PicoBlog

One of the first philosophical problems I thought about in college was free will vs. determinism. It was then that I thought of an argument against determinism, which I presented in a term paper. Later, as a professor, I tried to publish the same argument, but it was rejected about fifteen times by different journals. Each time, the referees said to reject it because they could think of some objections to my argument. (Note: Any philosopher can think of objections to any interesting argument.) Each time, I added a reply to the confused objection, then sent it out again to another journal, only to have the next referee make up some other rationalization for rejecting it. I eventually gave up. It seemed that it didn’t matter how many objections I refuted; they’d always just make up something else.

Almost no one has ever liked the argument. Almost everyone thinks that it’s just some cute trick I’m trying to play on them. But it isn’t; it’s just a refutation of determinism.

Eventually, I got a short version of it published in an invited book chapter (“Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report” in Science Fiction and Philosophy, ed. Susan Schneider (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 103-112). (See also http://www.owl232.net/papers/fwill.htm.)

Now, you too can read this amazing argument that utterly refutes determinism yet is utterly hated by nearly all philosophers who hear about it.

The intuitive idea goes back to Epicurus (as I discovered long after I’d thought of the argument):

“The man who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot criticize one who denies that all things come to pass by necessity: for he admits that this too happens of necessity.”

J.R. Lucas argued similarly:

“Determinism … cannot be true, because if it was, we should not take the determinists’ arguments as being really arguments, but as being only conditioned reflexes. Their statements should not be regarded as really claiming to be true, but only as seeking to cause us to respond in some way desired by them.”

The intuitive idea is that determinism is self-defeating when you apply it to beliefs about the subject of free will and determinism itself. Per Epicurus, it implies that you can’t criticize anyone for believing in free will, nor (presumably) can you say that anyone should believe determinism. In its most common (physicalistic) forms, per Lucas, determinism implies that good reasons play no role in explaining why one believes determinism itself. So the determinist couldn’t hold that he himself knows determinism to be true. (My interpretation/modification of Lucas.)

My idea was related to these. It was that in thinking about any issue, one always presupposes certain norms governing belief. E.g., that you should avoid falsehood, or that you should base beliefs on evidence. But any such norm, I think, is incompatible with the truth of determinism. So if you think determinism is true, you’re in an inherently self-defeating position: You’re committed to rejecting norms that you are implicitly presupposing.

Preliminaries:

• By “determinism”, I mean “hard determinism” (I’m not arguing with compatibilists here). Hard determinism, by definition, implies that, at any given time, you only ever have one thing that you can do.

• In trying to reason through any issue, I think we are presupposing some kind of truth-seeking norm, roughly that we should believe what is true rather than what is false about that issue.

So here’s how to convert that idea into a cute refutation of determinism.

Comments:

• Premise 1 is a presupposition of rational thought, as discussed above.

• Premise 2 is the famous “‘ought’ implies ‘can’” principle. Most people find this formulation more obvious: if you cannot do A, then it is not true that you should do A. (No one is obliged to do the impossible.)

• Premise 3 directly follows from the definition of “determinism” as given above.

• Steps 4 and 5 uncontroversially follow.

• Step 6 is empirically true. (There is excellent evidence that I, Mike Huemer, believe in free will. I’ve said it many times, said other things that imply it, etc.)

• Step 7 obviously follows from 5 and 6.

• And 8 follows from 7. In step 7, we see that determinism is self-refuting: Determinism and free will can’t both be true (by stipulation). So, per 7, determinism leads to its own denial. Any view that leads to its own denial is false. So determinism is false.

Reply:

First, notice what the objection is saying. It appears to be saying (i) that a person who disagrees with the argument’s conclusion would or could reject one of the premises, on the basis of their belief in the denial of the conclusion, and (ii) that this shows a flaw in the argument.

Now I’d like you to notice that that implies that all valid arguments are bad. In a valid argument, the conjunction of the premises, P, entails the conclusion, C. Therefore, it is also true that the denial of the conclusion, ~C, entails the denial of the premises, ~P. That, again, is true of all valid arguments by definition. So if you use your rejection of an argument’s conclusion to evaluate the premises, it would always be true that you would reject at least one of the premises. As far as I can tell, that’s all the objection is pointing to.

Presumably, not all valid arguments are bad. So here is a better account of “begging the question”: you’re begging the question if your justification for one of the premises rests on the conclusion. So if I had said you should accept premise 1 because we have free will, that would be begging the question. But of course I didn’t say that. What I said was that premise 1 is a presupposition of rational thought. So that is nothing like begging the question.

Reply:

I don’t really think there are multiple senses of “should”, but even if there are, there is no reason to think the argument uses different senses in 1 and 2. The “ought implies can” principle should apply to all “should”s. There is no sense of the word “should” on which it’s correct to say that you should do the impossible. So premises 1 and 2 are both true using the epistemic “should”.

Reply:

Okay. If you put that into premise 1, then the argument proceeds as before, except that step 7 winds up as “If determinism is true, then the belief in free will is overall best justified by our evidence.” I don’t think the determinist could happily accept this.

To show that people cannot control their beliefs, philosophers often say things like this: “Try believing right now that you are a giraffe.” You find that you can’t do it.

Reply:

The example shows at most that a person cannot, at will, believe a proposition that they have conclusive evidence against. However, it does not show that a person cannot refrain from believing falsehoods, or refrain from believing unjustified propositions, which is all that premise 1 requires. As long as you can refrain from believing the unjustified, it makes sense to say that you should do so.

Minority Report was a fun movie about a society in which people with precognition predict crimes in advance, and the police arrest and punish people before they have committed those crimes.

The free will issue figures prominently. It looks like the system faces a justice-based challenge: (a) If people’s crimes are pre-determined, then it’s unjust to punish people for those crimes, since they lack free will and hence lack moral responsibility. (It’s still right to take actions to prevent those crimes, of course.) (b) If the crimes are not pre-determined because we have free will, then it’s unjust to punish people for crimes they haven’t committed (even if they were likely to commit them), since the people haven’t actually made the blameworthy choice.

The movie suggests (b) because sometimes the people with precognition disagree about what is going to happen. In discussing that, I inserted my proof of free will.

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