting disparity, on which we have reason to reflect, because it bears on the question just how dialectically preposterous it is simply to assert that our strivings are not futile (for example), or that there is agency, and then use that to undermine the thesis of determinism. We do not appear to think that it is dialectically preposterous to assume (for a great many purposes) the existence of the external world.

There are many ways in which one might attempt to explain the fact that the denial of the existence of mind-independent reality is not a live option for us – and I don’t want to get into them in a great deal of detail here, since the focus of this paper remains the free will debate. Some of the explanations might indeed have to do with arguments, perhaps of a transcendental kind, why the denial would be incoherent in some way, or self-refuting, or self-undermining – in much the same sort of way as Lockie has suggested the denial of free will might be. But other explanations might be more prosaic. I think many philosophers are prepared to accept that we don’t know – and perhaps even more, that we have no reason to

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think it even more likely than not – that there is any mind-independent reality – and they don’t expect that any transcendental argument is going to ride to the rescue. But still, they don’t accept that the non-existence of mind-independent reality is a properly live option. They merely note the sceptical arguments with interest, and move on.

I don’t want to argue about whether this attitude is or is not acceptable in the context of the external world debate. The point I want to make here is that I think we should agree that this is very much not how things are so far as the denial of free will is concerned. The debate about free will is unquestionably live. There are many who seriously doubt the existence of free will in a way that no one (much) seriously doubts the existence of the mind independent world – and this is no doubt connected to the temptingness of live option readings of the Lazy Argument. I want now to offer some reflections on why this disanalogy exists – and to end by suggesting that we ought to question it.

iv. determinism as an empirical thesis

The first reason why I think people are inclined to suppose that determinism is a live option is the one I have already mentioned – that it is assumed that determinism is an empirical thesis. Here, for example, is Fischer’s definition of determinism:

“For any given time, a complete statement of the [nonrelational] facts about that time, together with a complete statement of the laws of nature, entails every truth as to what happens after that time” (Fischer, 2006: 5).

Is this true? Nobody knows, one might say, because nobody has the crucial ‘complete statements’ to hand – nobody can therefore run them through a logic tree to find out whether determinism is true. And probably nobody ever will have the crucial statements to hand. But if anyone does ever have them, it will be scientists – because they are in charge of providing that complete statement of the laws of nature; and they are also in charge of saying what the empirical facts are at any given time. Probably, the necessary knowledge will never be available – but even if it is, it is not going to come from a priori theorising or pure argumentation. In the meantime, then, we must content ourselves, as philosophers, with deciding merely what we would say, if determinism turned out to be true (as well it might, as it were). That must be the limit of our ambition.

I am myself deeply opposed to this way of thinking about determinism. I am deeply opposed, for a start, to thinking that determinism can be stated helpfully in this way as a thesis whose central concept is entailment. The main problem with this way of doing things is that certain views which are

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utterly unthreatening to freedom are consistent with the definition – views, for example, according to which the laws of nature are what have been called ‘non-governing’ laws, mere useful, Humean generalisations which impose no actual constraints on the unfolding of reality at all. But no one concerned about free will, it seems to me, need worry about determinism if this is all laws are. If that is all laws are, if it is all just one little thing and then another, we can all agree to be compatibilists and go home. No, the worrying conceptions of determinism, the ones which truly threaten free will, are the ones whose central concept is necessitation, conceived of as some kind of metaphysical relation, not entailment. If we are going to bother about whether determinism is compatible with free will, let us at least start with a conception of determinism that actually does look as though it might be threatening to free will – rather than one that is clearly compatible with it. Let us ditch the entailment definition.

But if we do start with a necessitation-based conception of determinism, it is much less clear that determinism can any longer be regarded as a purely empirical thesis. Any thesis whose central concept is necessitation – an interesting modal concept – looks already like it is shaping up to be a thesis on which philosophers could reasonably get their hands. Has the future ‘been in the post’ for 13.75 billion years, as Lockie (2018) puts it? What would it mean to say so? What would the presuppositions of such an assumption be? Do we already have reason to believe that some of those presuppositions are false? What would the consequences of such an assumption be? Do we already have reason to believe that some of the consequences are false? And with these last two questions, the ones about consequences, comes the possibility of offering arguments against determinism based on subjunctive conditionals – arguments that attempt to show, for example, that if determinism were true, there could be no agency; so – since there clearly is agency – determinism cannot be true. We philosophers are no longer stuck in the stultifying realm of ‘live option’ thinking – supposing that whatever we say has to remain consistent with the allegedly unassailable fact that we do not know whether determinism is true, because the men in white coats still haven’t figured it out.

v. local influence

A second factor which I think has tempted us to embrace ‘live option’ arguments in the free will debate is the close association between that debate itself, and related debates about moral responsibility, punishment and blame. Worrying examples crowd our brains. There is Phineas Gage who is alleged to have undergone drastic personality changes when an iron rod entered his brain following a serious accident. Drugs can render us happier, more docile, paranoid, anxious, etc. thereby suggesting

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that brain chemistry for which we are not responsible might play a large role in determining what kinds of people we eventually become. Difficult upbringings impact on children making it tremendously hard, perhaps even impossible, for those affected to lead happy and successful independent adult lives. There are, in other words, undeniable islands of local influence, perhaps even of local determinism in our experience – factors which, having been present in individual cases, plainly lessen the responsibility we feel able to attach to the relevant agents, and incline us to judge that their free will has been impaired. We have discovered these islands, we think – but then, it is easy to worry - what is to say that the whole of a person’s behaviour, if we only knew it, is not completely determined by such factors – factors which are such that no individual is responsible for them? And then we are in the ball park of another kind of argument that the nonexistence of free will must surely be considered to be a live option.

But at this point, a comparison with a certain move in the philosophical debate about the existence of external reality suggests itself. Descartes (1641/1984), recall, first introduces his sceptical doubt in the Meditations by beginning with the reflection that we often go wrong in the judgements we make on the basis of perception – round towers sometimes looks square from a distance; straight sticks look bent in water, and so on. There are notable islands of local error. But a common response in the secondary literature to these initial observations about the ubiquitous possibility of error is that one cannot infer safely from the fact that I can make mistakes about the odd tower that I might be completely mistaken about the existence of the external world.6 One cannot, that is, infer the possibility of global error from these local issues with perception-based judgements – that would be to engage in a fallacious move from the ubiquitous possibility of error to the possibility of ubiquitous error, as it is sometimes put. But in the literature on free will, I think we are often encouraged to accept as a serious possibility what is, to my mind, an equally preposterous totalising conclusion – the thesis of determinism – partly on the basis of similarly local phenomena - the existence of mere islands of local influence in the causal stories which underpin behaviour. Of course, I am not suggesting for a moment that the islands of local influence should be ignored, or that they are not relevant to questions about moral responsibility, punishment and blame. All I am saying is that the existence of islands of local influence no more suggest that global determinism is true than the fact that we make mistakes about round towers suggests that we’ve reason to worry about the existence of the external world.

6 See, for example, Kenny (1968); Cottingham (1998).

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vi. compatibilism

And finally - no inventory of reasons for the persistence of the ‘determinism as live option’ thinking in the free will debate would be complete that did not mention compatibilism. For what compatibilism gives us, of course, is the possibility of accepting that determinism is a live option without having to worry too much about it – since, even if determinism were true, compatibilism entails that no frightening consequences hang on it, at any rate not where free will is concerned. The parallel position in the debate about external reality might be something like an agnostic quietism – a view which held that perhaps we indeed don’t know whether or not there is a mind-independent reality – but there’s something, anyhow, and whatever the nature of that something turns out to be, no difference to anything that matters could possibly be made by any discovery pertaining to that nature. With compatibilism on the table, then, there’s no real point agonising about determinism and whether or not it’s true – because the sting has gone out of the question. Compatibilism is what enables even the live option theorist to save the appearances – to insist that we are agents, despite determinism – and that nothing we value need be given up by keeping that live option open.

I want to conclude, though, by agreeing with Lockie that there is a good alternative to the embrace of compatibilism for those who wish to save the appearances and defend the existence of free will. The alternative is a form of libertarianism, which asserts the existence of agency as a de facto certainty and argues from it to the falsity of determinism. Libertarians should have the courage to take arguments based on subjunctive conditionals like A1 where those arguments lead them. And in doing so they are only doing the same thing we do every day when we judge that the fact that the external world exists is more certain, more robust as a starting point, than any of the premises on the basis of which we might think to doubt it. We should embrace as a piece of knowledge the claim that there are agents; and be prepared to defend the idea that we can know, on this basis, that determinism is false. I do not suppose, of course, that this settles the matter between compatibilists and libertarians – which is a question on which I have barely touched in this paper. I only mean to insist that libertarians need not accept the epistemic assumptions which can make it look as though their arguments fly in the face of various sorts of common sense. To base arguments for the falsity of determinism on the existence of agency is to do nothing more preposterous, I believe, nothing more question-begging than is regularly done by philosophers who take it for granted in all their other arguments and reasonings that the external world exists. Agency and

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the external world are on a par. We can deny neither without undermining the very things which make all our enterprises possible.

University of LeedsSchool of Philosophy,

Religion and History of ScienceLeeds, LS2 9JT

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references

Bobzien, Susanne (1998): Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Cicero (44BC/1942): De Fato tr. H. Rackham (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press).

Descartes, René (1641/1984: Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. II, tr. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Cottingham, J. Descartes (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Fischer, J.M. (2006a): ‘Free Will and Moral Responsibility’ in D. Copp (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 321-54.

Fischer, J.M (2006b): My Way (New York: Oxford University Press).

Karttunen and Peters (1979): ‘Conventional Implicature’ In Choon-Kyu Oh and David Dinneen (eds.) Syntax and Semantics Vol 11: Presupposition (New York: Academic Press): 1-56.

Kenny, Anthony (1968): Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy (Bristol: Thoemmes Press).

Leibniz, G.W. (1710/2005): Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man tr. E.M. Huggard (London: Routledge).

Lockie, Robert (2018): Free Will and Epistemology: A Defence of the Transcendental Argument for Freedom (London: Bloomsbury).

Origen and Chadwick, H. (c.248AD/2008): Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Stalnaker, Robert. ‘Indicative Conditionals’, Philosophia 5: 269-86.

Steward, Helen (2012): A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford: OUP).

Von Fintel, Kai (1997): ‘The Presupposition of Subjunctive Conditionals’, in Orin Percus and Uli Sauerland (eds.) MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 25.

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