Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
So, it is possible to define "free will" in such a way that it is compatible with determinism (e.g., "my will is free if its decisions are the product of my ordinary processes of thinking–even if those ordinary processes are determined by natural laws–as opposed to the product of any extraordinary external interference such as drugs, brainwashing, mind control implants, etc").
Part of the dispute is over whether such a definition of "free will" matches people's everyday pre-philosophical usage, and also whether it works for the purposes of other disciplines in which the concept of "free will" might be invoked, such as ethics or law. Compatibilists would say it is close enough, and can be made to work for those purposes. Incompatibilists say it is a radical redefinition, and undermines those purposes.
> Part of the dispute is over whether such a definition of "free will" matches people's everyday pre-philosophical usage, and also whether it works for the purposes of other disciplines in which the concept of "free will" might be invoked, such as ethics or law.
Fortunately, this is an empirical question that has been explored by experimental philosophy [1]. It turns out that most lay people employ Compatibilist reasoning, so I think this question has also been answered.
[1] The latest that I've seen on the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
I suggest you read the study and others like it. If you flat out ask people what they believe, with no further context, they tend to support incompatbilist intuitions. But when they test their responses to moral questions, they employ Compatibilist moral reasoning, and agree with claims that are Compatibilist.
A compatibilist would say that for the purposes of discussion we describe this event as the exercising of will, even though from a physics perspective the outcome could be predetermined.
Is that correct?
If so that seems similar to a recent discussion on Bohr's view of the irreducibility of biology to physics.
A point worth adding – there are different forms of determinism. Physical determinism says people's decisions are predetermined by physical laws and initial conditions. Theological determinism says people's decisions are predetermined by God's will. A compatibilist could be either. (Although most compatibilists you'll encounter these days are in the physical not theological camp.)
> According to [David] Hume, free will is not the ability to choose otherwise given the exact same inner and outer condition. He considers it the hypothetical ability to choose otherwise, had the actor been in a psychologically different state because of different wishes or beliefs.
(Sorry for the rough translation, but I think it brings the point across.)
In general, the debate seems to be on what you take "free will" to mean. Philosopher/neuroscientist Joscha Bach [1] defines it as "the ability to do what one has recognized as right", contrasting it e.g. with compulsory behavior.
[1] https://bach.ai, although the source of the quote is the German podcast https://alternativlos.org/42/
“Non-determinism” implies randomness which is NOT what we are talking about when we say something like “Susie made a decision.” She makes a decision for reasons, and those reasons are the determinant (cause) of her choice. When you look into what decision making actually is, I.e. the procedures that underlying it, you find that it MUST be the case that our thinking is mostly if not all deterministic for free will to be of any meaning at all.
So really, the question is “why wouldn’t they be compatible?” And it says a lot about our introspective blind spots that we have for so long thought that free will and determinism were at odds with each other.
A bit sloppily put, a compatibilist believes a choice is free if the agent making it is not coerced or constrainted, even if the choice that the agent will make is determined.
Different compatibilists approach this as either being descriptive (this is how we tend to actually make moral judgements), or normative (free will is defined in these terms and moral responsibility for our actions follows from that).
Most incompatibilists agree that "freedom to act" is a necessary criterion for free will, but not that it is sufficient.
Because the future has not yet happened, all possible future choices are indeed free in a sense, even if one of them is predetermined.
When we look back, I think we tend to think of free in a different way, that is, given that a choice has already been made, we can now say that it was the only choice that could have happened and did (determinism or not, I think we often tend to think this way in ordinary life).
When we judge moral responsibility, we tend to think of the actor in that moment of making the choice. At that moment the choice was still "free", because the future had not yet happened, and so we ascribe moral responsibility to these actions.
1) Where the decision is coerced.
2) Where the decision is not coerced and so ostensibly 'free' but determined by external factors (ie. the laws of Physics).
3) Where the decision is genuinely 'free', thus violating the laws of Physics as we know them.
Compatibilists would reject 3) but would describe 2) as the exercising of 'free will'.
Is that correct?
Compatibilism is "compatible with" determinism, it doesn't depend on determinism. So even if we turn out to be non-deterministic beings, that fact is irrelevant to Compatibilist free will.
The most common Compatibilist view is probably one that focuses on an agent's reasons for acting. If an agent acts for internal reasons, they are acting of their own free will (reasons are beliefs, judgments, inclinations, etc.). If an agent's reasons are subjugated to another agent's reasons (coercion), then they are not acting of their own free will.
Basically, Compatibilism is very similar to the way the law works. We judge whether a person's cognition is compromised in some way, and so whether they are "fit" and so can make choices of their own free will, and then we examine whether they actually did make a choice of their own free will in order to determine whether they are responsible.
(Not sure what you mean with "reject 3)" - they basically say it doesn't happen, and it need not happen for free will.)
The thought experiment is always "suppose we could turn back time, and arrive in exactly the same situation as we were before - could I have decided differently?". The traditional notion of free will sort of requires that you could have decided differently. The compatibilist notion of free will implies that, no, you could not have decided differently - but that doesn't mean that you have no free will.
EDIT to add: Sam Harris has a book about his version of compatibilism:
Interestingly enough, maybe it's not the meaning of the word "free" that is under debate here, but instead that of the word coerced?
For more detail, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#FreWil.
It's actually the other way around: if you acted according to your own free will, then you are morally responsible for your choice.
If it's still not clear why I put the implication that way around, note that not everyone thinks that you have a moral responsibility in the way Peter Singer argues, but basically every philosopher thinks it's wrong to kick a dog.
In other words, making a choice of your own free will entails moral responsibility, not the other way around like you said. I don't know what Singer has to do with any of this.
Exactly... "necessary", not "sufficient".
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
Classical free will, going back to Hobbes, is really just that sometimes we act unencumbered by external forces. Determinism posits that no one can act other than how one ultimately does.
Those could be compatible.
There is a difference between me deciding to stay in a room after careful deliberation, and me being chained to a wall in that room in spite of my protest.
Even if the future is fixed, there's still a difference between a person being forced to do something by an external actor and a person doing something they would ordinarily do.
All Hobbesian free will is committed to is that being chained to a wall changes your circumstances. Being kidnapped deprives you of meaningful options.
There is a separate version of free will that insists that agents are the ultimate cause of their actions, rather than mediated causes, which would not be consistent with determinism. But that is not the only definition of free will (and I don't think a very common one, except by incompatabilists).
A lot of this hinges on what people actually mean by the individual phrases.
If you sometimes engage in deliberation, and sometimes deliberation changes your mind, then even if that deliberation would have always inevitably come out the same way, you still know that in those cases deliberation affected your subsequent actions. Your deliberation (informed though it may be by external factors) is sufficient for most sensible versions of agency.
(EDITED to be more comprehensive.)
The single person case has two descriptions of the person. The chatty, social person, who tells us of his thoughts and feelings and why he chose tea instead of coffee. Contrast that with the account in terms of atoms and molecules. Neurons fire, muscles contract, etc.
Where have we seen this before? In the kinetic theory of gasses. The pressure of the hot gas in a heat engine pushes the piston down. Alternatively the molecules bounce off the top of the piston, hammering it down with countless tiny hammer blows. Which account is true? Why not both?
In the single person case the differences between the two accounts are so large that we are sucked into seeing them as rival accounts. But philosophers have never managed to clarify why the accounts are incompatible. Both accounts run out of steam. We don't really know the secrets of our own hearts and often resort to rationalizing the choices that we freely make, after the event. The atoms and molecules account asserts that those choices are in principal determined, and offers a wonderful excuse, in the exponential sensitivity to initial conditions, for why determinists cannot be expected to make predictions.
Sure, we can say that our free choices are determined by atoms and molecules following the laws of physics. But take the prediction problem more seriously. Imagine that I have a gadget that predicts whether you will chose tea or coffee. If I tell you in advance, you can chose the other way, defeating the prediction. The philosophical problem arises due to viewing the atoms and molecules that make up your body as the gadget that predicts your choices. You cannot escape their power over your actions. On the other hand the point seems fatuous. Those atoms and molecules are you. "You cannot do other than what you do" is just a triviality because the two accounts are two accounts of a single underlying reality. They are bound to be compatible, no matter how much the customary language jars and creates the appearance of conflict.
- Lawrence of Arabia
Its akin to p-values in statistics (probability of evidence given hypothesis) being used in place of a what we really want to know (probability of a gypothesis given evidence).