Abstract
Whether or not we are able to do x is on many philosophical accounts of our moral practice relevant for whether we are responsible for not doing x or for being excusable for not having done x. In this paper I will examine how such accounts are affected by whether a Humean or non-Humean account of laws is presupposed. More particularly, I will argue that (on one interpretation) Humean conceptions of laws, while able to avoid the consequence argument, run into what might be called “the problem of radical freedom”: Humean laws fail to constrain what we can do. By contrast, non-Humean laws (and Humean laws on a second interpretation) avoid the problem of radical freedom but have no easy way out of the consequence argument.
This paper not only rehearses part of a joint paper with Christian Loew, the idea of the paper grew out of joint discussions (see also Hüttemann & Loew, 2019). So insofar as this paper contains convincing thoughts, they can also be attributed to Christian Loew. I would also like to thank audiences in Oxford, the DFG-Research Group on Inductive Metaphysics, the Colloquium in Cologne, Anna Marmodoro as well as an anonymous referee for helpful comments.
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Notes
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- 2.
“Imagine a grid of a million tiny spots – pixels – each of which can be made light or dark. When some are light and some are dark, they form a picture, replete with intrinsic gestalt properties. […] the picture and the properties reduce to the arrangement of light and dark pixels. They are nothing over and above the pixels.” (Lewis, 1994: 413).
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These are by no means the only assumptions. There is an extensive debate about how the consequence argument should be understood that I don’t need to go into for the purposes of this paper. (Some of the options are reviewed in Mauro Dorato’s contribution to this volume. Esfeld (also this volume) explores whether the remote past may be up to us – contrary to what van Inwagen assumes.) What is relevant in this paper is that different conceptions of lawhood make a difference for whether or not the informal consequence argument discussed here comes out as plausible. (This question is also raised in the contribution by de Haan).
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It has been suggested (in conversation both by Helen Beebee and by Thomas Blanchard) that Lewis’ semantics of counterfactuals may in turn be motivated by his account of laws. For the purposes of this paper I can bypass this issue.
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Supervenience is generally understood to be a non-symmetric rather than an asymmetric relation. Lewis, however, seems to think of it as an asymmetric relation. Asymmetry will be relevant only when I briefly discuss Armstrong towards the end of this section.
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Formulating TP in terms of difference-making grounds rather than grounds simpliciter avoids certain counterexamples. Suppose you can render the proposition that you will raise your hand false and raising your hand is among the grounds of a certain candidate’s election. However, suppose the candidate received more votes than she needed to get elected. Even though raising your hand was then up to you and was also an ontological ground of the candidate’s being elected, you could not have rendered the proposition that she gets elected false. The candidate did not need your vote to be elected. Using difference-making grounds instead of grounds simpliciter bypasses this problem because in the scenario described raising your hand is not a difference-making ground. Without you raising your hand, the remaining votes still would be complete grounds of the candidate’s being elected.
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Note that we are only concerned with the grounds of the fact that (G) is true. The additional fact that (G) is a law of nature has further grounds.
- 8.
Armstrong (1983, 82) requires that universals (and among them the necessitation relation) are instantiated, but still the instatiations, for instance our actions, obtain in virtue of the necessity relation, not vice versa.
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Beebee and Mele go on to argue that while their Humean compatibilist arguments entail that there is a legitimate sense of ability according to which we do have outlandish abilities, there might be a different sense of ability according to which agents can do otherwise yet do not have outlandish abilities. But Humean compatibilists would then still have to show that this second sense of ability is indeed supported by a Humean metaphysics of laws.
- 10.
As indicated above this is not a problem for Lewis’ proposal (Lewis, 1981) to deal with consequence argument.
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Hüttemann, A. (2022). The Problem of Radical Freedom. In: Austin, C.J., Marmodoro, A., Roselli, A. (eds) Powers, Time and Free Will. Synthese Library, vol 451. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92486-7_10
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