Is agentive experience compatible with determinism?

Abstract

Many philosophers think not only that we are free to act otherwise than we do, but also that we experience being free in this way. Terry Horgan argues that such experience is compatibilist: it is accurate even if determinism is true. According to Horgan, when people judge their experience as incompatibilist, they misinterpret it. While Horgan's position is attractive, it incurs significant theoretical costs. I sketch an alternative way to be a compatibilist about experiences of free agency that avoids these costs. In brief, I assume that experiences of freedom have a sort of phenomenal content that is inaccurate if determinism is true, just as many incompatibilists claim. Still, I argue that these experiences also have another sort of phenomenal content that is normally accurate, even assuming determinism.

Keywords:

• free will
• moral responsibility
• determinism
• phenomenology
• phenomenal content
• agentive experience
• Horgan
• compatibilism
• incompatibilism
• libertarianism
• cognitive penetration
• Chalmers

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Paul Russell, Terry Horgan, Derk Pereboom, and Murat Aydede (among others) for discussion and helpful suggestions. I also thank my anonymous reviewers of this journal for their exceptionally useful feedback and comments.

Notes on contributor

Oisín Deery received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2013. He is currently is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Research Ethics at the University of Montreal, where he is part of a research group studying normativity.

Notes

1. I say ‘non-doxastic’ since some people think that doxastic states such as judgments (which are representational states) also have phenomenal character (Bayne and Montague 2011).

2. This characterization is neutral on the compatibility question. (i) and (ii) are obviously neutral. The point of contention is (iii). Incompatibilists think we satisfy (iii) only if determinism is false. Some compatibilists may not accept (iii), since they think that worlds with different pasts and laws than the actual world are relevant to judging whether agents can do otherwise in the actual world, whereas (iii) says that only worlds with the same pasts and laws are relevant. Yet unless we characterize specific ability so as to include (iii), it is difficult to see how compatibilists and incompatibilists are disagreeing.

3. Bayne claims that such cases show that agentive experiences are not influenced by cognitive states (2011, 360). I discuss this issue later in this section.

4. See Bayne (2008) for discussion of this issue.

5. In addition to those mentioned earlier, many others grant that we experience being free to do otherwise; e.g. Hume (1739), C. A. Campbell (1951), Lehrer (1960), Ginet (1997), Nahmias et al. (2004), and Holton (2006).

6. The claim that these participants' experiences are incompatibilist is controversial, since Horgan's claim – as we shall see – is precisely that people misinterpret their experience. By contrast, I claim that even if such experiences are incompatibilist in a certain respect, they might be accurate in another respect, assuming determinism. Horgan and I agree that people often report having incompatibilist experiences. We differ in how each of us makes this fact fit with compatibilism.

7. If penetration occurs analogously to the hypothesized penetration of visual experience in Müller–Lyer illusions, it will not be clear when the experience was compatibilist; that will depend on how and when the relevant background beliefs were formed.

8. Horgan argues (Horgan 2012; cf. Horgan and Kriegel 2008) that there are cases where we are immune even from labeling fallacies – e.g. when we judge that ‘this experience has this feature’. Such judgments are infallible. These cases do not concern me here.

9. This is despite the fact that, for Horgan, experiences of freedom have intrinsic, determinate satisfaction conditions that are compatibilist, as I outline shortly. However, such compatibility is a ‘non-manifest’ feature of the experiences (Horgan also allows that such experiences may have wide satisfaction conditions.)

10. Moreover, Horgan thinks that a ‘useful illusion’ hypothesis has no purchase here, given the introspective non-manifestness of answers to compatibility questions about determinism and the experience of freedom.

11. See also Macpherson (2012) for an excellent discussion of this phenomenon.

12. If experiences of freedom are cognitively penetrated by background incompatibilist beliefs, then libertarian beliefs cannot (at least straightforwardly) be justified by incompatibilist experiences, since such an explanation would threaten circularity.

13. Does Black function like determinism? Libertarians deny that Black blocks alternatives, though they grant that determinism does. However, Black plausibly blocks the sorts of alternatives that are required for the freedom to do otherwise. Even if indeterminism offers Jones a ‘flicker of freedom’ (cf. Fischer 1994, Ch. 7), such a flicker is not robust enough to underwrite the freedom that might plausibly be required for moral responsibility. The central point is that while alternatives (of some sort – without begging the question on the compatibility issue) may be necessary for the freedom to do otherwise, they are insufficient for it. Conversely, compatibilists may think that determinism allows for the freedom to do otherwise, even if Black does not. Most compatibilists, however, accept that determinism does block alternatives, and therefore the freedom to do otherwise. Although I am sympathetic to the idea that it does not, there is wide agreement that compatibilist accounts of such freedom are subject to fatal criticisms (cf. Lehrer 1968; see also Clarke 2009).

14. Or spread throughout a volume (e.g. wine), etc.

15. Chalmers also calls such content Edenic – it is the content of experiential representations of the primitive properties instantiated in ‘Eden’ (2006, 66). In the ‘Garden of Eden’, Chalmers writes,’

We had unmediated contact with the world. We were directly acquainted with objects in the world and with their properties. Objects were simply presented to us without causal mediation, and properties were revealed to us in all their true intrinsic glory’ (2006, 48).

My ‘pre-Newtonian world’ is Eden for colors.

16. Not all philosophers writing on color grant that primitivism is descriptively right about color phenomenology, although many do, and some even defend primitivism about the nature of colors (John Campbell 1997). Moreover, Chalmers is not alone in defending a view that relies on the phenomenological claim of primitivism, yet claims that primitivism is false about the nature of colors. Johnston (1992) concedes that primitivism is descriptively right about color phenomenology, but claims our world is colored since there are (usually) properties instantiated that make true ‘enough’ of our beliefs about color. Johnston's view is an important precursor to Chalmers's.

17. The analogy here need not be airtight, it is only meant to be illustrative.

18. I am not claiming that the experience be causally undergirded by such properties. More plausibly, the relevant condition is that there are instantiated whatever relevant properties are ordinarily instantiated when one experiences being free to do otherwise.

19. For an overview of sourcehood views, see e.g. Timpe (2013).

20. I owe these terms to Holton (2010).

21. I owe this point to discussion with Terry Horgan and Martine Nida-Rümelin at a conference on the phenomenology of free will and its epistemological significance, Fribourg, Switzerland, 16–19 June 2013.