Abstract
There is an old but powerful argument for the claim that exhaustive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A crucial ingredient in this argument is the principle of the “Fixity of the Past” (FP). A seemingly new response to this argument has emerged, the so-called “dependence response,” which involves, among other things, abandoning FP for an alternative principle, the principle of the “Fixity of the Independent” (FI). This paper presents three arguments for the claim that FI ought to be preferred to FP.
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Notes
This argument has been around, in some form or another, for quite some time. See Pike (1965) for the classic presentation.
One might wonder about cases of overdetermination, where two unrelated facts are both full explanations for some third. This definition implies that the third fact is explanatorily dependent on both facts, which might seem strange. For the purposes of this paper, I’ll put the issue of overdetermination aside. Thank you to Ryan Wasserman for bringing this to my attention.
See Swenson (2016, pp. 660–61) for discussion of similar examples. For expository purposes, I’ll sometimes have the “explanatory dependence” relation take events rather than facts as relata. Nothing of substance hangs on this.
This formulation is inspired by, albeit distinct from, Swenson's formulation (2016), as Swenson restricts FI to explanatorily independent past facts.
One might wonder what sense of “because” is at play here. Wasserman (forthcoming) argues that the dependence theorist ought to understand it in a causal sense; others, like Merricks (2009), seem to understand it in a logical or metaphysical sense. I’ll set this issue aside, as I’ll be arguing that if God’s relevant past beliefs are explained in any sense by the agent’s behavior, then God’s relevant past beliefs are no threat to freedom.
Merricks (2009) also focuses on this asymmetry, although Merricks’s argument is unsatisfactory in at least two ways. First, he does not explicitly formulate FI and consider its relation to FP. Second, he does not spend adequate time considering alternative explanations of this asymmetry (or related ones).
Many have discussed this claim, but a particularly insightful and pertinent discussion is in Sartorio (2015).
For a thorough defense of the growing-block theory, see Tooley (1997).
First, since the growing-block theory of time is a version of the A-theory of time, it inherits all of the objections to the A-theory. See Mellor (1998) and Sider (2001). Second, there are objections unique to the growing-block theory. See Merricks (2006), Forrest (2006), and Briggs and Forbes (2012) for discussion.
It might be claimed that FI is inconsistent with Presentism, the view that only the present time is real, as FI seems to require cross-temporal relations, and Presentism has difficulty accommodating such relations. (Finch and Rea (2008) raise this worry for Ockhamist views and Presentism, but it seems a parallel worry could also be pressed on FI.) This is a deep issue, but the basic argument seems mistaken to me. Either Presentism can accommodate cross-temporal relations (like causation) or it can’t. If it can, then FI can be reformulated so as to be compatible with Presentism; if it can’t, then Presentism is too implausible to take seriously. See Swenson (2016, pp. 666–668) for a different take.
Thank you to Neal Tognazzini for helping me get clear on this.
Again, see Wasserman (forthcoming) for a discussion of this issue.
See Fischer (1986) for discussion of this point.
This restriction is arguably the most in line with the spirit of FP because past light cones are the closest one gets to an “absolute past” in standard interpretations of relativity.
To be clear, the situation is this: Galileo and his friend are at rest relative to one another, and so will eventually judge the supernova to have occurred at the same time in the past. But since Galileo is a bit further away from the supernova, he has to wait a while longer to witness it and make that judgment.
Here are two other ways of formulating FP in a standard relativistic setting: (i) restrict FP to all of the facts deemed past from the agent’s frame of reference and (ii) restrict FP to all of the facts outside of the agent’s future light cone. While I cannot fully elaborate here, both of these suffer problems. In short, (i) suffers a version of the second problem that FP-cone faces, namely, that it appears somewhat arbitrary, as an agent’s frame of reference is determined by her velocity; meanwhile, (ii) suffers a version of the first problem, namely, that it is equivalent to holding fixed all of those facts that are causally independent of the agent’s current behavior. Thanks to Neal Tognazzini for help here.
It is true that the notion of a global time is not well-defined in certain models of relativity, but FI need only be formulated in terms of a local time.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to John Martin Fischer, Jonah Nagashima, Michael Nelson, Carolina Sartorio, Phillip Swenson, and Ryan Wasserman for feedback on previous drafts. A special thank you to Taylor Cyr and Neal Tognazzini for extensive feedback on multiple drafts. Also, thank you to an anonymous referee at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy as well as the audiences at the 2018 USC-UCLA Graduate Student Conference and the 2018 Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.
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Law, A. From the fixity of the past to the fixity of the independent. Philos Stud 178, 1301–1314 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01476-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01476-1