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Just Deserts. Daniel C. DennettЧитать онлайн книгу.

Just Deserts - Daniel C. Dennett


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future is physically possible (van Inwagen 1983: 3). We can say that a world is governed by determinism if and only if, given the way things are at time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law (Hoefer 2016). Or put differently, it’s the thesis that facts about the remote past in conjunction with the laws of nature entail that there is only one unique future (McKenna and Pereboom 2016: 19). As a compatibilist, I assume you either accept the thesis of determinism or think it’s no threat to the kind of free will and moral responsibility under dispute.

      Do you accept, for instance, that if determinism is true, then all human behavior, like the behavior of all other things in the physical universe, is causally determined by antecedent conditions in accordance with natural laws? Do you also accept that determinism rules out or excludes an agent’s ability to do otherwise in exactly the same set of circumstances? Consider, for example, the following everyday example. This morning, after I showered, I went to my closet, opened it, looked inside, deliberated for a moment (not very long), and then decided that I would wear one of my (many) black button-down collared shirts. If determinism is true, my choice would have been the only one I could have made in exactly that situation, keep everything in the universe exactly the same up until the moment of choice. That is because according to determinism, our choices and actions are the fixed result of a deterministic chain of events that trace back to factors ultimately beyond our control (i.e. events in the remote past and natural laws). Hence, if determinism is true, then for any given voluntary action we would end up with something like the following picture – where a myriad set of antecedent conditions determines our unique set of inner psychological states and processes, which in turn determines our subsequent choice and action.

       Figure 1

      On this picture, keeping everything in the universe exactly the same up until a particular moment in time, say time t, the agent’s choice would be causally determined such that they could not have done otherwise in exactly those circumstances.

      Setting aside for the moment the question of whether the “ability to do otherwise” is a necessary condition for free will, and without getting into a compatibilist defense of free will quite yet, I simply want to know whether you agree with my summary of determinism and what it means for human action. Do you accept that if determinism is true, then all human behavior, like the behavior of all other things in the physical universe, is causally determined by antecedent conditions in accordance with natural laws? And do you also accept that determinism rules out or excludes an agent’s ability to do otherwise in the unconditional sense?

      First, consider the following argument for incompatibilism, which is independent of considerations regarding alternative possibilities and the ability to do otherwise. It comes from the American philosopher Peter van Inwagen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. As he puts it:

      If determinism is true, then there is some state of the world in the distant past P that is connected by the laws of nature to any action A that one performs in the present. But since no one is responsible for the state of the world P in the distant past, and no one is responsible for the laws of nature that lead from P to A, it follows that no one is responsible for any action A that is performed in the present. (van Inwagen 1993: 182–183)

      This argument captures one of the incompatibilist intuitions I have regarding


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