Psychology and the Question of Agency

3. Between Hard Determinism and Radical Freedom

45 Chapter Three Between hard determinism and Radical Freedom HAVING PROVIDED a historical overview of reductionism in psychology , with the aim of indicating the extent to which agency has been reduced, disavowed, simplified, and thus devalued in disciplinary scientific and professional psychology, it now is appropriate and necessary to focus more directly on agency itself. As recently noted by the psychologist, Joseph Rychlak (1999), “human agency is a difficult topic to discuss due to the innumerable approaches that have been proposed for centuries in its explanation” (p. 386). Since any attempt at exhaustively reviewing such a voluminous outpouring inevitably would fail, it is possible only to point to some useful set of organizing distinctions and then to consider ideas and works that relate most directly to matters of immediate concern. In this case, of course, the concern is to move toward a conception of agency that might steer psychology between a scientistically reductive determinism, on the one hand, and a too facile, unrealistic interventionism, on the other hand. In this chapter, the question of agency is addressed initially in the way in which it has been treated in much past and contemporary philosophy , including moral philosophy and philosophy of mind. Later in the chapter, some recent, nonreductive psychological work on agency is examined and critiqued. Finally, hermeneutic conceptions of agency are considered , with a view to conceptualizing agency as a kind of deliberative, emergent self-determination embedded inextricably within human existence in the world. As we will see, such a view requires a rather radical 45 46 Psychology and the Question of Agency rethinking of the agent as an embodied actor within the physical and biological world who is constituted developmentally by historical, sociocultural practices and conventions. In the initial part of this chapter, we describe how most philosophical debate in this area has been mired in two competing traditions that have shared a common perspective on agency but have diverged dramatically with respect to its existence and ontological status. One of these positions—libertarianism—champions our everyday sense of ourselves as persons who make our own way in life through exercise of our capacities for freedom of choice and action.The other—hard determinism—considers persons to be nothing more than large aggregations of very small units (e.g., cells or atoms) that are completely determined by genetic and environmental factors. Debates between hard determinists and libertarians seldom advance beyond a basic disagreement concerning the implications of agency for a scientific understanding of human beings. In short, hard determinists and libertarians disagree from the start in that they hold different premises concerning the admissibility of agency to a scientific or other scholarly discourse. Of course, there always have been attempts to forge middle-ground positions between hard determinism and libertarianism. Most often such middle positions go under the rubric of compatibilism or soft determinism. Compatibilists most often conceive of agency somewhat differently than do libertarians or hard determinists, and mostly because of this difference they attempt to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable options of freedom of choice and deterministic science and social science. However, as we shall see, these soft determinists have been hampered in their efforts to date by two outstanding difficulties: (a) The lack of a nonquestion-begging argument for agency that is not entirely determined by biology and/or culture, and (b) a conceptualization of agency adequate to the demand that agency can somehow be both determined and not determined. As hinted in chapter 1, the major aims of this volume are to propose resolutions to precisely these difficulties and to explore the implications of the resultant arguments and perspective on agency for psychology. DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS Libertarian defenders of free choice typically understand such choice as a decision that could have been different up to the moment it was made by the person making it (e.g., Kane, 1998). It means having alternatives such that until the decision is made the person deciding is not limited to only one of the available alternatives.As mentioned at the outset of this book, the matter of free choice lies at the very heart of our personal freedom and social responsibility. If a person could not possibly have done otherwise, the person cannot be held responsible for what has been done. The principle Between Hard Determinism and Radical Freedom 47 that our actions are the result of free choice, unless...