Philosophy 151

Paper #2

Delia Morgan

Libertarianism: Chisholm’s Views on Freedom

I. Introduction

The general problem of human freedom concerns these basic questions: In performing some action X, does the agent act freely? Does he choose freely (i.e., is his will free)? And finally, should he be held morally responsible? Doubts have been raised about the freedom of human action and the will, due to deterministic views of causation. Determinism holds that every event, including all human choice and action, is causally necessitated by preceding events. Whatever motivates us to choose and act, on a given occasion, has necessarily arisen due to a complex web of pre-existing causes, events and conditions which in turn were necessarily caused by other events and conditions. If this is true, then no one could ever have acted otherwise than he did. Since free will implies that one could, at least some times, have acted otherwise, it seems that determinism would deny free will, and human freedom in general.

The implications of this lack of freedom are disturbing to most people, since we tend to believe ourselves to possess and exercise the power of choice in our actions. This view would also undermine the notion of moral responsibility: if no one could ever have acted otherwise than he did, then it makes no sense to hold anyone morally responsible for his choices and actions. This is the view of “hard determinism,” and various challenges have been raised to it.

One obvious approach would be to simply deny determinism in favor of indeterminism, generally taken to be the view that at least some events are not causally necessitated by preceding events. This view has more plausibility than determinism, in light of our current understanding of the physical world. The theory of determinism itself seems to be a relic of a bygone era, when our understanding of nature was defined by Newtonian mechanics. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, posits that events on a microscopic scale are intrinsically probabilistic rather than deterministic. This is the mainstream physics view, which has a long history of experimental support. Some, such as David Bohm, have tried to force-fit determinism to quantum mechanics by reinterpreting the meaning of the Schrodinger wave equation. This effort has generally met with little success; it has no experimental validation or predictive power, and not much credibility among the physics community. (Citations available upon request.)

Some might claim that quantum effects “wash out” (i.e. average out to insignificance) on a macroscopic scale; this is generally held to be the case with rigid-body motion (the motion of an iron bar is the sum of the motion of all of its molecules, which are constrained to move together). However, there is no reason to think that this holds in all cases; indeed, complex systems (among which are fluid flow, weather patterns and biological organisms) often exhibit nonlinear dynamics, wherein a microscopic perturbation may be magnified through feedback mechanisms into a large-scale effect. (This field of study, often called “chaos theory,” is newer than quantum mechanics, but is also experimentally verified.) Given the combination of quantum mechanics, which are the basis for all physical interactions, and nonlinear dynamics, which are ubiquitous in complex systems, the plausibility of any deterministic theory is seriously undermined. Thus, if we are to take physics seriously, it would seem that it is indeterminism rather than determinism with which we should be concerned.

However, this view of indeterminism, in which the events corresponding to human choices and actions are uncaused, or random, fares no better with respect to our usual notions of free will and moral responsibility than determinism. A person whose choices and actions are fundamentally random, stemming perhaps from random brain events at the quantum level, might be considered to act freely (i.e., without constraint); but he cannot be considered to have willed his actions in any meaningful sense, nor would it seem reasonable to consider such a person morally responsible for his actions. Moral responsibility requires, at a minimum, that one could have behaved differently.

There are problems, then, with both the determinist and the indeterminist positions. In neither case could the person have chosen to act otherwise and done so; in neither case can he be held morally responsible. Some have just bitten the bullet and accepted these implications. (Usually by way of “hard determinism.” It would be interesting to see a comparable version of “hard indeterminism.”) Certain other approaches have attempted to reconcile determinism with free will by redefining the problem: all it means for one’s will to be free, they say, is that one could have acted otherwise if one had so chosen. Our actions still depend upon our choices, and our choices still depend upon our deliberations, and so our will is free. These views, known as compatibilism, are neutral with respect to determinism or indeterminism. (Thus, in the face of the physical implausibility of determinism, these arguments have relevance to indeterministic theories as well.) Still another view is that of Libertarianism, represented by Roderick Chisholm. His position is to deny both compatibilism and determinism, as well as indeterminism. This view asserts human freedom by positing a third possibility, between determinism and indeterminism, which involves human agency as a causative power; man becomes a prime mover, akin to God. This paper will consider Chisholm’s view, as well as some objections to it.

II. Chisholm’s version of Libertarianism

Chisholm’s approach, briefly, is as follows. He concerns himself with the status of man as a morally responsible agent. If one is morally responsible for what he does, then it must be that the choice and action were entirely up to the man himself. The act must have been within his power to perform or not to perform; therefore it could not have been caused by any event, internal or external, that was not within his power. Thus, moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism, since the causal events would not have been under his control; it is incompatible with indeterminism as well, since random events are also not under his control. He points out that compatibilism fails to address this convincingly, by its redefinition of free action. Compatibilism says that the statement “He could have done otherwise” is identically equal in meaning to “If he had chosen to do otherwise, then he would have done otherwise.” Chisholm points out that these two statements are not necessarily equivalent; for if the person could not have chosen to do otherwise, then he could not in fact have done otherwise. In that case, the second statement would still be true, but the first would be false; therefore, compatibilism in this formulation cannot be true.

Chisholm therefore posits a third alternative, one that is neither deterministic nor indeterministic. We recall that determinism is the theory that all events, including human actions, have a their necessary cause in prior events and circumstances; and that indeterminism is the theory that at least some events are uncaused. These two, then, while they seem to be contraries, are not; there remains another option. If there is some cause that does not consist in prior events and circumstances, then it may be that all events have a cause, but that cause is not a deterministic one. Chisholm considers that man himself is such a cause; he is a causal agent. Chisholm then acknowledges two kinds of causation: that due to previous events or circumstances, known as transeunt causation, and that due to an agent, known as immanent causation. In this view, each of us, like the western monotheistic conception of God, is a prime mover – an uncaused cause.

III. Some objections to Chisholm

A number of objections have been raised against Chisholm’s view; here we shall be able to consider only one or two. The most serious, which Chisholm himself addresses, is the charge that this view is no explanation at all: it fails to explain, when describing some action, just what the agent’s causation consisted in. In other words, what is the difference between the event just happening, and the human agent causing it to happen? The problem here is that this appears to be an empty distinction – a distinction without any real difference. In answer to this, Chisholm says that the difference is quite real, and just this: in one case the event was caused by the man, and in the other case it was not. He acknowledges that this answer may not be satisfactory; but he sees the root of the problem as lying with the very concept of causation itself, rather than being unique to the concept of immanent causation (causation by an agent). Causation itself is a peculiar idea, and one which is, as Chisholm says, a problem for everyone but the complete indeterminist.

To see this, one may ask an equivalent question with regard to transeunt causation: what does it add to our understanding of a sequence of events? To take an example of one billiard ball hitting another and causing the second to move, one may ask: what does it mean to say that the motion of the first ball caused the motion of the second, other than the mere fact that one event followed the other? Does the concept of causation really add anything in this case? In fact, Hume and others have found the concept of causation itself to be something wholly mysterious. If we take an empirical approach, all we will see is that one event follows another; perhaps the concept of causation should be eliminated. Thus, the objections to Chisholm’s immanent causation, as a wholly mysterious idea which explains nothing, may simply be seen as parallel to those raised by thoughtful observers against the more familiar idea of transeunt causation. Yet, most of us do not thereby dismiss transeunt causation; it has been found to be a useful idea, with explanatory and predictive power. If transeunt causation itself is not an empirically observable phenomenon, it has nonetheless led to physical theories which can accurately and repeatably predict empirically observable results.

While Chisholm does not address this directly, it can be applied with caution to his idea of immanent causation as well. Our usual understanding of ourselves as causally effective agents is verified by the repeated conjunction of our choices and our actions: time and again, my choice to raise my hand is followed by the motion of the hand. It might be objected that here, unlike the case with billiard balls, the cause is not a publicly observable event, but one contained entirely within my own mind. It is a cause to which I alone am privy, unlike the publicly observable and objectively repeatable motion of billiard balls. However, if we examine what we mean by “objective” observables, we discover that what we are really describing is a kind of intersubjective consensus. We may put a single ruler on the billiard table to measure the path, but the actual observation of the measurement is one which takes place in the mind of each observer privately; it is a subjective experience. We consider the measurement to be objective because we can discuss it and come to an agreement; this is what is meant by intersubjective consensus. But there is a way in which intersubjective consensus can be applied to internal events as well; I notice that my choice to raise my hand is followed by the decreed motion, and almost everyone else notices the same thing. Each of us is trapped in the laboratory of our own mind, but we can nevertheless communicate the results of our experiment and come to agreement about the nature of causation in this case; and this type of causation is that due to our own agency, or that which Chisholm calls immanent causation.

Chisholm, in fact, holds that it is our intimate familiarity with our own power of immanent causation that allows us to conceive of the notion of transeunt causation in the first place; without the direct experience of our own causal efficacy as agents, the concept of “cause” itself would have no meaning for us. Transeunt causation, then, is a conceptual extension of the idea of immanent causation, which is itself based upon direct experience of our power to produce actions based upon our choices. This assertion may be debatable; humans have arrived at many subtle concepts that have no internal, subjective equivalent. However, Chisholm’s main point is well-taken: the notion of immanent causation is fundamentally no more mysterious and no less explanatory than the more familiar idea of transeunt causation.

Some might still object that, while the mechanisms of transeunt causation can be understood wholly in terms of physical interactions, the mechanism of immanent causation is less clear. How, exactly, does a physical brain event arise as a result of an agent’s choice? It seems to require an interaction between a physical event and a non-physical choice. (The agent’s choice is not considered an event; it is not something that he does, but rather something that he causes to happen, without doing anything.) Indeed, Chisholm is a dualist, regarding persons as immaterial agents in a material world; with this stance comes the usual question about mind-body interaction – how do two such fundamentally different substances possible affect each other? One might expect Chisholm to resort to quantum theory here, but he does not. Others have claimed that consciousness itself is necessary to collapse the probabilistic wave function to an empirical observable; this would give consciousness a role in determining physical events at nature’s most fundamental level. It is not clear, however, that this would lead to a role for free will in causing quantum events; that might require one to subvert the supposedly random nature of quantum events by the introduction of what are known as “hidden variables” – unobservable properties or entities which determine, to some extent, the observable quantity without themselves being detected. Hidden variables are not popular in quantum physics, partly due to difficulties with empirical verification. Nevertheless, some appeal to quantum theory might strengthen Chisholm’s arguments against the criticisms arising from mind-body interaction problems.

IV. Conclusion

There are problems for human freedom, both free action and free will, that adhere to both the deterministic and the indeterministic views. The apparent incompatibility of free will with both views would seriously undermine moral responsibility, as well as our own sense of ourselves as efficacious agents in determining our life course. Compatibilist theories, seeking to reconcile free will and moral responsibility with either determinism or indeterminism, have a serious flaw: if one’s choices are determined in any way, or if they are completely random, then he could not possibly have acted otherwise than he did. Chisholm attempts to solve the dilemma by introducing a third alternative, one that is neither determinism nor random indeterminism. In so doing, he conceives of man as a causal agent, a prime mover unmoved; it is a power that most previous western philosophers have reserved for a monotheistic God. The most serious objections to his view center on the “mysteriousness” problem: it seems as if the power of causal agency is mysterious, and its interactions with the physical world are also mysterious. It may hardly seem to explain anything. While Chisholm readily admits to the mystery, he answers that causality itself is wholly mysterious, so his theory has not really added anything to the problem of causality itself. Here we might also add that physical interactions themselves are also fundamentally mysterious, and that Chisholm’s assumed interaction of the physical with the non-physical does nothing to augment that mystery. These “no added mystery” approaches to countering the objections may not be entirely satisfying; but they are a straightforward admission of the limits of human knowledge. In light of the realization of what we cannot know about physicality and causation, the position that takes seriously what we do seem to know about human causal agency – that is, our own direct experience of being causal agents – may be ultimately more satisfying than either of the alternatives: those theories which seek to deny such causal efficacy by appealing to outmoded notions of determinism, or those which seek to reframe the question of human freedom to fit within the confines of such a deterministic view.