Historical Causation and Human Free Will

HISTORICAL CAUSATION AND HUMAN FREE WILL IW. H. Dray The question which I wish to discuss is whether the assumption of universal causation in historythe assumption that any event or condition studied by the historian can, in principle, be explained by indicating its cause or causes-conflicts with the assumption that human beings, whose actions contribute so largely to these events or conditions, possess free will. That both of these assumptions are made in the course of ordinary historical inquiry, it seems rather difficult to deny; and it is only natural that the recognition of this fact should have embarrassed, not only philosophers of history, but many practising historians as well. Thus, although historians regularly use the word "cause" (or ooe of its many substitutes) in the explanatory narratives they offer of past happenings, it is a common complaint among them, when confronted with certain theories of the historical process, that such theories mistakenly attempt to represent the course of history as determined. And when a reflective and self-critical historian like Professor Charles A. Beard urges his fellows to abandon causal language altogether on the similar ground that it implies determinism, it may seem that this complaint is only being pressed to its logical conclusion.' It will be the thesis of this paper2 that Beard's proposed reform is, happily, quite unnecessary, since the assumptions of causation and of free will are not, after all, incompatible. For I shall argue that, whether the doctrine of determinism is true or false, the assumption of universal causation, in view of the way the concept of causation is employed in history, does not commit historians to a belief in that doctrine. By contrast -and in spite of what many philosophers have written recently to the contraryS-I shall argue that a belief in determinism is incompatible with the assumption of free will. I Let me try to show, first, why I think that the apparent clash between Vol. XXIX, No.3, April, 1960 358 W. H. DRAY the assumptions of free will and determinism cannot successfully be resolved by representing the clash as apparent only. The most popular ways of attempting such resolution seem to me to reduce to three. I shall examine each of them briefly in turn. The first has proved popular in recent years among moral philosophers seeking to protect the meaningfulness of moral judgments in a world increasingly impressed by the success of psychology and the social sciences in their search for laws of human nature. Such philosophers have argued that to contrast freedom with determinism is to make a logical mistake. For the polar opposite of freedom is not determinism but compulsion or constraint; and the opposite of determinism is simply indeterminism. If this is so, it would, of course, follow that the historian's assumption that at least some of the actions he studies are free is perfectly compatible with the assumption that all actions are determined by antecedent conditions-not all of which need be of the sort we call compelling or constraining. Indeed, it has even been argued that, far from assuming any freedom which denies causal determinism, our moral judgments actually require us to assume determinism; for to be our own free act, it is necessary that what we do be determined by our own characters; and for moral blame to be in point, it must be possible for it to produce relevant alterations in the actions of the person to whom it is addressed. If this ingenious argument is sound, the historian need worry no longer about his proneness to make both of the assumptions under discussion. For, far from being incompatible, it would appear that the two may be necessarily connected. Ingenious as it is, however, it seems to me that this type of argument itself rests upon a logical confusion: the failure to distinguish between freedom of action and freedom of the will. Of course we should not say that a boy who creeps unwillingly to school under threat of punishment goes freely, for this is exactly the sort of situation (and not, for example, a situation in which he is carried or pushed, and thus does not act at...