Re: Compatibilism is impossible
Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2023 9:30 pm
"Behind the whole compatibilist enterprise lies the valid and important insight that, from one centrally important point of view, freedom is nothing more than a matter of being able to do what one wants or chooses or decides or thinks right or best to do, given one’s character, desires, values, beliefs (moral or otherwise), circumstances, and so on. Generally speaking, we have this freedom. Determinism does not affect it at all, and it has nothing whatever to do with any supposed sort of ultimate self-determination, or any particular power to determine what one’s character, desires, and so on will be. It is true that the fact that we generally have this freedom provides no support for the idea that we are or can be ‘truly’ self-determining in the way that still appears to be necessary for true responsibility. But we can indeed be self-determining in the compatibilist sense of being able by our own action, and in the light of our necessarily non-self-determined characters and desires, to determine to a very considerable extent what happens to us.
Compatibilists who stress this point have a powerful question to ask: ‘What else could one possibly suppose, or reflectively require, that freedom could or should be, other than this?’ But the old incompatibilist answer remains. This account of freedom does nothing to establish that we are truly responsible for our actions, nor, in particular, to establish that we are or can be truly morally responsible for our actions, in the ordinary, strong, desert-entailing sense."
(Strawson, Galen. Freedom and Belief. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 94)
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"Compatibilism says that our choices are free insofar as they manifest our characters (our beliefs, desires, etc.) and are not determined via causal chains that bypass our characters. If so, freedom is compatible with predetermination of our choices via our characters. The best argument for compatibilism is that we know better that we are sometimes free than that we ever escape predetermination; wherefore it may be for all we know that we are free but predetermined.
Incompatibilism says that our choices are free only if they have no determining causes outside our characters – not even causes that determine our choices via our characters. The best argument for incompatibilism rests on a plausible principle that unfreedom is closed under implication. Consider the prefix 'it is true that, and such-and-such agent never had any choice about whether', abbreviated 'Unfree'; suppose we have some premises (zero or more) that imply a conclusion; prefix 'Unfree' to each premise and to the conclusion; then the closure principle says that the prefixed premises imply the prefixed conclusion. Given determinism, apply closure to the implication that takes us from preconditions outside character – long ago, perhaps – and deterministic laws of nature to the predetermined choice. Conclude that the choice is unfree. Compatibilists must reject the closure principle. Let's assume that incompatibilists accept it. Else why are they incompatibilists?
I'll speak of 'compatibilist freedom' and 'incompatibilist freedom'. But I don't ask you to presuppose that these are two varieties of freedom. According to incompatibilism, compatibilist freedom is no more freedom than counterfeit money is money."
(Lewis, David. "Evil for Freedom's Sake?" 1993. Reprinted in Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy, 101-127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. pp. 109-10)