This alleged ability of ours to start up new causal chains from scratch will strike many as pretty mysterious; you may feel that only an antecedent conviction that there is free will, or perhaps a strong desire that there should be, could lead anyone to postulate it. But that something strikes us as mysterious isn’t a very strong argument against it—perhaps there just are things about the world that it’s hard for us to get our minds round. The real problem with this line of thought is quite different: mysterious or not, as an explanation of free will it doesn’t seem to work.
Consider the first event in one of these causal chains. It has effects, but being the first link it doesn’t have a cause. So where does it come from? Why did just that causal chain start up, and why just then? Why should we think that it was started up by the person in question, rather than just being something that happened in them? And since it was supposedly causeless, something that randomly happened in them? The point is not that there cannot be such events, but that even if there are they do not do the job we wanted. What we wanted was control over our actions; what this episode offers us are actions which, far from being controlled by us, aren’t controlled by anything. If my action did you some injury, don’t blame me; it was just that a rather unfortunate causal chain started up. If it did you some good don’t praise me or thank me; it was more like winning a lottery.Compatibilism
Our dalliance with indeterminism hasn’t helped. At least when we were thinking deterministically there was something controlling my actions. Perhaps if we take a more careful look at how human actions arise we can find something that is doing the controlling and which, in favourable circumstances, can be thought of as me. If so, freedom may be compatible with determinism after all. (‘Compatibilism’ is philosophers’ jargon for this view.) It won’t, of course, be the kind of freedom the indeterminist was after—but that turned out to be a will-of-the-wisp.
What can an advocate of compatibilism say in support of it? I would begin with a question. Why are we so keen on this freedom of the will? What turns on it, what do we want it for? So far we have heard two answers. One was that we want to feel that we have control over our lives. Another was so that there be can such a thing as moral responsibility; we find ourselves blaming people, and praising them; these, so the thought went, presuppose free will, and would be inappropriate without it. (We saw that Descartes wanted it for another reason, but it was closely related: it was in order that the responsibility for error can fall on us rather than on God.) So let us stop talking about freedom and concentrate on control and responsibility; control first, since we can take it that where there is no control there is no responsibility. And (still the advocate of compatibilism speaking) don’t expect too much. We are part of nature, and we cannot hope to be able to jump out and direct goings-on from outside, as if we were little gods.
So consider this suggestion: you act with control if your wishes, preferences, intentions, deliberations, decisions, or some combination of them, lead to the action you decide upon. Remember that all these are events, or enduring states, in you. (Leave materialists and dualists bickering about exactly what kind of states and events they are—that does not concern us in this context.) Remember also that they are essential components of the causal chain that results in the outcome. They are not as it were an external commentary on it, like a commentator telling us about events which are happening independently, uninfluenced by the commentary, and which would go on in just the same way without it. That action occurred because you are the sort of person you are, what you wanted at the time, what you decided would be the best way of achieving it; why would that not be called ‘having control’? We say that a thermostat controls the temperature, though all it does is flip a switch when the temperature falls below n degrees and flip it again when it rises above n+1. But it is not involved in the process like a human being. It has no preferences, it doesn’t deliberate. We may think ‘It’s getting uncomfortably warm, shall I turn the heating off or open the window? The heating would be best’—and then, because we have had those thoughts, flip the switch. If that’s not control, what could you be looking for?
Humans can go further. We sometimes have preferences that we would prefer not to have: I wish I didn’t like x so much, because y would be better for my health, not so dangerous, less expensive—maybe all of the above. Then we can take action to change that preference, and these actions do sometimes succeed. That’s control. Sometimes they fail, or don’t even get started, as in the agonizing case of the addict desperately wanting to ‘kick the habit’. That’s not control, nor do we think it is; that’s being controlled by your own condition. Could that be the truth behind Descartes’s remark that being free was not being controlled by anything ‘external’, that word now meaning something that I cannot embrace as mine, something I would rather be rid of? Is it a down-to-earth version of Hegel’s
