Abstract
Brian Cutter (Analysis 77: 278-287, 2017) argues that one of the most prominent versions of the consequence argument—viz., Peter van Inwagen’s (An Essay on Free Will. Oxford University Press, 1983) ‘Third Formal Argument’—does not support an incompatibility thesis that every paradigmatic compatibilist would reject. Justin Capes (Thought 8: 50-56, 2019) concedes Cutter’s conclusion concerning van Inwagen’s Third Formal Argument and tries to meet the important challenge that Cutter issues at the end of his paper—viz., articulate a promising version of the consequence argument whose conclusion is an incompatibility thesis that every paradigmatic compatibilist would reject. After arguing that Capes’s response to Cutter’s challenge fails, I meet Cutter’s challenge by presenting and discussing a version of the consequence argument that focuses on ordinary human agents in circumstances that are ordinary for human agents.
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Notes
Readers familiar with the relevant literature may note that Capes’s Conclusion (which Capes labels ‘incompatibilism*’) resembles the principle that Alicia Finch and Ted Warfield (1998: 521) call ‘Beta 2’.
More precisely: the Lewis of “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” would accept Capes’s Conclusion. That’s the only part of the Ludovician corpus with which I’m concerned here.
I should emphasize an important semantic difference between ‘normal person’ (in Dorr’s paper) and ‘ordinary human agent in ordinary human circumstances’ (in this paper). While ‘normal person’ is (in Dorr’s paper) a stipulatively defined technical term, I’m assuming (with van Inwagen [2017: 146–147], so far as I can tell) that we have a sufficiently clear intuitive grip on the meaning of ‘ordinary human agent in ordinary human circumstances’. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to say more about this difference.)
Dorr (2016: 281–282) presses a somewhat different objection against his version of the consequence argument, one that can also be pressed against the argument I’m about to present. I discuss this objection in the next section.
Cf. Lewis (1981: 118, note 4): “…[T]he task of compatibilism is to show how freedom and determinism might coexist at a world that might, for all we know, be ours.” Reflection on the opening paragraphs of “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” confirms that Lewis in particular meets the assumed requirement for being a paradigmatic compatibilist. There Lewis endorses the metaphysical possibility of a deterministic case whose subject is an ordinary human agent in ordinary human circumstances who is able to behave otherwise than they in fact do (observe that Lewis describes the case in question as “a particular instance” of the thesis he labels ‘soft determinism’, which thesis clearly concerns ordinary human agents in ordinary human circumstances). Lewis (1981) devotes the bulk of his essay to defending the metaphysical possibility of the indicated case from two versions of the consequence argument: one that he introduces (pp.114–115), and one due to van Inwagen (1975). Accordingly, Lewis’s endorsement and defense of compatibilism does not in any way countenance the thesis that no free agent in a deterministic world is an ordinary human agent in ordinary human circumstances. (Thanks to an anonymous referee whose comments led me to amplify this note.)
Objection: “Earlier, you rejected Laws on the ground that there could be a non-godlike agent who is able to act so that a law of nature would be broken. But any power that could be possessed by a non-godlike agent could also be possessed by an ordinary human agent in ordinary human circumstances. So, your objection to Laws commits you to rejecting (4) as well.” Reply: The envisaged critic’s second claim is false. There are possible non-godlike agents who have powers that no possible ordinary human agent in ordinary human circumstances has. Cutter (2017: 284) suggests a neat example, to which I return below (see note 9): while some possible non-godlike agents have telekinetic powers, no possible ordinary human agent in ordinary human circumstances has telekinetic powers.
In other words: necessarily, if each of a conjunction’s conjuncts is such that it would still be true no matter how one exercises one’s abilities, then the conjunction would still be true no matter how one exercises one’s abilities (cf. Carlson, 2000: 286–287).
In a wide-ranging recent discussion of epistemic issues in the debate over incompatibilism, Patrick Todd and Brian Rabern (2023: 1749, note 10) make the following remark: “Standardly, incompatibilists don’t claim that their view is supported by an empirical investigation into the nature of human action—instead they put forward a priori arguments, e.g., the Consequence Argument…” Reflection on some views that Cutter suggests in the following passage points the way toward (what might be called) an “empirical incompatibilist” position that Todd and Rabern would presumably classify as “non-standard”: “The status of the claim that we have no choice about the laws is, I suggest, much the same as the status of the claim that no one can move objects in one’s environment by telekinesis. It is hard to believe that anyone actually has telekinetic powers... But I do not think we have any good reason to suppose that telekinetic powers are strictly impossible, that even in the far reaches of modal space no one has the ability to move objects by telekinesis” (2017: 284). I find here the suggestion that while we lack (wholly) a priori justification to believe (4), we have (at least partly) empirical justification to believe (4). Proponents of the above argument for Ordinary Human Incompatibilism who accept the indicated epistemological suggestion will maintain that their justification to believe Ordinary Human Incompatibilism is at least partly empirical, and comes at least partly from their experience with ordinary human agents in ordinary human circumstances (including themselves). I hope to elaborate and evaluate this “non-standard empirical incompatiblist” position in future work. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for comments that [i] led me to modify the role that the material in this note plays in this context, and [ii] identified some relevant mistakes that I made in an earlier draft).
Many thanks to the anonymous referees whose comments helped me to improve significantly upon earlier drafts.
References
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Coffman, E.J. The consequence argument and ordinary human agency. Synthese 203, 96 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04517-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04517-y