Abstract
It has been argued that in a deterministic universe, no one has any reason to do anything. Since we ought to do what we have most reason to do, no one ought to do anything either. Firstly, it is argued that an agent cannot have reason to do anything unless she can do otherwise; secondly, that the relevant ‘can’ is incompatibilist. In this paper, I argue that even if the first step of the argument for reason incompatibilism succeeds, the second one does not. It is argued that reasons require alternative possibilities, because reasons are action-guiding. A supposed reason to do the impossible, or to do what was inevitable anyway, could not fill this function. I discuss different interpretations of the claim that reasons are action-guiding, and show that according to one interpretation it is sufficient that the agent believes that she has several alternative options. According to other interpretations, the agent must really have alternative options, but only in a compatibilist sense. I suggest that an interpretation of action-guidance according to which reasons can only guide actions when we have several options open to us in an incompatibilist sense cannot be found. We should therefore assume that reasons and obligations are compatible with determinism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See Vranas 2007 for a discussion of some of the counter arguments, including Frankfurt examples. Some people have the intuition that Jones in a standard Frankfurt case has an obligation to and/or reasons to abstain from murder, despite the counterfactual intervener ensuring that it is inevitable that Jones will murder Smith. Others have the intuition that Jones cannot really have such obligations or reasons, at least not in an objective sense, although he might rationally believe that he has them insofar as he is unaware of the counterfactual intervener. My own intuitions tend towards the latter view, but regardless of which set of intuitions that track the truth here, I will grant the reason incompatibilists, for the sake of argument, that APR is true, so that Jones lacks (objective) reasons to abstain from murder in a Frankfurt case.
If I am unconscious, it can still be true that I would save her if I chose to do so; if I so chose, I would have been awake. Likewise, in the phobia scenario, it may be true that I would save her if I chose to do so, because if I so chose, I would have been less scared.
In fairness to Hobbs, he does suggest that there might be a more demanding kind of ‘ought’, connected to blameworthiness, which his ‘ought’ is not. He might thus not be discussing the same thing as Haji and Streumer do. Derk Pereboom (2014 pp. 139–141) suggests that Hobbs’ ‘can’ is the one relevant for the ‘ought’ of axiological recommendation, whereas another sense of ‘ought’ requires incompatibilist alternative possibilities.
Streumer (forthcoming) argues that APR cannot be replaced by a belief condition. His supposed counter example involves a man who believes that he is Napoleon, but yet has no reason to try to win the battle at Waterloo. Even if this man’s belief is justified, Streumer argues, because he has been given a drug that gives him realistic hallucinations according to which he is Napoleon, he lacks a reason to try to win the battle at Waterloo. I do not believe that this is a very convincing counter example. It is highly controversial whether hallucinations caused by ingesting a drug can justify one’s belief, for instance. I suspect that it is possible to come up with a convincing belief condition that can handle the crusades case and similar cases (perhaps by invoking, as Streumer does later in the same paper when discussing Frankfurt cases, what people should have believed in a certain situation), but doing so is not part of the purpose of this paper. After all, I agree with Haji that a belief condition is not plausible anyway for objective reasons.
This suggestion might remind some readers of Michael Smith’s famous analysis of moral reasons (1994 pp. 151–181). However, Smith’s theory is a theory of meta-ethics, of the nature of the reasons themselves. He writes that facts about what is desirable for us to do are constituted by facts about what we would advise ourselves to do if we were fully rational. I take no stand in this debate. For the purposes of this paper, reasons might just as well be some kind of queer Platonic entities floating about in the metaphysical ether, or facts that we might use to justify our behaviour to other rational agents, or something else.
This is, of course, compatible with Cora still having reasons to call an ambulance rather than doing nothing at all. For the sake of simplicity I merely discuss the two options of calling and driving.
If an idealized agent has correct motivating desires, does this mean that an idealized version of Cora cannot have debilitating phobias, and that Cora can therefore have an objective reason to drive Sue to the hospital after all even if her hospital phobia is ever so extreme? This is a complicated question. If an agent can have an objective reason to do what she has a truly irresistible phobia against doing, this is a bit counter intuitive, but does not really hurt my main objective in this article, which is to argue for reason compatibilism. I do not think that we must embrace this conclusion, however. We might distinguish motivating desires from the kind of emotions – desires if you will – that has an external feel to them, that seems to push or pull you but not really motivate, such as extreme phobias.
If it still seems crazy, one might try to invoke something like Zimmerman’s fittingness relation, and say that the right kind of fit does not hold, after all, between me and the action of preventing the crusades, or the paralyzed person and bodily actions, while arguing that his example of John and the rescue of the child still shows that ‘reason’ does not imply ‘can’, when ‘reason’ is used in a non-action-guiding sense.
Alternatively, we might replace ‘impossible’ with ‘unlikely’. It seems fairly plausible that an agent who is not particularly skilled at basketball cannot have an objective reason to throw the ball through the hoop, although she might have an objective reason to do her best and try. Something independent of her motivating desires and relevant factual beliefs, namely her inferior basketball skills, makes her throwing the ball through the hoop unlikely, if not impossible. However, whether we choose ‘impossible’ or ‘unlikely’ makes no difference for the compatibilism issue.
Nelkin does not ultimately endorse precisely this condition.
References
Broad CD (1952) Ethics and the history of philosophy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
Haji I (2002) Deontic morality and control. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Haji I (2012) Reasons debt to freedom. Oxford University Press, New York
Heuer U (2010) Reasons and impossibility. Philos Stud. 147:235–246. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9285-2
Hobbs J (2012) Ought claims and blame in a deterministic world. Dissertation, Department of philosophy, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Howard-Snyder F (2006) Cannot” implies “not ought. Philos Stud. 130:233–246. doi:10.1007/s11098-004-4511-z
Johnson R (2003) Virtue and right. Ethics 113:810–834. doi:10.1086/373952
Nelkin DK (2004) Deliberative alternatives. Philos Top. 32:215–240. doi:10.5840/philtopics2004321/224
Pereboom D (2001) Living without free will. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Pereboom D (2014) Free will, agency and meaning in life. Oxford University Press, New York
Smith M (1994) The moral problem. Blackwell Publishers Inc, Malden
Streumer B (Forthcoming) “Reasons and Ability”, in The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. Daniel Star, eds. Oxford University Press
Streumer B (2007) Reasons and impossibility. Philos Stud. 136:351–384. doi:10.1007/s11098-005-4282-1
Vranas P (2007) I ought, therefore I Can. Philos Stud 136:167–216. doi:10.1007/s11098-007-9071-6
Zimmerman M (2007) The good and the right. Utilitas 19:326–353. doi:10.1017/S0953820807002622
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.
Funding
The writing of this article was funded by Anna Ahlström’s and Ellen Terserus’ foundation.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jeppsson, S. Reasons, Determinism and the Ability to Do otherwise. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 1225–1240 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9721-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9721-x