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Sublating the free will problematic: powers, agency and causal determination

  • S.I.: Real Possibilities, Indeterminism and Free Will
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Abstract

I argue that realism about causal powers (which, loosely following Brian Ellis, I refer to as ‘anti-passivism’) sublates the passivist, Humean-inflected free will problematic. In the first part of the paper I show that adopting what I call ‘powers-non-determinism’ reconfigures the conceptual terrain with respect to the causation component of the contemporary problematic. In part two I show how adopting ‘powers-non-determinism’ significantly alters the nature of the discussion with respect to the agency component of the problematic. In part three I compare ‘powers-non-determinism’ to an otherwise- Humean agent causal position.

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Notes

  1. Reid (1975), Anscombe (1975). Obviously the issue then becomes what ‘activity’ is, and the passivist and anti-passivist will once more give contrary answers, in relation to which the flipbook analogy will again be apt.

  2. For a detailed discussion of the difference between contemporary passivist and anti-passivist uses of the term ‘power,’ in the work of Bird in the former case, Mumford (with and without Anjum) and Ellis in the latter case, see Groff (2012b).

  3. Nielson (2002, p. 42).

  4. Proponents of agent causation don’t have to hold that agent causation is a special type of causation. Thomas Reid, and Aristotle before him, did not think this; nor do contemporary dispositional realists such as E. J. Lowe. Still, most often—and standard amongst detractors—agent causal theories are interjected into a default, non-powers metaphysical framework, one in which causation as such is presumed to be event-causation. For a discussion of this point see Groff (2012a), Chapt. 5. Even Chisholm felt the need at the end of his career to subsume agent-causation into event-causation. See Chisholm (1995).

  5. Again: no property the conception of which is consistent with a passivist metaphysics will count as a power for the purposes of this discussion.

  6. Groff (2012a, p. xii).

  7. For readers who may be curious about other aspects of my own preferred metaphysics, my views are recognizably Aristotelian: I hold, e.g., that there is no such thing as a property-less substrate, and thus no real problem of “fit” between entities and their essential properties, at least; that there is no well-conceived issue of whether or not a given power would behave differently if it were a property of a different kind of entity than it is, as though it is entities that are properties of their properties, rather than the other way around; that propertied things do not cause their properties but, rather, are the ways that they are, viz., things of different kinds.

  8. For a classic formulation of this view, see Bhaskar (1978). For more recent versions, see, e.g., Schrenk (2010) and Stephen Mumford and Anjum (2011).

  9. Bird (2007).

  10. Bird (2012).

  11. For a recent, pointed example see Lawson (2012). But see also Bhaskar (1998), and the voluminous subsequent critical realist literature building on Bhaskar’s work.

  12. Berofsky (2011).

  13. Ibid., p. 159.

  14. Ibid.

  15. The parenthetical concern prompts Randolph Clarke to say that a satisfactory agent-causal view would have to be supplemented by an account of the agent being event-causally caused to act at time t by the holding of reasons. Ekstrom (2000).

  16. Ibid., p. 97.

  17. See, e.g., Lowe (2008).

  18. Op. Cit.,Groff (2012a), Chapt. 5.

  19. For an interesting canvassing of different iterations of source incompatibilism, see Tognazzini (2012).

  20. Or “categorical,” as Mumford and Anjum put it, citing Kant. Op. Cit., (Mumford and Anjum 2011, pp. 163-164). Mumford and Anjum thank Johan Arnt Myrstad for the reference to Kant.

  21. It does not follow from the fact that salt has, rather than causes, its powers (i.e., that salt can do what salt can do) that salt just is its powers—or, as one would have to say, since the claim would be that there is no “it” other than the powers, that salt just is some power(s). To think as much assumes (a) a commitment to pandispositionalism; as well as (b) a rejection of the category of substance (or object, as per E. J. Lowe) in one’s metaphysics, and (c) the equation of essences with essential properties.

  22. The way that I have articulated this is influenced by Brian Ellis. See, especially, Ellis (2002); but also Op. Cit. Bhaskar (1998).

  23. Ellis (2012, p. 194).

  24. John Martin Fischer, for example, holds that an agent who could not have done otherwise does not have free will, but nevertheless is morally culpable for his or her actions. See John Martin Fischer (2003).

  25. Op. Cit., (Berofsky 2011, p. 154).

  26. For a discussion of transitivity from a powers-based perspective, see Op. Cit., (Mumford and Anjum 2011, Chapt. 7).

  27. (Frankfurt 2003, p. 172).

  28. Ibid., p. 173.

  29. Compare this way of cutting into the issue to that taken by Levy (2008), who argues against Fischer and Mark Ravizza that the counterfactual “intervener” in Frankfurt-style cases cannot be bracketed. Levy’s argument turns upon the idea that if we are prepared to say that an agent may gain powers in virtue of acting as part of an agential “ensemble” with an intervener, then there is no reason to think that a line can be drawn between agent and context (including intervener) in the case in which a power is lost. The approach that I have taken, apart from being efficient, does not require any sort of extension of boundaries for agents. Neither, and perhaps more important, does it conflate the issue of what it takes to be morally responsible with the issue of which powers are essential to being the kind of powerful particular that one might think human beings are. That is, we can avoid argument about whether or not the mental states that figure into counterfactual-Jones’ behavior are such that a quasi-human agent of the type counterfactual Jones is imagined to be may be considered morally responsible for his acts. It is sufficient to show that actual Jones has the agential powers distinctive of human agents, whilst counterfactual-Jones does not – or else the case would fail.

  30. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point.

  31. For an excellent overview of this literature, see: Timpe (2009).

  32. Ginet (1989).

  33. See, e.g., Kane (1995) and (2003).

  34. See, e.g., Clarke (2011) for a concise statement of the need for “co-determination.”

  35. O’Connor (2000).

  36. Op. Cit., Lowe (2008).

  37. Op. Cit., Ellis (2002) and (2012).

  38. Frankfut (2003, p. 331).

  39. Watson (2003).

  40. John Stuart Mill (1951, p. 85).

  41. Op. Cit., Groff (2012a), Chapt. 3.

  42. For a wonderful statement of this point see Rogers Albritton’s 1985 Presidential Address to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association; Albritton (2003).

  43. Groff (2012a, ch. 4 and 6).

  44. Op. Cit., Groff (2012a), Chapt. 5.

  45. Op. Cit., Clarke (2011).

  46. Ibid., pp. 345–346.

  47. Op. Cit., Ellis (2001). For his most recent process account of substances, see Brian Ellis (2010).

  48. Op. Cit. Groff and Greco (2012).

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  1. Saint Louis University, St. Louis, USA

    Ruth Groff

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  1. Ruth Groff
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Correspondence to Ruth Groff.

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Dedication for E. J. Lowe.

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Groff, R. Sublating the free will problematic: powers, agency and causal determination. Synthese 196, 179–200 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1124-y

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