Van inwagen's consequence argument

Philosophical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 525-544

  Huemer, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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EID: 77949291774     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: 15581470     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00318108-109-4-525     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1983), chapter 3.
2. Three different versions of the argument appear there, of which I shall focus on the third. Van Inwagen has indicated that the latter is his favorite version ("When Is the Will Free?" Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989): 399-422, at 404) and that, in his opinion, the three arguments will stand or fall together (Essay on Free Will, 56-57).
3. Van Inwagen, Essay on Free Will, 96;
4. "When Is the Will Free?" 405.
5. Van Inwagen, Essay on Free Will, 93. Note that Np, so denned, entails p. I have abbreviated van Inwagen's definition slightly, but not so as to alter its sense. 'Has' in this definition may be read as timeless.
6. Van Inwagen, Essay on Free Will, 93-95
7. "When Is the Will Free?" 404-5.
8. Michael Slote ("Selective Necessity and the Free-Will Problem," Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 5-24, especially 10)
9. argues that the Consequence Argument depends on these two rules for its plausibility. André Gallois ("Van Inwagen on Free Will and Determinism," Philosophical Studies 32 (1977): 99-105, 101)
10. has also argued that the Consequence Argument depends on rule β *. These same rules figure in James Lamb's version of the Consequence Argument ("On a Proof of Incompatibilism," Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 20-35): rule α* corresponds to his principle of "can- entailment" (23), while rule β * corresponds to his "union inefficacy" principle (24). See also note 11 below.
11. The proof of β * also appears in Thomas McKay and David Johnson, "A Reconsideration of an Argument against Compatibilism," Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 113-22, at 115.
12. This is true provided, of course, that we do not rely on a counterexample to α in which X doesn't exist. That is, if we were to criticize α by appealing to a possible world in which every proposition is one that someone has a choice about, such a criticism would not tell against the Second Version of the Consequence Argument. But of course, no such criticism is in the offing here.
13. Van Inwagen, "Reply to Narveson," Philosophical Studies 32 (1977): 89-98, at 93, and Essay on Free Will, 66-67. For the sake of simplicity, I omit van Inwagen's later qualification that requires holding the past fixed (Essay on Free Will, 68). This qualification does not affect the counterexamples in the following two subsections.
14. This corresponds to David Lewis's "weak sense" of 'can render false' ("Are We Free to Break the Laws?" Theoria 47 (1981): 113-21, at 120).
15. This proposal derives from Thomas Talbott, "On Free Agency and the Concept of Power," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1988): 241-54, at 251. It also appears to be equivalent to Lewis's "strong sense" of 'can render false' ("Are We Free to Break the Laws?" 120). Lewis suggests (116-17) that, if A is some action S could have but did not perform, then if S had done
16. This counterexample strongly resembles those brought forth by Gallois, "Van Inwagen on Free Will and Determinism," 101
17. McKay and Johnson, "A Reconsideration," 115.
18. Van Inwagen ("Reply to Gallois," Philosophical Studies 32 (1977): 107-11), however, seems to miss the significance of Gallois's examples, in part because they were brought forth in response to a different version of the Consequence Argument from those discussed here.
19. (Gallois is responding to van Inwagen, "The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism," Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 185-99, which does not make any explicit mention of rules α, β, α*, or β*)
20. This point is made by Terence Horgan ("Compatibilism and the Consequence Argument," Philosophical Studies 47 (1985): 339-56, at 341-42). Horgan, like Gallois and Slote, underestimates the strength of his criticism-all three authors think that the invalidity of rule β* undermines rule β, removing the principal or only reason for accepting β. In fact, as McKay and Johnson realize (115-16), the invalidity of rule β* proves the invalidity of either α or β.
21. McKay and Johnson have deployed a similar example, involving coinflipping, against rule β*, although theirs does not involve genuinely random events. They claim (118) that it is an advantage of their example that it does not stipulate indeterminism. But note that genuine randomness is required to refute β under the counter-factual interpretation of 'Np', since, given determinism, the counterfactual, 'If I flipped the coin at t, it would have come up heads' is (arguably, at least) determinate. We need an example in which, if S had made a certain choice, either p or q would definitely have held, but it is indeterminate which one would have held.
22. See also David Widerker, "On an Argument for Incompatibilism," Analysis 47 (1987): 37-41, for two similar counterexamples to β.
23. I have in mind such authors as Richard Foley ("Compatibilism and Control over the Past," Analysis 39 (1979): 70-74)
24. Christopher Hill ("Van Inwagen on the Consequence Argument," Analysis 52 (1992): 49-55)
25. David Lewis ("Are We Free to Break the Laws?" 119 n.)
26. Thomas Flint ("Compatibilism and the Argument from Unavoidability," Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 423-40).
27. See van Inwagen, Essay on Free Will, 102-3
28. "Reply to Christopher Hill," Analysis 52 (1992): 56-61.
29. Van Inwagen, Essay on Free Will, 86-91.
30. Van Inwagen, Essay on Free Will, Ibid., 97.
31. Sally has no choice about whether John gives her the dollar. She has access to a world in which ∼A (the actual world), but she lacks access to any worlds in which A holds; therefore, she lacks access to any world in which either B or C holds. Of course, if John were to give her the dollar, she would then have access to such worlds.
32. This locution sounds funny-one cannot stipulate what goes on in the actual world. In the context of this paragraph, 'the actual world' refers to the world that we are pretending is actual, when considering the Gorbachev example.
33. Van Inwagen's remarks (Essay on Free Will, 89) suggest that he would want to say S only has access to worlds in which other people's choices are the same as in the actual world. But he does not specify what should be said about the situation in which one person's choices affect what choices others have.
34. McKay and Johnson ("A Reconsideration," 119) discuss this sort of interpretation with their proposed rule β4.
35. In responding to the Frankfurt examples, van Inwagen ("Ability and Responsibility," Philosophical Review 87 (1978): 201-24, at 215-17) has argued that if, no matter what an agent had done, state S would have obtained, then the agent is not responsible for S. This suggests that he would be receptive to my proposed reinterpretation of the consequence argument.
36. This, of course, is only true assuming I have free will. If I lack free will, then the only action I can perform is that of sitting here typing just these words on my keyboard.
37. Assume A is the only relevant non-actual action available to me.
38. Strictly speaking, of course, we should talk about the conservation of mass/energy, but this qualification is irrelevant to our present concerns.
39. By 'law of nature' I refer to physical laws, such as the law of gravity, the conservation of momentum, F=ma, and so on. The intuition in question does not clearly hold for, say, laws of psychology (if there are any such things). Van Inwagen (Essay on Free Will, 61-62) makes a similar stipulation.
40. Lewis, "Are We Free to Break the Laws?" 116-17. More precisely, Lewis claims that this is true if determinism is true, and that determinism could be true while at the same time we had free will.
41. John Turk Saunders argues, anticipating Lewis, that sometimes a person can act in such a way that, if he did so, the past would have been different than it actually was, even though no one can cause anything to happen in the past ("The Temptations of Powerlessness," American Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1968): 100-8).
42. But see also John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 81-82, which responds (albeit inconclusively) to Saunders's argument.
43. See David Lewis, "Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow," Nous 13 (1979): 455-76, for an explanation of "divergence miracles." A divergence miracle is a small violation of (what in the actual world is) a law of nature-the minimal violation required in order to make true the antecedent of some counterfactual conditional we are considering.
44. Fischer sympathetically discusses essentially this principle, which he calls "the fixity of the past" (see especially 78-85). Fischer's formulation is "no person can act in such a way that some fact about the past would not have been a fact" (9). Carl Ginet also defends a related "principle of the fixity of the given past" (On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102-10).