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Compatibilism

John Martin Fischer

There may be outward impediments even whilst [an agent] is deliberating, as a man deliberates whether he shall play at tennis, and at the same time [unbeknownst to him] the door of the tennis court is fast locked against him.

Bishop Bramhall, A Defense of True Liberty

1 Introduction

To begin, take "compatibilism" to be the view that both some central notion of freedom and genuine, robust moral responsibility are compatible with causal determinism. This scientific claim is that, among other things, every bit of human behavior is causally necessitated by events in the past together with the natural laws. Of course, compatibilism, as thus understood, does not in itself take any stand on whether causal determinism is true.

Compatibilism is appealing because it appears so obvious to us that we (most of us) are at least sometimes free and morally responsible, and yet we also realize that causal determinism could turn out to be true. That is, for all we know, it is true that all events (including human behavior) are the results of chains of necessitating causes that can be traced indefinitely into the past. Put slightly differently, I could imagine waking up some morning to the newspaper headline, "Causal Determinism is True!" I could imagine reading the article and subsequently 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% probabilities associated with them. I feel confident that this would not - nor should it - change my view of myself and others as free and robustly morally responsible agents, deeply different from other animals.

The fact that these generalizations or conditionals have 100% probabilities associated with them, rather than 99 or (say) 90%, would not and should not have any effect on my views about the existence of freedom and moral responsibility. My basic views of myself and others as free and responsible are and should be resilient with respect to such discoveries about the generalizations of physics. This of course is not to say that these basic views are resilient to any empirical discovery - just to this sort of discovery.

So, when I deliberate, I often take it that I am free in the sense that I have more than one option that is genuinely open to me. Since causal determinism might, for all we know, be true, compatibilism is attractive. Similarly, it is very natural to distinguish agents who are compelled to behave as they do from those who act freely; we make this distinction, and mark the two classes of individuals, in common sense and the law. If causal determinism turned out to be true, along with incompatibilism, all behavior would be put into one class, and the distinctions we naturally and intuitively draw in common sense and law would be in jeopardy of disappearing.

And yet there are deep problems with compatibilism. Perhaps these are what have led some philosophers to condemn it in such vigorous terms: "wretched subterfuge," (Kant), "quagmire of evasion" (James), and "the most flabbergasting instance of the fallacy of changing the subject to be encountered anywhere in the complete history of sophistry . [a ploy that] was intended to take in the vulgar, but which has beguiled the learned in our time" (Wallace Matson). Kant added, for good measure, that compatibilism offers us "the freedom of the turnspit." Yikes!

In this essay, I will start by highlighting the attractions of compatibilism, and sketching and motivating a version of traditional compatibilism. I shall then present a basic challenge to it. Given this challenge, I suggest an alternative version of compatibilism, which I call "semicompatibilism," and I elaborate its advantages. Finally, I consider objections to this specific version of compatibilism, as well as compatibilism in general. My goal will be to present the scaffolding of a defense of semicompatibilism (highlighting the main attractions), rather than a detailed elaboration or defense of the doctrine. In Section 2, I begin with "classical" or "traditional" compatibilism, then turn to semicompatibilism. Many, although not all, their virtues are shared.

Oscar Wilde wrote in The Portrait of Dorian Gray that, if an author tries to exhaust the subject, he is in danger of exhausting the audience. I will not do the former, and I hope that I will not have done the latter!

2 The Lure of Compatibilism

Often, it seems to me that I have more than one path open to me. The paths into the future branch out from the present, and they represent different ways I could proceed into the future. When I deliberate now about whether to go to the lecture or to the movies tonight, I think I genuinely can go to the lecture and I genuinely can go to the movies (but perhaps not both). I often have this view about the future as a "garden of forking paths" (in Borges's wonderful phrase). But I can also be brought to recognize that, for all I know, causal determinism is true; its truth would not necessarily manifest itself to me in my subjective experience. Compatibilism allows me to keep both the view that I often have more than one path genuinely open to me and that causal determinism may be true. I can keep both views in the same mental compartment, so to speak; they need not be compartmentalized into different mental slots or thought to apply to different realms or perspectives.

It is incredibly natural - almost inevitable - to think that I could either go to the movies or to the lecture tonight, that I could either continue working on this essay or take a coffee break, and so forth. It would be jarring to discover that, despite the appearance of the availability of these options, only one path into the future is genuinely available to me. A traditional compatibilist need not come to the one-path conclusion, in the event that theoretical physicists conclusively establish that the conditionals discussed above have 100% probabilities, rather than (say) 90%. A compatibilist can embrace the resiliency of this fundamental view of ourselves as agents who (help to) select the path the world takes into the future, among various paths it genuinely could take.

Similarly, it is natural for human beings to think of ourselves as morally accountable in a deep way for our choices and behavior. Typically, we think of ourselves as morally responsible precisely in virtue of exercising a distinctive kind of freedom or control; this freedom is traditionally conceived as exactly the sort of "selection" from among genuinely available alternative possibilities involved in deliberation about the future. When an agent is morally responsible for her behavior, we typically suppose that she could have (at some relevant time) done otherwise.

Think of moral responsibility broadly, to include aptness to (or, possibly, fittingness of, or desert of) the full range of "reactive attitudes" (using P.F. Strawson's 1962 term): moral blame, punishment, moral praise, and moral reward. So construed, moral responsibility is central to our lives, and, arguably, to our status as persons. At the very least, its constituents help to bind us together as friends, lovers, teams, social groups, nations, and so forth.

So far as we are morally responsible agents, we are fundamentally different from nonhuman animals in specific and important ways. We morally blame and punish other human beings, and they can be deserving targets of the reactive attitudes, such as resentment, indignation, and gratitude. Resentment and indignation involve moral anger, and punishment is (among other things) an expression of such anger. Although we can legitimately "condition" and negatively re-enforce a nonhuman animal's behavior, it would be inappropriate to morally blame or punish them (or, for that matter, to morally praise or reward them).

The assumption that we human beings are morally responsible agents is extremely important and pervasive. In fact, it is hard to imagine human life without it. At the least, such a life would be very different from our current ones - less richly textured and, arguably, less desirable. A compatibilist need not give up this assumption, even if, as above, she were to wake up to the headline, "Causal Determinism is True!" (and she were convinced of its truth, over time). The resilience of moral responsibility with respect to the truth of causal determinism is not just a desideratum but also a truth-making feature of compatibilism (Fischer, accepted for publication, a).

In ordinary life, and in our moral principles and legal system, we distinguish individuals who behave freely from those who do not. Sam is a "normal" adult human being, who grew up in favorable circumstances. She has no unusual neurophysiological or psychological anomalies or disorders, and she is not in a context in which she is manipulated, brainwashed, coerced, or otherwise "compelled" to do what she does. More specifically, no factors that uncontroversially function to undermine, distort, or thwart the normal human faculty of practical reasoning or execution of the outputs of such reasoning are present. She deliberates in the "normal way" about...