Reference Material:
Freedom
and Belief by Galen Strawson (2010)
An
Essay on Free Will by Peter van Inwagen (1983)
Free
Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life by Derk Pereboom (2014)
In
my previous post, I questioned the conception of free will described by the
conditional formulation of the freedom to do otherwise. I was then briefly
sympathetic to the categorical formulation. Here, I’ll discuss a well-known
class of examples, typically called Frankfurt-style cases, intended to
undermine the freedom to-do-otherwise conception as a whole (often in order to
motivate a source conception). A typical Frankfurt-style case is something like
the following:
Imagine
Alex is trying to decide who to vote for. He will likely vote for the Donkey
Party candidate, Doug (Alex has always voted Donkey in the past). However, if
he happens to consider his relatives serving in the armed forces just prior to
voting, he will have a change of heart and vote for the Elephant Party
candidate, Elaine, instead. Unbeknownst to him, neuroscientist and Donkey Party
operative Brianne has implanted a very special device in Alex’s brain. The
device constantly monitors Alex’s brain activity for thoughts about members of
the armed forces (and relays this information instantly to Brianne) and, upon
activation, modifies Alex’s brain activity to cause him to vote for Doug.
Brianne’s plan is to simply wait for Alex to go to the polls. If he happens to
think about the military prior to voting, she’ll activate the device, causing
Alex to vote for Doug instead of Elaine. If Alex shows no signs of considering
the armed forces, she’ll leave the device inactive, allowing Alex to vote for
Doug on his own. As it happens, Alex does not consider the armed forces prior
to voting, and votes for Doug without the interference of Brianne’s device.
The
argument surrounding a Frankfurt-style case is this. Whether he thinks about
his relatives in the armed forces or not, Alex will end up voting for Doug.
There is no possible world in which he votes for Elaine. Therefore, Alex does
not have the ability to do otherwise. However, the way events actually
unfolded, Alex voted for Doug on his own, without Brianne and her device
interfering. Intuitively, then, Alex’s decision to vote for Doug was a free
one, one for which he is responsible. But if Alex exhibited freedom in a case
in which he could not have acted otherwise, freedom cannot consist simply in
the ability to do otherwise. The freedom to do otherwise, therefore, does not
adequately capture what we mean by free will.
The
classic criticism of Frankfurt-style cases comes in the form of a two-horned
dilemma. Consider the causal connection between Alex’s failing to think of his
relatives in the armed forces and Alex’s voting for Doug. This connection is
either deterministic or indeterministic. If the connection is deterministic,
then proponents of Frankfurt-style cases cannot expect to convince
incompatibilists. If the fact that Alex failed to think of the armed forces
deterministically led to his voting for Doug, incompatibilists will deny that
Alex made a free choice. The intuition that Alex is responsible for voting for
Doug, that he was free in his choice, is crucial to the success of the
argument, and so it falls flat. If, on the other hand, the connection is
indeterministic, then it is possible that Alex fails to consider his relatives
in the armed forces and yet goes on to vote for Elaine. In this case, opponents
of Frankfurt-style cases can claim that Alex did in fact have the ability to do
otherwise. Either way, according to this dilemma, free will as freedom to do
otherwise remains intact.
As
you might guess, the arguments surrounding Frankfurt-style cases continue
today. There are attempted rebuttals of the two-horned dilemma, then responses
to those rebuttals, and on and on. I won’t explore these arguments in more
depth here (I’ve started to sense that the success or failure of
Frankfurt-style cases will ultimately be irrelevant to where my position
stands). Instead, I want to make some methodological points about the argument
Frankfurt-style cases attempt to make. Notice that the intuition appealed to,
that Alex is responsible for voting for Doug, is an intuition about moral
responsibility (praise and blame). I’m fairly skeptical of relying on such
normative intuitions, especially when trying to understand something as
fundamental as human freedom. But fully investigating the relationship between
free will and moral responsibility, and indeed the nature of moral
responsibility alone, would take the present overview of the free will debate
far afield. Here I simply want to note the reliance on intuitions about moral responsibility,
a reliance that would be undermined by a moral skepticism.
For Frankfurt-style
cases to apply directly to free will, one would have to identify free will with
the kind of control required for moral responsibility. But notice – we seem to
have come full circle, logically. I introduced Frankfurt-style cases as part of
a broader conceptual inquiry into what free will is, arguments intended to
undermine a to-do-otherwise conception of free will in favor of a source
conception. But in order to do so, it seems Frankfurt-style cases rely on a
conception of free will as the kind of control required for moral
responsibility. The success of such cases with respect to the free will debate
rests at least in part on the connection between free will and moral
responsibility. Perhaps this connection can be assumed (as suggested in my
opening free will post), or perhaps not. I won’t argue either way here. Just
notice that an implicit conception of free will, the freedom required for moral
responsibility, is lurking in the Frankfurt-style case argument.
