A regress argument for restrictive incompatibilism

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 103, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 201-215

  Vander Laan, David ^a  

^a WESTMONT COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 33751505104     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1010361610463     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Van Inwagen says that restrictivism is true if the modal rule Beta is valid, and he uses something akin to ARD in the course of his argument. Since Fischer and Ravizza are willing to grant Beta's validity for the sake of argument, and since van Inwagen's argument can be presented without explicit reference to Beta, we will not address the question of its validity here.
2. One might say that, in a sense, an agent cannot now be free to act at any time other than now. At this moment, there is no other time at which to act. But it is clear that Fischer and Ravizza are considering a different sense of 'free'. In this sense an agent is free to perform an action at a future time if there is a possible future in which the agent performs the action at that future time, and, throughout the relevant temporal interval, it will be up to the agent whether the next moment of that possible future occurs. It is not always clear what is meant by "the relevant temporal interval", especially when the action in question is supposed not to occur. I propose we take it as follows. If the action is time-specific, as, e.g., turning on the TV at 8 o'clock, or taking the bread out of the oven twenty minutes from now, the relevant temporal interval is the interval from the time implicitly specified in the statement "the agent (now) has an unopposed desire to perform the action" to the time at which the action must occur if it occurs at all. We may then construe freedom to perform a time-inspecific action, such as finishing Moby Dick, as freedom to perform one of a collection of time-specific actions, such as finishing Moby Dick next Thursday evening.
3. Peter van Inwagen, "When the Will Is Not Free," Philosophical Studies, 75 (1994), pp. 95-113.
4. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, "Free Will and the Modal Principle," Philosophical Studies, 77 (1996), pp. 213-230.
5. Van Inwagen, "When the Will Is Not Free," p. 106. The same points, mutatis mutandis, might be made in cases where A is not reprehensible but is for some other reason obviously not the thing to do. It may not be clear whether motives are to be understood as desires or as desire-producing reasons or in some other way, but the argument will not be affected so long as they are taken always to involve desires. Alternately, the claims van Inwagen makes about motives could be made directly for desires.
6. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, "When the Will Is Free," in T. O'Connor, ed., Agents, Causes, and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 250.
7. If the argument is to be successful, Peter must not be able to make ARD false, since otherwise we would not be able to rule out Peter's being free to falsify ARD and then to refrain without any desire to refrain. But of course if ARD is true, then it is eminently plausible that this fact is not up to Peter.
8. Van Inwagen, "When Is the Will Free?" in T. O'Connor, ed., Agents, Causes, and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 231.
9. Van Inwagen, "When the Will Is Not Free," p. 104.
10. Indeed, it seems Fischer and Ravizza's view naturally leads us to the idea that we are continuously free during waking hours (at the least). They say there is no reason to think that we generally lack the power to generate desires to do otherwise. If the restrictivist's arguments provide no such reason, then what reasons are there to think we are not free at any particular moment? And if there are none, why not suppose we are free continuously, or nearly continuously? Moreover, this view suggests that at a given moment we may be free to perform a spectacularly wide variety of actions, viz., any of those it is within our power to form a desire to do. One of the examples Fischer and Ravizza choose in their "Free Will and the Modal Principle" is taking up the bagpipes. Even on the assumption that "you are a singularly unmusical person with an aversion to Scottish music," they say, "it seems intuitively plausible to suppose that you do have the power to practice the bagpipes . . ." (225-6). Presumably they think we have this power at almost every time. Since the same is true of many other possible actions, we are (on this view) nearly always free to perform each of a great many actions. In contrast, for the restrictivist who accepts the argument of this paper, we are free to do only what we have an occurrent desire or meta-desire to do. Since we do not have a great many occurrent desires at once, we are free with respect to only a small number of actions at a time.
11. Van Inwagen, "When Is the Will Free?", p. 232.
12. Many thanks to Gordon Pettit, whose work got me thinking about the issues discussed here. Thanks also to the many who commented on drafts, especially Ray Van Arragon and Dan and Frances Howard-Snyder.