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Assimilations and Rollbacks: Two Arguments Against Libertarianism Defended

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Abstract

The Assimilation Argument purports to show that libertarians cannot plausibly distinguish supposed exercises of free will from random outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. If this argument is sound, libertarians should either abandon their position or else concede that free will is a mystery. Drawing on a parallel with the Manipulation Argument against compatibilism, Christopher Franklin has recently contended that the Assimilation Argument is unsound. Here I defend the Assimilation Argument and the Rollback Argument, a second challenge to libertarianism that Franklin rejects. My aim in doing so is to underscore the force of these challenges, and thereby to resist what appears to be an emerging trend in the literature. By not coming to grips with the kind of power that libertarians must secure, many writers have recently downplayed or dismissed the pressing worry for libertarianism.

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Notes

  1. Some influential contemporary statements of this objection can be found in van Inwagen 1983, 142–150 and 2002; Mele 1999 and 2006, ch. 3; Haji 2001; and Almeida and Bernstein 2003. Though by no means insignificant, the differences among these formulations won’t concern us here. More recently, Mele (2013) presents a version of the objection that has affinities to the Assimilation Argument, not least that it eschews the concepts luck and chance.

  2. We might say that it belongs to the same family of objections, namely ones purporting to show, often by appealing to the notions of luck and chance, that libertarians cannot explain how we can have the kind of power over causally undetermined actions required for moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. This family notably includes van Inwagen’s version of Mind Argument (1983, 142–52).

  3. Examples of this emerging trend arguably include Balaguer (2010, 106–113) (though it should be stressed that Balaguer isn’t concerned with reconciling moral responsibility with causal indeterminism, as libertarians are); Almeida and Bernstein (2011); Ekstrom (2011); McCall and Lowe (2005); Vargas (2012); Steward (2012, ch. 6); as well as Franklin (2011a, 2012). (I say more about this in work in progress.) For an example of a philosopher who seems to find the Rollback Argument in particular more cogent now than in previous work, compare Clarke 2011, 347–348 n.10 with Clarke 2003, 164–167. For a recent challenge to the Rollback Argument, see Buchak 2013.

  4. In other work, Franklin (2011b) defends such an event-causal libertarian account. We needn’t look closely at this account here. However, one point is worth noting. Franklin (2012: 396–97) suggests that a neural event counts as a mental act of deciding only if it’s appropriately caused by the agent’s mental states, but he does not commit himself to any particular view about which mental states are essential. Some defenders of causal theories of action hold that the appropriate causes must include an agent’s intention to perform the act, where intentions are irreducible to other mental states (cf. Searle 1983, ch. 3). If the relevant decisions are actively formed intentions (cf. Mele 2000), then this particular causal theory of action isn’t open to Franklin on pain of an infinite regress of intentions.

  5. It makes no difference whether we consider a multiple-case version, such as Pereboom’s Four-case Argument (Pereboom 2001, 112–15), or a two-case version of the Manipulation Argument.

  6. At least, this is the challenge for compatibilists who aren’t prepared to bite the bullet and insist that the agent is morally responsible.

  7. Franklin writes, “In response to such cases, some compatibilists have maintained that such manipulated agents are not persons and that being a person is necessary for exercising free will” (ibid.). That is, some compatibilists have maintained, with regard to particular versions of the Manipulation Argument, that the manipulated entity doesn’t meet a precondition for free action: he or she isn’t a person (or a genuine agent), given the extent of the manipulation. If the nature and extent of the manipulation of an individual’s mental states cast doubt on the individual’s status as an agent, it will indeed suffice for compatibilists to cite this difference between the manipulated agent and an ordinary determined agent.

  8. In “Revisiting the Rollback Argument” section, I address the view that free will involves making a further, agent-causal contribution to the outcome.

  9. That said, it’s worth noting that objections to event-causal libertarian accounts, such as Kane’s, are sometimes expressed in terms of these accounts being too easily satisfied—that is, their conditions for free will are satisfied even though these conditions don’t convincingly answer the question of how the action is up to the agent. Thus, for example, Clarke (2003, ch. 8) has argued that libertarians should supplement a broadly Kane-style event-causal account with an agent-causal component, since an agent who satisfies event-causal libertarian conditions may still fail to exercise free will. (Thanks to Chris Franklin for reminding me of this point.) I take this objection to such accounts to be another way of saying that the conditions they provide, being too weak, fail to render it intelligible how a causally undetermined action could truly be up to (or settled by) the agent who performs it.

  10. Notice that Case 4b should further impugn Franklin’s claim that Case 5’s featuring an action is sufficient to defeat the Assimilation Argument. After all, the outcome in Case 4b isn’t up to Alice, yet Case 5 can’t be differentiated from Case 4b by saying that Alice acts in Case 5, since she acts in both.

  11. To be clear, Case 4b is unlike Cases 4 and 5 in that the relevant neural outcome is causally determined by its immediate antecedents; in this respect, Case 4b is like Case 3, where the device causally determines which neural state ensues, depending on which way the particle randomly swerves. However, Case 4b is different from Cases 3 and 4 in that Franklin’s grounds for denying that the neural outcome is a mental act don’t apply: when the mental states that embody Alice’s reasons for lying are neutralized, there is no reason to deny that the neural event that issues from her reasons to tell the truth is a mental act.

  12. I take it Franklin means to say “…observed variability from one replay to the next on the monitor displaying Case 5.”

  13. Nor, pace Franklin (407), do I see why a libertarian would “have to get himself rather muddled to be worried” by thought experiments along the lines of the Rollback Argument.

  14. In Shabo 2011: 123 n. 23, I briefly respond to one of Clarke’s (2004: 52) reasons for denying that there could be a contrastive explanation.

  15. See Buchak, op. cit. Buchak suggests (25) that an appeal to agent-causation might be a way for libertarians to reject the assumption of objective probabilities. A question that would need to be addressed, however, is whether there would be any significant cost to libertarians, agent- or event-causal, in rejecting objective probabilities. It might be thought, for example, that it would be harder for libertarians to account for the causal role of agents’ reason states, and the different motivational strengths of competing reason states, if they did not construe such states as potential probabilistic causes with determinate objective probabilities. In any case, it would be interesting to see an agent-causal account developed along these lines.

  16. McCall and Lowe, op. cit. (See also Steward, loc. cit.) While McCall and Lowe’s response may blunt the force of the Rollback Argument, I confess that I don’t understand how they think it will help with the Luck Objection more generally.

  17. In saying that the endorsement goes “all the way up,” Almeida and Bernstein mean that the agent would endorse her endorsement if asked, and that she would in turn endorse that endorsement, and so on, at every stage at which the question arose.

  18. Without discussing the Rollback Argument in particular, Almeida and Bernstein seemed in earlier work to take more seriously concerns about how a causally undetermined action could be up to the agent who performs it. See Almeida and Bernstein 2003.

  19. At one point, as Franklin (2012: 412 n.21) correctly observes, I mistakenly attribute to him the view that it’s incoherent to suppose that someone might lack a choice about which choice she makes (Shabo 2013: 301). But while Franklin doesn’t actually claim that this is incoherent, it remains an important and unanswered question whether he would accept that it is coherent, given his account of action, so that Alice could in principle lack a choice about which choice she makes in Case 5.

  20. Mele (2006: 53–56) presses a related version of the Luck Objection against agent-causal accounts, including O’Connor’s. Cf. Ginet 1997: p. 91.

  21. For an objection to O’Connor’s claim that the agent-causal occurrence—that is, the event that is the agent’s agent-causing her intention—cannot in turn have been caused, see Widerker 2005: 92–94.

  22. While O’Connor’s agent-causal account has evolved in significant ways, I take it he would still say that it’s incoherent to claim that it might not be up to Alice which intention she agent-causes.

  23. I would like to thank Chris Franklin and two anonymous referees for Philosophia for their close readings and valuable comments, which led to significant changes.

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Shabo, S. Assimilations and Rollbacks: Two Arguments Against Libertarianism Defended. Philosophia 42, 151–172 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9491-9

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