From Daily News to Metaphysics
Quotidian reports from the news media make one thing clear, if it wasn’t already: we take it for granted that human beings are morally responsible, that we are proper recipients of praise, blame, reward, and punishment. Note that this commitment is incompatible with hard determinism.
Arguably, our firm and settled belief in moral responsibility commits us either to libertarian freedom or to compatibilist freedom. For me, as Kant put it, the compatibilist account of free will is of “the freedom of a turnspit,” i.e., an object which moves in virtue of being wound up by prior and external causal factors, even though after the causal force has occurred, the object proceeds kinetically according to its own physical properties, like a bullet after discharge.
I agree with Kant that such movement is no freedom at all, indicating that compatibilism is “a wretched subterfuge.” (Critique of Practical Reason, Chapter 3) In other words, freedom is not compatible with determinism, not even with the soft determinism of compatibilists.
Think about it this way. According to causal determinism, for any event E, the conjunction of the laws of nature and the complete history of events in the universe prior to E is sufficient for E to occur. Now, we have no control over the laws of nature or their causal efficacy in a deterministic universe. We cannot do anything about the prior events in the universe that are said to compel our actions. We cannot change the conjunction of the laws of nature and these prior events. And we have no control over the complete causal influence these collective conditions supposedly have on our actions.
Hence, on the compatibilist account, there is no place for freedom. No human being is free to do anything about the occurrence or the non-occurrence of any event whatsoever, including those occurrences which are his own actions. We are completely passive with respect to the factors which causally determine us, and hence we do only what we are causally determined to do. (This is my quick summary of an argument from Peter van Inwagen called “the consequence argument.”)
In sum, here is an argument for libertarian freedom:
If human beings are morally responsible, then we have free will.
Human beings are morally responsible.
Thus, we have free will.
Either our freedom is libertarian, or it is compatibilistic.
It is not compatibilistic.
Thus, our freedom is libertarian.
As with most substantive claims in philosophy, there is no consensus among competent practitioners that libertarianism is the correct view. But it is defensible, as I have just shown — albeit in a condensed fashion suitable for this online medium. And there are other plausible arguments for libertarian free will.