Free Will and Human Agency: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments

Garrett Pendergraft

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000605358
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Philosophy History & Theory

In this new kind of entrée to contemporary discussions of free will and human agency, Garrett Pendergraft collects and illuminates 50 of the most relevant puzzles, paradoxes, and thought experiments. Assuming no familiarity with the philosophical literature on free will, each chapter describes a case, explains the questions that it raises, briefly summarizes some of the key responses to the case, and provides a list of suggested readings. Every chapter is accessible, succinct, and self-contained. The puzzles are divided into five broad categories: the threat from fatalism, the threat from determinism, practical reason, social dimensions, and moral luck. Entries cover topics such as the grandfather paradox, theological fatalism, the consequence argument, manipulation arguments, luck arguments, weakness of will, action explanation, addiction, blame and punishment, situationism in moral psychology, and Huckleberry Finn. Free Will and Human Agency is an effective and engaging teaching tool as well as a handy resource for anyone interested in exploring the questions that have made human agency a topic of perennial philosophical interest.

Key Features:

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• Though concise overall, offers broad coverage of the key areas of free will and human agency.
• Describes each imaginative case directly and in a memorable way, making the cases accessible and easy to remember.
• Provides a list of suggested readings for each case.

Part I Fatalism and other Sources of Existential Angst

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126119-1

Chapters 1–9 group together a set of challenges to free will that can all loosely be described as fatalist challenges. (Although of course many of these challenges could be categorized in other ways as well.) In Chapter 1 we begin with an intuitively compelling picture of our freedom: the idea that our choices take place in the context of a (metaphorical) “garden of forking paths.” The notion of fatalism encapsulates a set of concerns that cause us to wonder whether this picture is an accurate representation of reality.

Chapter 2 (“Tomorrow’s Sea Battle”) refers to a famous passage from Aristotle, in which he considers arguments that begin with very simple ingredients (apparently true predictions) and end with a disturbing conclusion about a lack of control. Aristotle doesn’t seem to endorse the fatalistic conclusion, but the third chapter (“A Date with Destiny”) features a thought experiment told by someone—Richard Taylor—who does endorse fatalism. Taylor’s thought experiment involves an individual named Osmo, who discovers a book that accurately describes his entire life.

Chapter 4 (“Stranger than Fiction”), inspired in part by the movie of the same name, features a similar type of story, i.e., one in which the main character (Harold Crick) discovers that his life is the subject of a book. Unlike Osmo, however, Crick’s story is still being written (albeit not by him), which gives him the opportunity to lobby the author for a better ending. The fifth chapter (“The Trouble with Time Travel”) also involves someone trying to rewrite a narrative. In this case, however, the protagonist, Tim, is trying to travel back in time and rewrite his family’s history by killing his own grandfather.

One common feature of the fatalistic stories in Chapters 3–5 is a knowledge of what’s going to happen (or what has already happened, in Tim’s case). Some philosophers (Taylor included) have thought that knowledge of what’s going to happen makes it impossible to deliberate about what’s going to happen. Chapter 6 (“Does Deliberation Require Uncertainty?”) puts this claim under the microscope.

Two recurring themes, then, are predictions (which can give rise to fatalist concerns) and deliberation (which seems to be threatened by those fatalist concerns). Chapter 7 (“One Box or Two?”) takes up the prediction concern by examining Newcomb’s problem. The predictor in Newcomb’s problem can be described as more or less accurate, depending on which variation of the problem we’re considering, but there’s one particular predictor who is supposed to be infallible: the God of traditional Christian theism. Chapter 8 (“Does Divine Foreknowledge Undermine Our Freedom?”) examines the theological version of the fatalist challenge.

The final chapter in this part (“Fatalism in the Courtroom”) borrows from Clarence Darrow’s famous defense of Leopold and Loeb. We’ll extract an argument from Darrow’s wide-ranging plea to the effect that free will is not just non-existent, but perhaps even impossible.

1 The Garden of Forking Paths

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126119-2

Getting Started in our Thinking About Free Will

Jorge Luis Borges made a name for himself primarily in literature, but he has also shaped contemporary discussions of free will and moral responsibility. His influence on the free will discussion comes from a very simple thought experiment, which helps us get a handle on one way of thinking about free choice. In Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the character Stephen Albert says the following: “In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others” (Borges 1998 [1941], 125).

Encountering “diverse alternatives” is like walking through a garden and coming to a fork in the path; making a choice is like choosing between the different forks. Borges’s character describes this as what happens in fiction, but various philosophers have been willing to use the description for reality as well. John Martin Fischer, for example, introduces the commonsense notion of freedom as the view that “the future is a garden of forking paths” (1994, 3).

One reason why this picture has become one of the dominant metaphors for thinking about free will is that it captures a sense in which the future, unlike the past, seems to be open. (For more on statements about the future, see Chapter 2.) The path we have already traversed has been written into our journey, but the path we take into the future has yet to be decided.

Robert Kane captures the importance of this metaphor by asking us to consider a recent law school graduate, Molly, who is deciding between two different job offers:

If Molly believes her choice is a free choice (made “of her own free will”), she must believe both options are “open” to her while she is deliberating. She could choose either one. (If she did not believe this, what would be the point of deliberating?) But that means she must believe there is more than one possible path into the future available to her and it is “up to her” which of these paths will be taken. Such a picture of an open future with forking paths—a “garden of forking paths,” we might call it—is essential to our understanding of free will. Such a picture of different possible paths into the future is also essential, we might even say, to what it means to be a person and to live a human life.

(Kane 2005, 6–7)

As Kane points out, the way that we think about our choices is fundamental to the way that we think about ourselves as human persons.

Our ability to reflect on our own freedom, however, often gives rise to various concerns. We might wonder whether our future path is up to us in the way it seems to be. Do we really have the choices between different paths that we think we have? Are we really the one writing our own story? Perhaps our story has already been written—by someone else, or perhaps by impersonal forces—and we are merely living it out.

If you’ve ever pondered possibilities such as these, then you’ve encountered the philosophical problem of fatalism. And you’re joining a venerable tradition of philosophers who have been thinking about this problem, and passing it along, for thousands of years. In fact, Daniel Dennett speculates that the problem of fatalism might be the original philosophical problem: “The idea of Fate is older than philosophy itself” (1984, 1). One of the core movements of philosophical thought is to wonder whether things really are as they seem to be, and one of our first and strongest seemings is the impression that we are making free choices on a regular basis.

Over the next few chapters, we’ll be sharpening the challenge of fatalism by examining its various facets and examining in detail their potential implications for our freedom. We will also be working to increase our understanding of numerous crucial concepts. The central concept of this book is, as you may have guessed, the concept of free will. But rather than spending a lot of time up front trying to define free will in a comprehensive way, we will instead highlight various ways of understanding the concept as they become relevant. We will also note how these different ways of understanding free will align or conflict with each other.

For now, we can simply say that Borges’s garden of forking paths is one influential and intuitively plausible way of understanding free will: to have free will is to have the ability to choose between different paths into the future. Free will is a type of control over what we do.

Responses

As you might imagine, not everyone has bought into the idea of a garden of forking paths as the right way to think about free will. (It is, after all, only a picture (van Inwagen 1989, 410).) As Kane acknowledges, some would argue that the forking paths metaphor “hides a multitude of puzzles and confusions” (2005, 7). Unfortunately, however, there hasn’t been a lot of discussion of how exactly the metaphor is obscure or confusing. (Although see Waller and Waller 2015 for an argument that the forking paths metaphor is inconsistent with a different, but equally plausible, way of thinking about free choice.)

Since the garden of forking paths is a strongly anti-fatalist metaphor, one way to look for alternatives is to look for metaphors that have a better chance of being consistent with fatalism. John Martin Fischer, though not a fatalist himself, has offered a couple of promising examples of this strategy. (See Chapter 25 for an additional example.) One of Fischer’s suggestions is that we could shift our focus from the path we choose to the way we choose to walk it:

Even if there is just one available path into the future, I may be held accountable for how I walk down this path. I can be blamed for taking the path of cruelty, negligence, or cowardice. And I can be praised for walking with sensitivity, attentiveness, and courage. Even if I somehow discovered there is but one path into the future, I would still care deeply how I walk down this path. I would aspire to walk with grace and dignity. I would want to have a sense of humor. Most of all, I would want to do it my way.

(Fischer 1994, 216)

And for those who want to get away from talk of garden paths entirely, they could explore the idea that exercising agency is like playing the cards that you’ve been dealt. Fischer develops this idea in an article discussing some of Joel Feinberg’s work:

Our behavior may well be “in the cards” in the sense that we simply have to play the cards that are dealt us. Further, just as an astronaut may still control the lift-off of the rocket, even though she did not build the platform that makes the launch possible (or ever have any control over the platform), we can be accountable for playing the cards that are dealt us, even if we did not manufacture the cards, write the rules of the game, and so forth. … It is a kind of wisdom—a wisdom found in Feinberg—to recognize that, when you play the cards that are dealt you (in a certain distinctive way), you can exercise a robust sort of control, even in the absence of the power to make the cards, to own the factory that makes the cards, to make up the rules of the game, and so forth (to infinity) …

(Fischer 2006, 129)

Choosing between paths is a powerful idea that seems to capture something about the type of freedom that we, as humans, appear to enjoy. Whether it ends up being the best way to think about free will remains an open question that we will continue to examine throughout this book.

Recommended Reading

• Borges, Jorge Luis. 1998 [1941]. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, 119–28. New York: Penguin Books.
• Fischer, John Martin. 1994. The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Kane, Robert. 2005. A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, chapter 1. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Rice, Hugh. 2018. “Fatalism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/fatalism.

Works Cited

• Dennett, Daniel C. 1984. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Fischer, John Martin. 2006. “The Cards That Are Dealt You.” The Journal of Ethics 10: 107–29.
• Van Inwagen, Peter. 1989. “When Is the Will Free?” Philosophical Perspectives 3: 399–422.
• Waller, Robyn Repko, and Russell L. Waller. 2015. “Forking Paths and Freedom: A Challenge to Libertarian Accounts of Free Will.” Philosophia 43: 1199–1212.

2 Tomorrow’S Sea Battle

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126119-3

The Most Important Sea Battle in History?

The Battle of Salamis, which took place in 480 B.C., is widely regarded as one of the most important naval battles in the history of western civiliza...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Fatalism and Other Sources of Existential Angst
• Part II: The Threat from Determinism(s)
• Part III: Practical Reason
• Part IV: Social Dimensions
• Part V: Moral Luck
• Index