KEVIN TIMPE
Department of Philosophy
Northwest Nazarene University - E.E. U.U.
ktimpe@nnu.edu

Abstract

Keywords: John Martin Fischer, semi-compatibilism, motivation, free will, resilience, luck.

Resumen

Palabras clave: John Martin Fischer, semicompatibilismo, motivación, libre albedrío, resistencia, suerte.

1. Introduction

In the case of reactivity to reasons, the agent (when acting from the relevant mechanism) must simply display some reactivity, in order to render it plausible that his mechanism has the 'executive power' to react to the actual incentive to do otherwise. (Fisher & Ravizza 75)

The second requirement for guidance control is that the agent takes responsibility for the reasons-responsive mechanism that results in her choices; that is, that the mechanism is her own, or one for which she has taken responsibility. This feature of Fischer's view marks an important difference from purely structural or hierarchical compatibilist accounts (such as Harry Frankfurt's). For Fischer, "the mere existence of [the right kind of volitional] mesh is not sufficient for moral responsibility; the history behind the mesh is also relevant" (Fisher & Ravizza 196). So, in order for an agent to be morally responsible, he needs to have taken responsibility for his volitional structure.

Taking responsibility involves three elements. First, the agent must see that his choices have certain effects in the world —that is, he must see himself as the source of consequences in the world (in certain circumstances). Second, the individual must see that he is a fair target for the reactive attitudes as a result of how he affects the world. Third, the views specified in the first two conditions —that the individual can affect the external world in certain characteristic ways through his choices, and the he can be fairly praised and/or blamed for so exercising his agency— must be based on his evidence in an appropriate way. (Fischer 2006b 224)

2. The Resilience of Semi-compatibilism

The first motivation behind semi-compatibilism I want to explore is what Dan Speak has labeled "the resiliency intuition" (Speak 124).³ According to this intuition, "our self-conception as morally responsible agents should be understood to possess a certain kind of stability. It should not be too easily undermined or too readily threatened by at least certain possible ways the world could turn out to be. It should, in short, be resilient" (ibid). Here is one of Fischer's presentations of the resilience motivation:

I could certainly imagine waking up some morning to the newspaper headline, "Causal Determinism Is True!" (Most likely this would not be in the National Enquirer or even People —but perhaps the New York Times...) I could imagine reading the article and subsequently (presumably over some time) becoming convinced that causal determinism is true —that the generalizations that describe the relationships between complexes of past events and laws of nature, on the one hand, and subsequent events, on the other, are universal generalizations with 100 percent probabilities associated with them. And I feel confident that this would not, nor should it, change my view of myself and others as (sometimes) free and robustly morally responsible agents [...]. The assumption that we human beings —most of us, at least— are morally responsible agents (at least sometimes) is extremely important and pervasive. In fact, it is hard to imagine human life without it [...]. A compatibilist need not give up this assumption [that we are at least sometimes free and morally responsible], even if he were to wake up to the headline, "Causal Determinism is True!" (and if he were convinced of its truth)[...]. A compatibilist need not 'flipflop' in this weird and unappealing way. (Fischer 2007 44-47)

In contrast, if the libertarian were to become convinced that determinism were true, she would have to give up at least one of her beliefs under threat of inconsistency. That is, she would either have to abandon her belief that we are morally responsible beings, or she would have to abandon her incompatibilism. Peter van Inwagen suggests that he would make the latter move if he were convinced of the truth of determinism:

There is one question I shall very likely be asked by philosophers who think I have overstepped the bounds of philosophy. I think it is a very good question which I am bound to answer. That question might be put like this:

Very well. You admit that your theory [i. e., libertarianism] is in principle empirically refutable. If physics were to become once more deterministic, or if the empirical sciences of man were to provide us with really good reason for believing that a human being is a deterministic system, then (you concede) your rejection of determinism would be rendered untenable by science. Well, suppose this did happen despite your prediction that it won't. What would you say then?

I am not quite sure what I would say, but I believe I would say that (β)⁴ [which figures centrally in the argument for incompatibilism] was, after all, invalid [...] I have defended (β) entirely on a priori grounds. But it would not surprise me too much to find that this proposition, which at present seems to me to be a truth of reason, had been refuted by the progress of science. Such refutations have happened many times. And it does not follow from the fact that they have happened that there is anything wrong with accepting on a priori grounds a principle that later turns out to be empirically refutable. One must simply realize that a priori convictions are as corrigible as any others. (van Inwagen 1983 219, 221)⁵

As van Inwagen here admits, given the possibility of the empirical discovery of the truth of determinism, libertarian beliefs are not as resilient as their compatibilist cohorts. And this resilience is one of the driving motivations behind Fischer's semicompatibilism:

One of my main motivations for being a compatibilist is that I don't want our personhood and our moral responsibility, as it were, to hang on a thread, or to be held hostage to the possible scientific discovery that determinism is in fact true" (Fischer 2000 323).⁶

All else being equal, it does seem preferable to have our beliefs —especially such a central belief as that we are morally responsible agents— be resilient in this way.

3. Less Luck

So, according to Fischer, one reason to prefer semi-compatibilism to libertarianism is its resilience. A second motivation is that, on the semi-compatibilist picture, moral responsibility does not depend on things which it shouldn't; more specifically, an agent's responsibility only depends on those things which the agent can reasonably be said to control. To make this point in a negative way, an agent's responsibility cannot simply be a matter of luck.

Now, it is no easy task to define just what luck is.⁷ A natural way of thinking about the nature of luck is to say that an event (or fact) is lucky for an individual if she had no control over the occurring (or obtaining) of that event (or fact). This idea is at the heart of the Luck Objection to libertarianism. Here is one formulation of that objection which makes clear the contrast between luck and control:

Agents' control is the yardstick by which the bearing of chance or luck on their autonomy and moral responsibility is measured. Luck (good or bad) becomes problematic when it seems significantly to impede agents' control over themselves [...]. To the extent that it is causally undetermined whether, for example, an agent intends or decides in accordance with a better judgment that she made, the agent may seem to lack control over what she intends or decides. (Mele 2002 535)

As this quotation from Mele suggests, luck (in the relevant sense) can be understood as a kind of lack of control. But trying to define precisely what kind of control is required in the present context is likely to be just as difficult as defining luck. It cannot be, for example, that agents must have control over all those factors which are logically necessary for our moral responsibility. This kind of control is what Fischer calls 'total control': "an agent has total control over X only if for any factor f which is a causal contributor to X and which is such that if f were not to occur, then X would (or might) not occur, then X has control over f " (Fischer 2007 67, see also Fischer 2006a 125). But there are innumerable factors, that are causal contributors to an agent's moral agency, over which the agent has no control, let alone total control:

The sun is shining (through the smog), and its continuing to shine is a contributing causal factor to my continuing to exist, continuing to be an agent, and so forth. If the sun were to flicker out, I would not continue to exist, continue to be an agent, or engage in any behavior. So the sun's continuing to shine is a contributing cause to my behavior, is completely out of my control, and is such that, if it were not to occur, I would not even exist [...]. Obviously, the sun's continuing to shine is just one of an indefinitely large number of such factors: a huge meteorite's not hitting the United States, my not being hit by a lightning bold, and so forth [...]. Consider now the fact that my parents did not seriously injure me when I was young and helpless [...]. That they took good care of me was a contributing cause of my developing into an agent at all. Had they significantly abused and injured me, I would or at least might not have developed into an agent at all.And of course how my parents treated me when I was an infant was entirely out of my control. (Fischer 2007 67f)

In a context of indeterminism, we do not have an explanation for why the agent made the particular choice he made rather than another. The [Luck Objection]⁸ points to the fact that the antecedent conditions —say my standing desires, values, intentions, and plans— cannot in themselves explain why I actually choose C rather than something else (given indeterminism) [...] Given this, it can seem that I do not actually control my behavior in the sense relevant to ascriptions of moral responsibility. (Fischer 1999 102, see also Fischer 2006a 127 f)

According to Fischer, the presence of this kind of luck in the causal origin of a volition is "menacing" (Fischer 2008b 197) and a "major challenge to libertarianism" (Fischer 1999 102, see also Fischer 2008b 196).

4. The Tension

[S]uch absence of determination, if and so far as it exists, is no gain to freedom, but sheer loss of it; no advantage to the moral life, but blank subtraction from it [...]. Freedom is something that we can attribute only to a continuing being, and he can have it only so far as the particular transient volitions within him are determined. (Hobart 2 and 13)

5. Total Control and Metaphysical Megalomania

I wish to explore some of the reasons why philosophers have contended that causal determinism rules out sourcehood in the sense required by moral responsibility, and I wish to offer some plausibilityarguments against this contention [...] I do not suppose that I have exhausted the possible motivations for an incompatibilistic sourcehood requirement, or that I will have offered knockdown arguments against such a requirement. My goal is to lay down some of the salient motivations for the worry that causal determinism would threaten sourcehood, and to suggest that the worry may issue from a mistaken picture —an inflated conception of the sort of control we must possess in order to be morally responsible. (Fischer 2007 67)¹⁷

Now of course one might seek to motivate an incompatibilist source requirement in various different ways. But my suggestion is that, once one sees that the picture that favors total control is inflated and illusory, one might have considerably less inclination to accept such a requirement for any reason [...] My suggestion (and it is merely a suggestion) is that, once one recognizes the pervasiveness of a certain sort of luck, one will find an incompatibilistic source condition less attractive. (Fischer 2007 68f)

In the absence of any explicit mention of total control on behalf of source incompatibilists, and without an argument which links source incompatibilism and total control, it is hard to see why the rejection of the latter gives us reason to reject the former. There very well may be other reasons to prefer compatibilist accounts of sourcehood over incompatibilist accounts, but the rejection of total control isn't among them.

6. A Push Towards More Substantial Revision

To be a bit more explicit. I distinguish between the concept of moral responsibility and the conditions of its application. With regard to the concept, I do not consider myself a revisionist; I attempt to understand a robust ordinary notion of moral responsibility. But my account of the conditions of its application are significantly revisionary (perhaps even revolutionary), insofar as I think it can apply even in contexts in which an agent has never had genuine access to metaphysical alternative possibilities. (2007b 188)

Weak revisionism is revisionism about what the folk think they think: it is the idea that the folk have in some way failed to appreciate the nature of their own conceptual or metaphysical commitments. While the folk really believe X, the folk mistakenly understand themselves to believe Y. In contrast, moderate revisionism is revisionism about what the folk think. (Vargas 2007b 217)

Insofar as Fischer writes, as seen above, that he does not consider himself a revisionist about the concept of moral responsibility, Vargas's claim that Fischer isn't a moderate revisionist is correct. But this is where Fischer's attempt to respect our pre-philosophical intuitions becomes potentially problematic. As mentioned earlier, Fischer is willing to grant the soundness of the Consequence Argument, which he thinks "employs highly plausible ingredients" (Fischer 2007 71).²⁰ He elaborates as follows:

It is natural to think of oneself as possessing regulative control, and that it is plausible to analyze this in terms of the power to add to the actual past (the entirety of the temporally nonrelational past), holding fixed the laws of nature. A semi-compatibilist need not dismiss out of hand, or profess puzzlement, about what is surely an intuitive natural set of views.

Because the Principle of Alternative Possibilities expresses such a plausible and attractive idea, and because we typically think of ourselves as selecting a path into the future (where there is more than one such path available), semi-compatibilism is a significant revision of ordinary, commonsense thinking —as well as standard philosophical reflection on freedom and moral responsibility. I do not deny that alternative possibilities are a presupposition of commonsense as well as philosophical analysis; rather, I seek to explain how we can offer a subtler, more refined analysis which dispenses with the requirement of metaphysical access to alternative possibilities, but also preserved and explains the connection between freedom (of an appropriate sort—guidance control) and moral responsibility. (Fischer 2007b 188)

¹ A number of the works in which Fischer develops and defends semi-compatibilism are co-authored with Mark Ravizza. In what follows, I will focus primarily on some of Fischer's more recent single-authored work.

² As Fabio Fang has pointed out in correspondence, there is a sense in which the third motivation for semi-compatibilism can be seen as a specific instance of the second. "Luck has been defined by you as the lack of certain type of control. Now, total control (which we lack), is the lack of certain type of control. [So] what is different in the third reason (or motivation) that is not present in the second?" In a sense, Fang is right. But insofar as Fischer addresses 'total control' in a different context than he does the problem of luck, I think it's worth treating this as a separate motivation even if it is not entirely separate.

³ For an incompatibilist defense of the resiliency intuition, see Helen Steward (2008).

⁴ β is the following inference rule: "p, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that. If p then q, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that. Hence, q, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that" (van Inwagen 2004 223). In this article, van Inwagen goes on to describe how while β is technically invalid, he is "inclined to think that the 'general idea' behind Rule β was sound, and that its invalidity stemmed from the fact that certain features of the English phrase unfit it for the task he assigned it" (id. 224).

⁵ Derk Pereboom is an incompatibilism who later came to reject his belief in free will and moral responsibility —though not because he thinks that determinism is true. Rather, he thinks that whatever indeterminism there may be in the world is not the kind needed to underwrite moral responsibility.

⁶ See also Fischer (1999 129) and Fischer (2006b 183). For another presentation of this concern, see Manuel Vargas (2007 141f). Fischer grants that there are other empirical discoveries that would threaten our view of ourselves as free and responsible agents; see, for instance, Fischer (2008a 169).

⁷ For two helpful discussions about the metaphysical nature of luck, see Jennifer Lackey (2008) and E. J. Coffman (2007).

⁸ He calls it the 'rollback argument'. See Fischer (1999 102).

⁹ For a related discussion see Mele (2006 205f).

¹⁰ A recent interdisciplinary collection on free will does contain an essay defending this literal Hobartian position: "So we do have free will in a deterministic universe. Indeterminism, on the other hand, makes free will impossible [...]. To the extent that determinism is true, we humans do indeed have something that we all innately feel and believe that we have: free will. In this most important sense, determinism makes free will possible" (Baer 309).

¹¹ This implication is noted by Manuel Vargas. "Consider that many compatibilists argue against libertarianism on the grounds that indeterminism disrupts responsibility. For these compatibilists, if it turned out that the world had indeterminacies of just the right sort (or perhaps more accurately the 'wrong sort'), then we would lack responsibility under even compatibilist understandings of responsibility" (Vargas 2005 426 note 16).

¹² Fischer acknowledges that on his view "the falsity of causal determinism in itself would not rule out control and moral responsibility" (1999 130).

¹³ Fischer could avoid this tension altogether by abandoning one or other of these motivations, so the argument above in no way counts as a refutation of semi-compatibilism. Nevertheless, both motivations play a significant role in various compatibilist accounts that the tension is worth pointing out. See also footnote 19 below.

¹⁴ See, for instance, Fischer (2007 56). For a very useful discussion of these issues, see Moya (2006 chap. 1).

¹⁵ See, for instance, Fischer & Ravizza (1998) and Fischer (2006b).

¹⁶ See, for instance, Fischer (2006b chap. 3, 12).

¹⁷ For a further discussion of Fischer's treatment of sourcehood, see chapter 5 of Timpe (2008).

¹⁸ See, for instance, Robert Kane (1996), Derk Pereboom (2001), and Timothy O'Connor (2005). For my own arguments for source incompatibilism, see Timpe (2008), particularly chapters 5-6.

¹⁹ Commenting on a previous version of this paper, Carlos Patarroyo suggested that the objections I raise to Fischer's semicompatibilism here may apply to all compatibilism in general. If this is indeed the case, then I take that to be a further reason why it is important to note the objections raised here.

²⁰ However, for the record "semicompatibilism in itself does not take a stand on whether the Consequence Argument is sound; it is consistent with acceptance or rejection of the Consequence Argument" (Fischer 207 56).

²¹ So says van Inwagen: "the existence of moral responsibility entails the existence of free will, and, therefore, if free will does not exist, moral responsibility does not exist either" (forthcoming).

²² While the Consequence Argument doesn't explicitly involve the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, as Robert Kane argues the two are connected; see Kane (2005 23f).

²³ A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2008 Pacific Society of Christian Philosophers conference at the University of California at Riverside, where I benefited from numerous helpful comments and criticisms. In particular, I would like to thank John Fischer for his constructive comments and gentle guidance, both at this conference and throughout all of his work. Many thanks also to Carlos Patarroyo for helpful comments and for the invitation to contribute to this issue of the journal. I would also like to thank Manuel Vargas for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and for encouraging me to think about the methodological issues at work.

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