Consequence Argument for Incompatibilism

Back to Free Will and Determinism

Outline

Basic Consequence Argument

If determinism is true, everything a person does is logically necessitated by laws of nature and events that have already occurred.
No one can undo events that have already occurred.
No one can do anything that violates a law of nature.
Therefore if determinism is true, no one can refrain from anything they do.

Like a Falling Marble

View Free Falling Marble
Assume the initial conditions are beyond your control
You cannot violate laws of nature such as Newton’s Law of Gravitation and Equation of Motion.
Therefore you could not have prevented the marble from hitting bottom of the tube after 5.86 seconds.

Ancestral Consequence Argument

If determinism is true, everything a person does is logically necessitated by laws of nature and events taking place before they were born.
No one can undo events that took place before they were born.
No one can do anything that violates a law of nature.
Therefore if determinism is true, no one can avoid doing anything they do.

Like Falling Dominoes

Assume it’s a law of nature that if a domino falls then the next domino falls.
- This is the Law of Dominoes
Then the falling of Domino #1000 follows logically from
- The Law of Dominoes
- Prior events, e.g. the falling of Domino #25.

Suppose that Domino #25 fell before you were born.
Then you could not have prevented any domino from falling, because
- You could not have prevented Domino #25 from falling because you were not yet born.
- There’s no domino you could have prevented from falling if the domino before it had fallen
  - That’s because of the Law of Dominoes and the fact that no one can violate a law of nature.

RAA Ancestral Consequence Argument

If determinism is true, everything a person does is logically entailed by laws of nature and events taking place before they were born.
Suppose a person who raised their arm could have refrained.
Then they could have done something (refrained from raising their arm) such that had they done it then either some event that took place before their birth would not have happened or a law of nature would have been violated.
No one has such power.
Therefore they couldn’t have refrained.

Scope of the Consequence Argument Can be Restricted

All events, physical and mental
Physical events only
Location, velocity, and acceleration of a physical body at a time.
Wavelength, frequency, time period, speed, and amplitude of a wave at a time.

Proposition-Subjunctive Version

If determinism is true, for any proposition A stating that a person S performs a particular action, A is logically entailed by propositions L stating laws of nature and propositions E stating events taking place before S was born.
- View Determinism is like Falling Dominoes
S cannot do anything such that were S to do it some proposition of L would be false
S cannot do anything such that were S to do it some proposition of E would be false
Therefore S cannot do anything such that were S to do it proposition A would be be false

Objections

plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ContComp
- Saunders, John Turk, 1968. “The Temptation of Powerlessness,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 5: 100–8.
- Perry, John, 2004. “Compatibilist Options,” Freedom and Determinism, eds. J. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and D. Shier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 231–254.
- Dorr, Cian, 2016. “Against Counterfactual Miracles,” Philosophical Review 125: 241–286.
- Lewis, David, 1981. “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” Theoria, 47: 113–21.
- Graham, Peter A, 2008. “A Defense of Local Miracle Compatibilism,” Philosophical Studies, 140: 65–82.
- Pendergraft, Garrett, 2011. “The Explanatory Power of Local Miracle Compatibilism,” Philosophical Studies, 156: 249–266.
- Slote, Michael, 1982. “Selective Necessity and the Free-Will Problem,” Journal of Philosophy, 79: 5–24.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/
- We can now explain the essence of Lewis’s reply to the counterfactual version of the Consequence argument in a way that doesn’t require you to accept Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals.
- The argument trades on an equivocation between two counterfactuals.
  - (C1) If I had raised my hand, the laws (or the past) would have been different.
  - (C2) If I had raised my hand, I would thereby have caused the laws (or the past) to be different.
- There is a corresponding equivocation between two ability claims:
  - (A1) I had the ability to do something (raise my hand) such that if I had exercised my ability, the laws (or the past) would have been different.
  - (A2) I had the ability to do something (raise my hand) such that if I had exercised my ability, I would thereby have caused the laws (or the past) to be different.
- The problem with the argument, says Lewis, is that it equivocates between these two ability claims. To count as a reductio against the compatibilist, the argument must establish that the compatibilist is committed to (A2). But the compatibilist is committed only to (C1) and thus only to (A1). The compatibilist is committed only to saying that if determinism is true, we have abilities we would exercise only if the past (or the laws) had been different in the appropriate ways. And while this may sound odd, it is no more incredible than the claim that the successful exercise of our abilities depends, not only on us, but also on the co-operation of things not in our control: the good or bad luck of our immediate surroundings. Since we are neither superheroes nor gods, we are always in this position, regardless of the truth or falsity of determinism.
- The Consequence Argument was intended as an argument from premises that we must all accept—premises about our lack of control over the past and the laws—to the conclusion that if determinism is true, we don’t have the free will common sense says we have. The counterfactual version of the argument claims that if we attribute ordinary abilities to deterministic agents, we are forced to credit them with incredible past or law-changing abilities as well. But no such incredible conclusion follows. All that follows is something that we must accept anyway, as the price of our non-godlike nature: that the exercise of our abilities always depends, in part, on circumstances outside our control. (See also Fischer 1983, 1988, 1994; Watson 1987; Nelkin 2001; Vihvelin 2008, 2011, 2013, 2017; Kapitan 1991, 2011; Carlson 2000.)
- If the aim of the Consequence argument was to show that no compatibilist account of ‘could have done otherwise’ can succeed, then Lewis is surely right; the reductio fails. The distinction between (A1) and (A2) permits the compatibilist to avoid making incredible claims about the powers of free determined agents. On the other hand, the incompatibilist surely has a point when she complains that it is difficult to believe that anyone has the ability described by (A1). We believe that our powers as agents are constrained by the past and by the laws. One way to understand this belief is compatible with determinism: we lack causal power over the past and the laws. But it’s natural to understand the constraint in a different, simpler way: we are able to do only those things which are such that our doing of them does not counterfactually require a difference in either the past or the laws. And this leads more or less directly to the incompatibilist conclusion that if determinism is true, then we are never able to do otherwise.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
- While there have been numerous different replies along these lines, the most influential of these objections is due to David Lewis (1981). Lewis contended that van Inwagen’s argument equivocated on ‘is able to break a law of nature’. We can distinguish two senses of ‘is able to break a law of nature’:
  - (Weak Thesis) I am able to do something such that, if I did it, a law of nature would be broken.
  - (Strong Thesis) I am able to do something such that, if I did it, it would constitute a law of nature’s being broken or would cause a law of nature to be broken.
- (e.g., Lehrer 1980; Slote 1982; Watson 1986. See the entry on arguments for incompatibilism for a more extensive discussion of and bibliography for the Consequence Argument)
- If we are committed to the Categorical Analysis, then those desiring to defend compatibilism seem to be committed to the sense of ability in ‘is able to break a law of nature’ along the lines of the strong thesis. Lewis agrees with van Inwagen that it is “incredible” to think humans have such an ability (Lewis 1981, 113), but maintains that compatibilists need only appeal to the ability to break a law of nature in the weak sense. While it is absurd to think that humans are able to do something that is a violation of a law of nature or causes a law of nature to be broken, there is nothing incredible, so Lewis claimed, in thinking that humans are able to do something such that if they did it, a law of nature would be broken. In essence, Lewis is arguing that incompatibilists like van Inwagen have failed to adequately motivate the restrictiveness of the Categorical Analysis.
- Some incompatibilists have responded to Lewis by contending that even the weak ability is incredible (van Inwagen 2004). But there is a different and often overlooked problem for Lewis: the weak ability seems to be too weak. Returning to the case of John’s refraining from raising his hand, Lewis maintains that the following three propositions are consistent:
  - (i) John is able to raise his hand.
  - (ii) A necessary condition for John’s raising his hand fails to obtain (i.e., that the laws of nature or past are different than they actually are).
  - (iii) John is not able to do anything that would constitute this necessary condition’s obtaining or cause this necessary condition to obtain (i.e., he is unable to do anything that would constitute or cause a law of nature to be broken or the past to be different).
- One might think that (ii) and (iii) are incompatible with (i). Consider again Luke, our agoraphobic. Suppose that his agoraphobia affects him in such a way that he will only intentionally go outside if he chooses to go outside, and yet his agoraphobia makes it impossible for him to make this choice. In this case, a necessary condition for Luke’s intentionally going outside is his choosing to go outside. Moreover, Luke is not able to choose or cause himself to choose to go outside. Intuitively, this would seem to imply that Luke lacks the freedom to go outside. But this implication does not follow for Lewis. From the fact that Luke is able to go outside only if he chooses to go outside and the fact that Luke is not able to choose to go outside, it does not follow, on Lewis’s account, that Luke lacks the ability to go outside. Consequently, Lewis’s account fails to explain why Luke lacks the ability to go outside (cf. Speak 2011). (For other important criticisms of Lewis, see Ginet [1990, ch. 5] and Fischer [1994, ch. 4].)
- While Lewis may be right that the Categorical Analysis is too restrictive, his argument, all by itself, doesn’t seem to establish this. His argument is successful only if (a) he can provide an alternative analysis of ability that entails that Luke’s agoraphobia robs him of the ability to go outside and (b) does not entail that determinism robs John of the ability to raise his hand (cf. Pendergraft 2010). Lewis must point out a principled difference between these two cases. As should be clear from the above, the Simple Conditional Analysis is of no help. However, some recent work by Michael Smith (2003), Kadri Vihvelin (2004; 2013), and Michael Fara (2008) have attempted to fill this gap. What unites these theorists—whom Clarke (2009) has called the ‘new dispositionalists’—is their attempt to appeal to recent advances in the metaphysics of dispositions to arrive at a revised conditional analysis of the freedom to do otherwise. The most perspicuous of these accounts is offered by Vihvelin (2004), who argues that an agent’s having the ability to do otherwise is solely a function of the agent’s intrinsic properties. (It is important to note that Vihvelin [2013] has come to reject the view that free will consists exclusively in the kind of ability analyzed below.) Building on Lewis’s work on the metaphysics of dispositions, she arrives at the following analysis of ability:
- Revised Conditional Analysis of Ability: S has the ability at time t to do X iff, for some intrinsic property or set of properties B that S has at t, for some time t′ after t, if S chose (decided, intended, or tried) at t to do X, and S were to retain B until t′, S’s choosing (deciding, intending, or trying) to do X and S’s having B would jointly be an S-complete cause of S’s doing X. (Vihvelin 2004, 438)

Libertarian Compatibilism, Kadri Vihvelin in Nous

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