Abstract
Hudson (A materialist metaphysics of the human person, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2001, The metaphysics of hyperspace, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005) has formulated two local deterministic theses and argued that both are incompatible with freedom. We argue that Hudson has half the story right. Moreover, reflection on Hudson’s theses brings out an important point for debates about freedom generally: that instead of focusing on the notion of entailment, debates about freedom should focus on the notions of explanation and sourcehood. Hudson’s theses provide an excellent case study for why the latter notions ought to take precedence over the former in debates about freedom.
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Notes
We use the term ‘entails’ loosely for ease of expression. In this loose sense, an object, proposition, state of affairs, etc. entails another just in case the existence, truth, obtaining, etc. of the first item metaphysically necessitates that of the second.
This is a rough statement of what has come to be known as the Consequence Argument, thanks to its classic treatment by van Inwagen (1983).
Assuming foreknowledge is like perceiving the future, that is. But even that is not usually taken for granted in discussions of the problem of freedom and foreknowledge. For further discussion, see Wasserman (n.d.).
This is a familiar move in debates about the relationship between foreknowledge and freedom. See, for example, several of the essays in Fischer and Todd (2015).
For a nice exploration of a similar sort of asymmetry, see Swenson (2016).
Our presentation below is obviously indebted to Hudson’s own presentation in his 2001, chapter 1. But the original statement of the problem can be found in Unger (1980).
For discussion about the nature of mereological simples, see Markosian (1998a).
According to Hudson’s favored view—Partism—“parthood is a three-place relation between two objects and a region of spacetime” (2001: 61). This allows the Partist to say that the one person in our story about Neal and Neil is composed of the simples in the Primary Set at a certain region of spacetime, but also composed of the simples in the Secondary Set at a different region of spacetime.
Lewis (1999: 178) considers an analogous case involving cats and says the following: “Remember how we translate statements of number into the language of identity and quantification, ‘There is one cat on the mat’ becomes ‘For some x, x is a cat on the mat, and every cat on the mat is identical to x’. That’s false, if we take ‘identical’ to express the complete and strict identity… But the very extensive overlap of the cats does approximate to complete identity. So what’s true is that for some x, x is a cat on the mat, and every cat on the mat is almost identical to x. In this way, the statement that there is one cat on the mat is almost true. The cats are many, but almost one. By a blameless approximation, we may say simply that there is one cat on the mat. Is that true?—Sometimes we’ll insist on stricter standards, sometimes we’ll be ambivalent, but for most contexts it’s true enough”.
You might initially be puzzled about clause (ii): why build a double-entailment into the antecedent of this principle? Hudson (2001: 42) explains that without clause (ii), you could construct a counterexample to the principle by replacing ‘A’ with ‘Hannah’, ‘B’ with ‘God’, ‘doing x’ with ‘clapping her hands’, and ‘doing y’ with ‘permitting Hannah to clap her hands’. God’s permitting Hannah to clap her hands is (plausibly) entailed by Hannah’s clapping her hands, but it doesn’t seem like that’s enough to undermine God’s freedom. Hudson thus revises the principle to include a double-entailment, which would make it inapplicable to the God/Hannah case. In our view, however, the explanation for why Hannah’s freely clapping her hands doesn’t undermine God’s freedom is that the relevant entailment doesn’t pose a threat to God’s being the source of his action. As we’ll see, once this is appreciated, even the sort of double-entailment that features in (PP) doesn’t look like the right sort of fact to be threatening to freedom.
Hudson (2005) defends this claim, but we need not examine his defense here.
Some may object that such a supposition is simply too much – it is either necessarily false or too far from the actual world to merit consideration. We won’t be taking a stand on this issue. This is, after all, just a warmup exercise.
Presumably a similar threat could be articulated by conceiving of three-dimensional objects not as reflections but rather as the shadows of four-dimensional beings. We’re inclined to think, however, that the threats from Mirror Determinism and Shadow Determinism would stand or fall together.
When we speak of sourcehood, we have in mind the aspect of freedom that Watson (1987) calls ‘self-determination’, which is at least separable from (though possibly metaphysically dependent on) access to alternative possibilities. According to Watson, any adequate theory of freedom—compatibilist or incompatibilist—has to account for both of these elements.
Assuming non-Humeanism about the laws, of course. For discussion on this point, see Beebee and Mele (2002).
See, for example, Todd (2013).
Another way to put the point: although “it will be the case that p” was true in the past, it’s not a fact about the past, and arguably, when we say that the past is not up to us, that only applies to facts about the past, and not to facts in the past (i.e, true in the past) that were about the future.
And given the way we’ve set up the case, it’s not even that Neal’s brother is larger, or anything like that.
If there is no explanatory relationship between the actions of Neil and those of Neal, then you might wonder how exactly there could be a double-entailment in the first place. Wouldn’t it simply be a monumental modal coincidence that Neal’s actions and Neil’s actions always march in lockstep? Hud Hudson has offered an intriguing suggestion in personal conversation: perhaps Neal’s action is identical to Neil’s action. As such, this modal coincidence is not surprising at all. See note 23 for how this suggestion fits in with our response to the threat of Many-Brothers Determinism. Absent Hudson’s suggestion, though, this modal coincidence is perhaps another reason to be skeptical of the Ludovician solution to the Problem of the Many.
There’s an additional reason not to use (PP) to argue for Mirror Determinism: although Neal’s waving his hand does cause Neal’s reflection to wave his “hand”, the first doesn’t entail the second. After all, Neal need not be standing in front of a mirror. So, a general lesson here is that issues of sourcehood and explanation are the locus of the worry for freedom, whether or not entailment is involved. Thanks to a referee for this point.
Hudson (2005: 154 n. 16) also sketches a related variety of local determinism that might become worrisome for three-dimensional beings embedded in a higher-dimensional space: surface determinism. Just as a three-dimensional object might be the reflection of a four-dimensional object, so a three-dimensional object might be the surface of a four-dimensional object. He then goes on to point out that this would only be a threat to the freedom of the three-dimensional surface if we imagine that the free actions of the four-dimensional object somehow fix the behavior of its surface. This isn’t the only way to imagine the interaction between the surface of an object and the object itself, though. As Hudson points out, “…one can imagine an inert cube that is pulled along by the willful activity of its uppermost face” (2005: 154 n. 16). Though we don’t discuss surface determinism in the text, it is instructive to note that these two ways of envisioning the relationship between an object and its surface are parallel to the threats from causal determinism and divine foreknowledge, respectively. If the object fixes the behavior of the surface, then the surface is plausibly not the source of its behavior, and this is why surface determinism appears to be a threat to freedom. On the other hand, if the surface’s willful activity pulls along the object, then even if the position of the object entails facts about the position of the surface, that entailment will arguably not undermine the sourcehood of the surface and hence will not be as obvious a threat to the surface’s freedom.
As mentioned above, Hud Hudson has suggested (in personal conversation) that perhaps Neal’s action is not distinct from Neil’s action – rather, there is only one action performed by distinct agents. If so, then facts about Neal’s action are certainly not dependent on facts about Neil’s action, otherwise facts about Neal’s action would depend on themselves, and that looks incoherent. However, even if there is only one action performed, we should still treat differently the threats of Many-Brothers Determinism and Mirror Determinism. In Many-Brothers Determinism, the single action would have both Neal and Neil as a source—Neal’s being the source of the action need not exclude Neil’s being the source of the action as well. However, in Mirror Determinism, it is fairly intuitive that the action performed by the reflection has its source only in the higher-dimensional agent. This is because, intuitively, the actions of the higher-dimensional agent explain the actions of the reflection and not vice-versa. Hence, even if we grant Hudson’s suggestion, there seems to be an important asymmetry in sourcehood between these two types of determinism.
Here we suspect we are endorsing what Hudson (2005: 142–144) calls ‘soft-fact compatibilism’ as the right answer to the problem of Many-Brothers Determinism. We admit that there may be some resistance to the idea that the actions of any one of the brothers may be at least partly up to each of the rest of the brothers. But to resist the argument we need not insist on this; we need only insist that (PP) has to be restricted to apply to events that have the sort of intrinsicality that hard facts are typically thought to have. Then at the very least it will be unclear whether (PP) applies to the case of many brothers.
For a different route to the same speculation, see Tognazzini (2016). For helpful comments on previous versions of this paper, thanks very much to Hud Hudson and two anonymous referees.
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Law, A., Tognazzini, N.A. Free Will and Two Local Determinisms. Erkenn 84, 1011–1023 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9992-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9992-9