Foreknowledge, Frankfurt, and Ability to Do Otherwise: A Reply to Fischer

There is one important point about which Fischer and I are in agreement. We agree that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. We disagree about the best way of defending that claim. He thinks that Frankfurt's strategy is a good one, that we can grant incompatibilists the metaphysical victory (that is, agree with them that determinism means that we are never able to do otherwise) while insisting that we are still morally responsible. I think this a huge mistake and I think the literature spawned by Frankfurt's attempt to undercut the metaphysical debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists is a snare and a delusion, distracting our attention from the important issues.

I am a compatibilist, not a ‘semi-compatibilist’ but an unabashed traditional compatibilist who believes that determinism (by itself) doesn’t render us unable to do otherwise in any significant or morally relevant sense. I don’t make these claims lightly; I think that the problem of free will and determinism is a metaphysical problem which can be solved only by paying careful attention to modal and metaphysical issues concerning choice, agency, ability, dispositions, counterfactuals, causation, laws, and so on. I have defended this view in a number of places.¹ In my ‘Freedom, Foreknowledge, and The Principle of Alternate Possibilities’² I argued that so-called ‘Frankfurt stories’ cannot show what they are supposed to show: that a person who is never able to do otherwise may nevertheless be morally responsible for what she does.³ I offered a diagnosis of why they have persuaded so many for so long. It has gone unnoticed that there are two very different methods that Black might use to ensure that Jones does exactly what Black wants him to do; Black might be what I called a ‘conditional intervener’ or Black might be what I called a ‘counterfactual intervener.’ Both interveners have genuine and powerful powers, and it is natural to suppose that if we grant Black both kinds of powers, then Black succeeds in depriving Jones of all his morally significant alternatives. But if we carefully examine the two methods, we will see that while the powers of a conditional intervener are genuine, they are also limited. If Black is only a conditional intervener, then he cannot, in principle, rob Jones of the kind of freedom traditionally regarded as essential to free will and moral responsibility: the freedom to choose or at least to try or begin to choose otherwise. At first glance, it appears that if we grant Black the powers of a counterfactual intervener, then Black can ensure that Jones lacks even this inner freedom. But, I argued, if Black is only a counterfactual intervener, he does not succeed in robbing Jones of any freedom whatsoever. If we think that he does, it is because we have let ourselves be persuaded by the intuitions or arguments that underlie the fatalist's conflation of truth and necessity. In passing, I also pointed out that one way of defending the claim that Jones is unable to do otherwise — a so-called ‘back-tracking’ argument — relies on hypothetical syllogism, which is generally considered invalid for counterfactual conditionals.⁴

Fischer's response,⁵ in this journal, can be summed up as follows:

1. 1. He agrees that the distinction between conditional and counterfactual intervention is an important one, and that a purely conditional intervener cannot be invoked to show that moral responsibility does not require any ‘alternative possibilities.’ He agrees that ‘the focus should be on counterfactual interveners.’

2. 2. He agrees that my story about Black and the coin succeeds in showing that the mere existence of a counterfactual intervener does not suffice to show that a person is unable to choose otherwise (or begin or try to choose otherwise). So he appears to concede that additional argument is needed.

3. 3. He does not take issue with my criticism of the arguments which rely on variations of fatalist reasoning nor does he dispute my claim that hypothetical syllogism is invalid for counterfactuals.

4. 4. He defends the ‘back-tracking’ argument I criticized by...