Compatibilism and Conditioning

Compatibilism and ConditioningAuthor(s): Robert YoungSource: Noûs, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 361-378Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215105 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 16:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.28 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 16:48:00 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215105?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Compatibilism and Conditioning ROBERT YOUNG

LA TROBE UNIVERSY

I

Contemporary defenders of the claim that an action or an omission's being determined is compatible with its being free have offered by way of a first approximation the following analysis of freedom. A person performs some action freely if he (or she) possesses the capacity (or capacities) relevant to its performance and exercises this capacity when he wants to, provided that the wanting is not the product of defeating conditions (such as brainwashing, pathological urges and the like).' A person freely omits to do some action if he has the capacity to do it but does not want to exercise the capacity, provided that the wanting is not the product of defeating conditions. The present paper will mainly be concerned with this proviso which is intended to mark off those wants that are truly the person's from those that are alien to him. But first the compatibilist analysis of freedom given above needs to be refined to take account of several complicating factors.

A first complication is that where a person does not know or believe that he has the capacity to perform some action which he indeed wants to perform, and where his wants are not the product of defeating conditions, he may still not in fact perform the action. In order to avoid this complication we must distinguish between an epistemic sense of power or capacity and a non-epistemic sense. Sometimes one is entitled to say of a particular person that some action is (or was) within his power but that he doesn't realize that it is. Whether or not we are led to judge the failure to act as free and responsible depends on whether or not the person is culpable for failing to acquire the requisite knowledge at or by the specified time. The modification needed in the suggested analysis of freedom is pretty obvious - what is needed is the incorporation of a

NOOS 13 (1979) 361 ? 1979 by Indiana University



362 NOOS

clause specifying that the person knows he possesses the relevant capacity or is culpable for his ignorance of it.

A second complication is as follows. Sometimes in discussions of a person's power to perform some act our concern is with his capacity to do it at a certain time, or by a certain time. In general, in order for an agent to perform some action, A, by a time, t2, he must perform some acts prior to t2 which he knows2 would, together with the state of the rest of the world, cause him to be able, at some time t1, where t1 is earlier than or simultaneous witht2, to doA at t1. There are occasions where a person may be unable, at t2, to do A, though he could and should at an earlier time t1 have done the preparatory acts which would have enabled him to do A by or at t2 and where in consequence we hold him to have freely and responsibly failed to do A. Some compatibilists have spoken of agents thus situated as being indirectly free. The analysis offered at the beginning of the paper covers only those cases where the agent is directly free. Again the remedy is fairly obvious. Suppose (to simplify the exposition) that an agent is aware that he posseses a capacity relevant to the performance of an action, A. Then we may say that, according to the compatibilist account we are considering, doingA is within his power at t2 if, and only if, it is either directly or indirectly within his power at that time. In the former case, if the agent wanted to do A at t2 then he would doA att2. In the latter case, he is able attj to doA by t2, where t1 is either earlier than or simultaneous with t2, if, and only if, there is a set of preparatory acts known to him which, together with the state of the rest of the world (other than his own acts), would put him in a position (empower him) to perform the next preparatory act, and this series of preparatory acts would ultimately put him in a position at or before t2, to perform the indicated act A.

The third complication is the most serious. There are instances where a person who knows he possesses the relevant direct power to do some action and wants to do the action nevertheless fails to do it. In some of these instances even though we may be warranted because of past performances in ascribing the relevant powers and desires, the high degree of skill involved in bringing off the action may be such that there is no entailment relation between propositions ascribing the relevant powers and desires and propositions concerning the performance of the action. Examples come readily to mind from sport, medical diagnoses, surgery, wine-tasting and a



COMPATIBILISM AND CONDITIONING 363

host of other activities of a highly skilled nature. How can the compatibilist analysis be modified to accommodate these ap- parent counter-examples? The most promising way forward, I suggest, is to hold that when a person has either performed or failed to perform a particular action we regard his behaviour as free if a warranted ascription can be made of the relevant powers and desires and there seem to be no defeating conditions present.

There are two glosses which seem to be needed here. First, if this post facto stance is adopted a heavy burden is thrown on warranting the ascription of the relevant capacity. Only thus would it seem that a display of genuine capacity or skill can be distinguished from a mere fluke performance. (The fluke performer does display the relevant capacity in some sense3 but not the appropriate sense.) Of course, there will still be difficulties in cases where a person performs some action for which there is no previous evidence one way or the other about his capacity in the matter and even worse cases where a person who had previously seemed incapable of per- forming a particular action develops the capacity needed for it. We sometimes will in the latter circumstances have evidence that the person has trained, studied or the like in such a way as to develop the relevant capacity and this may influence our judgment as to whether he now has freely performed the action in question or merely 'fluked' it. Second, in those hard cases for the compatibilist where there is every reason to believe an agent has the capacity and the desire relevant to the performance of some difficult task but fails to accomplish it because he 'freezes' up in the face of the task, the compatibilist may still reasonably maintain that the agent has freely failed. However, the compatibilist can nonetheless regard such a freezing up as an extenuating consideration where regarding it thus seems appropriate.

Before I proceed to the central concern of the paper I must first respond to the objection that notwithstanding the various suggested improvements in the formulation of the compatibilist position the account will not do because it fails to pick out all the actions we consider to be free. Suppose that if S performs a certain action (e.g. pulls a particular lever) it is 40% probable that he will set off a disastrous nuclear reaction which will kill some thousands of people. Suppose further that S knows the order of the probability of his action's producing



364 NOOS

these deaths. S goes ahead and pulls the lever and the nuclear reaction takes place and people do die in large numbers. Surely, it may be said, S has done what he has done freely and hence he should be held fully responsible, whereas, the objection continues, the proposed compatibilist analysis would suggest otherwise.

The several replies I shall offer involve, it must be con- ceded, rather controversial philosophical claims. Nonetheless they are not without some plausibility. To begin with, it is crucial that we be clear aboutjust what it is that S has done. It is widely held that a distinction needs to be drawn between an action and its consequences. (I would go further and hold with von Wright ([15]) that we also need a separate notion of the results of our actions. The consequences of our actions on this view are extrinsic to what we do, the results of those actions intrinsic.) Intuitively an event is a consequence of an action if some other event (the action) precedes and is (or would be, or would have been) a cause or contributory cause of the other. The chief difficulty with this intuitive account is that various theories of the individuation of events suggest different ac- counts of what constitute distinct events. What on some theories would be deemed the same event under various de- scriptions, on others would consist of separable events re- ferred to as an action and various consequences. The first point in my response to the case of the nuclear explosion does commit me to the latter sort of approach.

My suggestion is that S freely performs the action of pulling the lever, the most important consequence of which is the triggering off of the nuclear explosion. S is morally responsible for his action and for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of it given that there were present no conditions which set aside his responsibility. Because the explosion is a causal consequence of his action of pulling the lever, S does not, on my view, perform freely an action of exploding the nuclear device. Nor has he, on my view, freely murdered the victims though their deaths are, of course, among the consequences of his action for which he is properly held responsible. This seems intuitively plausible anyway since there was, for instance, no malice aforethought. If my view or something like it is correct the imaginary case does not defeat the compatibilist analysis I have proposed.

Second, it seems to be part of our notion of freely per- forming an action that the action is, other things being equal,




under our control. Human powers are in this regard distinct from those of some other agents. Nitric acid, for instance, has corrosive power but it is not a power which the acid can be said freely to exercise since it is not within the acid's control either to display or withhold the power. In the nuclear explosion case it is not obvious that whether or not the explosion occurs is under S's control.

Thirdly, consider a case which has important parallels with the nuclear explosion case but where there is less pull in the direction of calling the comparable event a free action. Elmer picks up an old amusement machine at an auction. He discovers in the course of playing the machine that there is a probability of two in five of getting a particular result if one pulls a certain lever. It does seem dubious to say that when he obtains the particular result that he does so freely. If this is so it strongly suggests that any inclination we have to speak of S's freely exploding the nuclear device is occasioned by the seri- ousness of the event involved and our associated desire to hold him responsible for the disastrous effects. But I have claimed that to achieve this purpose we need only accept that other things being equal people may justifiably be held morally responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions.

I conclude that the nuclear explosion case does not re- quire us to abandon the modified compatibilist analysis because it has not been shown that that analysis fails to cover all cases of acting freely.

My discussion to date has been directed to clarifying the compatibilist account of freedom, particularly the reference made in it to the agent's possession of a relevant capacity. Typically, however, critics of compatibilism have found the reference to the agent's exercising the relevant capacity the objectionable feature of compatibilism. This is especially true of those who emphasize to a large degree the extent of the social conditioning humans undergo. In the remainder of the paper I shall consider how plausible is the compatibilist's contention that provided the agent's desire to exercise his capacity is not the product of defeating conditions, his desire can justifiably be regarded as truly his, and hence that his freedom is not chimerical even though there are antecedently sufficient causal conditions for both his capacities and desires. In defending the position that an agent's desires are truly his



366 NOCS

when not the product of defeating conditions, I shall be spe- cially concerned with the role which social conditioning is increasingly given in the formation of our desires by many prominent thinkers.

II

Though compatibilists have not given an exhaustive list of the defeating conditions, they have indicated some of the items which would find a place on such a list. Some wants which certain individuals have are the product of actions which others take with the intention of inducingjust such wants and in circumstances where the vulnerability of the individual so disadvantages him as to militate against resistance. In this category would come serious threats, perhaps some offers (see, e.g. [6], [9] and [10]), brain-washing, subliminal advertiz- ing, hypnosis,4 indoctrination, psychosurgery, aversion therapy and drug therapy. But this is not the only category of defeating conditions the compatibilist wishes to recognize for there are circumstances properly -thought of as defeating individual freedom which no one has brought about intention- ally. Pathological urges, uncontrollable impulses, neuroses and psychoses are regarded by compatibilists, for instance, as defeating conditions, on occasions.

The standard incompatibilist reply has been that at- tempts to single out particular sorts of causes as constituting defeating conditions is beside the point because there is a conceptual incompatibility between an action's having a sufficient cause (and hence being inevitable if the cause is instan- tiated) and its beingfree. Not all contemporary critics of compatibilism accept that there is this conceptual incompatibility. There is an argument with some currency which is directed at showing that there is not a conceptual incompatibility but a

factual one between an action's being determined and its being free. It is argued that since any and every desire in the actual world is deterministically produced and would be able to be located in one or other of the two sorts of defeating conditions previously distinguished were these to be embellished for completeness, there is no human freedom.

Among the causes previously mentioned as constituting defeating conditions according to the compatibilist were some involving the intentional activity of other agents. Now it may




well be that the list should be extended to include other intentional instillings of wants. For instance, perhaps as well as subliminal advertising we should include the non-subliminal varieties. If Vance Packard ([12]) is to be believed,5 advertiz- ing

employs techniques designed to reach the unconscious or subcon- scious mind because preferences generally are determined by factors of which the individual is not conscious. (p. 7)

But even if the list of defeating conditions can be somewhat lengthened by the inclusion of other causes which involve intentional instillings of wants the list is surely not indef- initely extensible in this way. Because of this it is not necessary for us to decide whether, for example, non-subliminal adver- tizing should be included among the defeating conditions recognized by compatibilists, though it does seem as a matter of fact that not all advertising of the non-subliminal sort succeeds in achieving the advertizer's intent.

The real problem comes with the inclusion in the list of defeating conditions of causes which do not involve the intentional instilling in, or the manipulation of, the wants of one agent by another. For, says our critic of compatibilism, humans develop socially and psychologically in an environment not of their own making and with a given genetic endowment. They acquire their wants through a process of socialization and social conditioning. (Presumably we are to understand such conditioning as somewhat like, though not entirely like, classical (Pavlovian) conditioning which involved the manipulation and association of stimuli to elicit a learned but blatantly inappropriate response. As regards the social conditioning of humans we surely must suppose that it is not always the product of deliberate manipulation nor does it typically result in blatantly inappropriate responses.6) Our socialization or social conditioning is, then, at least in large measure, not a deliberately engineered process but rather a function of the influences of parents, family, friends, teachers, the media, cultural background and so on. The innumerable individual acts not performed with the intention of instilling particular wants combine to socialize and condition us all and this makes nonsense of the idea that our convictions, motivations, preferences, principles, ideals and the like are truly ours. They can't be truly ours because where they are not the product of



368 NOOS

the intentional manipulations of others or of organic causes they are outside our control in virtue of our passive role in our socialization.

In broad outline that is the argument for the factual incompatibility of freedom and determinism in our world. What replies, if any, are open to the compatibilist in en- deavouring to maintain the plausibility of his position in the face of such claims about our conditioning?

III

It is worth observing first of all that this argument from our social conditioning cannot plausibly be taken as applying across the board. Suppose that while I am on my own I raise my hand in the air for no reason beyond my merely wanting to do so. It would surely be an implausible claim to make, that my wanting thus to act was not truly my wanting because my behaviour is the outcome of environmental conditioning, of my genetic make-up and such like and thus not a matter over which I had any real control. There certainly do seem to be actions we perform which are occasioned by wantings that we (or others with a privileged view) recognize to be under the dominion of our socialization working in harness with our genetic endowment. But to regard all of our behaviour, in- cluding its simplest forms, in such a light is to render vacuous the notion of our being subject to the hegemony of the social and biological processes we experience; it is to collapse the distinction between our wantings and cravings, where the craving is such that it must be satisfied no matter what the force of the reasons for and against doing the act.

I have quite deliberately made use of a very simple wanting and a very simple piece of behaviour with the aim of eroding some of the appeal of the argument against compatibilism previously outlined. If the process of erosion has been got under way with this example it is easy to see how it can readily be extended to the many other wantings to perform simple actions which could equally well have been used as illustrations. Now it might be objected that it makes no sense to speak of such simple actions which are done because we want to do them as being free. But the weakness of this objection (pace [7]) may readily be seen once we ask whether we'd think of ourselves as unfree should we come not to be able to want or to do such simple actions. Such actions may not




bulk large in our thinking about our freedom but they soon would if we ceased to be able to do them when we wanted to, or if we lost the power to want to do them. Those who lose the will to do such simple things are thought to be less free than those who have not, for they, like infants, lose some degree of autonomy in virtue of their dependence.

If the preceding argument is sound then at least some of our behaviour cannot be shown to be unfree just because it is subject to the deterministic processes of social conditioning that operate in a world like ours (assuming as we are that our world is indeed deterministic). Nonetheless, even if this is a sound argument it cannot serve as a basis for significantly extending the scope of our (compatibilist) freedom since few of the more complex and significant of our wantings and doings consist in an amalgam of such simple components.

IV

To establish that the scope of compatibilist freedom is significant it is necessary to look more carefully at the nature of the socialization we undergo and of the role which heredity plays in structuring our desires and actions. There are, I suggest, several considerations which may give rise to the conviction we sometimes have of our wants having been moulded and shaped by factors external to us. On the one hand there is the awareness that to want to do certain things which we have the capacity to do would demand of us too great a sacrifice or be too risky or necessitate our doing in addition certain things to which we are averse and so on. A person may want to do some action but recognize that to satisfy his want would estrange him from his parents or friends and the sort of life-style they value. Or a person may want to broaden his experience in a different career but be unwilling to do so because he values the financial security his present post offers and does so in the face of the knowledge that the alternative career which offers lower financial rewards is far more likely to promote his job satisfaction. In all such cases we can see the potent force which a person's socialization may exert. Moreover, we can readily explain why some people react in the sorts of ways I have described while others react quite differently when faced with similar conflicts of wants by citing the different kinds of socialization each has experienced. That we can understand why



370 NODS

some people resolve such conflicts in one way rather than another does not, of course, commit us to regarding them as unfree or absolving them of responsibility. How we decide such matters depends on assessments of what risks, costs and so on it would be fair to expect a person in the given circum- stance to bear and on ourjudgment of the degree to which the person reflectively associates himself or herself with one side of the conflict rather than the other.

On the other hand, however, there are circumstances where a person's socialization seems to hold the sway it does because it has operated largely unknown or at least unrecog- nized by the person for what it is. And sometimes when the source of the person's wants is laid bare (often by another person though on other occasions through the person's own self-reflection) this in itself can serve to liberate the person from any such alien desires. Self-knowledge of this sort is power. Such practices as that of psychotherapy are premised on the notion that the *achievement of this sort of self- knowledge does occur.

I want now to link the claims I have been making about the potentially liberating effects of raising into clear relief people's awareness or consciousness of their motivations with some insightful recent work by Harry Frankfurt ([4]) and Gerald Dworkin ([2], [3]) on our conception of human autonomy.7

Frankfurt has written that:

Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are... No animal other than man... appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. ([4]: 7.)

Frankfurt argues that where a person's effective desires are those that he wants to have then such a person is morally responsible for his behaviour. Autonomy is to be located at the level of the so-called 'second-order desires.' It is to Dworkin, however, that we must look for an attempt to relate this insight to the problem of freedom and determinism because Frankfurt claims that his remarks are 'neutral with regard to the problem of determinism' ([4]: 20). While he may be right about this, he is, I believe, mistaken in further suggesting that the reason is that




. . There is no more than an innocuous appearance of paradox in the proposition that it is determined, ineluctably and by forces beyond their control, that certain people have free wills and that others do not. ([4]: 20.)

Dworkin ([3]) argues that autonomy cannot be located on the level of first-order considerations because 'the notion of decision or choice is implausible as a description of how we acquire our motivational structures' ([3]: 25). But, as he sees it, even if the autonomous person cannot adopt his motivations de novo he can make them his by identifying with them in his reflective judgings in such a way as to view himself as the kind of person who wishes to be thus motivated. In addition, though, to this quality of authenticity, autonomy requires that a person's motivational structure display what Dworkin terms 'procedural independence' for otherwise a person's motivations may be his but not his own because they are the product of manipulation, deception or other undue influence.

While I have no doubt about the significance of these remarks for our thinking about human autonomy, on at least two counts they seem open to objection. On the first count I shall suggest a revision, on the second I shall argue that the objection can be met and in a way which advances the compatibilist position I have undertaken to defend. There are, to begin with, grounds for refusing to run together the reflective self-evaluation manifested in the formation of second-order desires and the notion of identifying with, and thus making one's own, the desires which move to action. There seems no question that one can identify with one's first-order desires and hence that the idea of identification with one's desires is independent of the notion of 'orders of desires.' Moreover, the formation of second-order desires is not sufficient for identification with such desires since one may for example be self-deceived about what one really wants, or weak-willed to the point where one's claims about one's own desires come to lack conviction. Mention of these phenomena makes plain as well that both Frankfurt and Dworkin (at least in [2]) in their insistence on the role of reflection appear to take too narrowly cognitivist a view of the way in which a commitment to certain wantings may be clarified.8 The opinions about their own motivations which people form, even after the most careful introspection, are not always the most reliable indicator of their deepest preferences. Where, for instance, a person



372 NOOS

shows remorse over his failure to perform some action which he believed he ought to have done (given that he was not self-reflectively aware of any countervailing want or inclination), or where he shows genuine admiration for the behaviour of others-an admiration which does not flag even when he regularly fails to measure up to the standard of those he admires-we are apt to give maximum credence to such conative considerations in determining his real desires. This is especially so where circumstances arise in a person's life which provide a literally unique opportunity to do some important action. Any failure to capitalize on the opportunity will be an irredeemable failure. In such a case a person's remorsefulness may prove the only serious evidence we have of his true desires. Remorse, unlike guilt feelings or feelings of regret, is a peculiarly appropriate response to a failure to act as one believed one ought, because it is linked with a wish that one hadn't done what one did. In the light of these various considerations my inclination is to think of the formation of second- order (and, though they are probably uncommon, even higher-order) desires as indicators of a person's deepest preferences and ultimately of what desires are identified with. At the same time it must not be forgotten that there are other indicators, too, which can satisfactorily be taken as supporting a claim that a particular individual does identify with certain of his desires.

The second difficulty facing Frankfurt's and Dworkin's remarks about human autonomy is that at first sight they fall foul of the very problem which confronts the compatibilist and with which we are concerned in this paper. Dworkin's concept of 'procedural independence', for instance, is inex- tricably linked with the absence of defeating conditions, because Dworkin holds that:

Even if some strong thesis of determinism is correct, we will still want to make a distinction between those forms of influence which con- tribute to the agent making his own decisions and those which make those decisions and choices in some sense that of others. ([3]: 25.)

The accusation levelled at the compatibilist-that his first- order desires having antecedently sufficient causal conditions is factually incompatible with them being truly his-would surely be brought against the procedural independence of people's second-order desires, too. For whether we have or




lack the desire to be a certain sort of person, to enter into the self-reflective and self-critical process Dworkin envisages, might also be said to depend on the sort of socialization we have undergone. If this charge were to succeed, then, despite its otherwise helpful character, Dworkin's contribution could not be pressed into service here to overturn the present objection to compatibilism for it would seem that in the relevant regard the two stand or fall together. I shall argue, though, in what follows, that the central thrust of Dworkin's suggestions is left unscathed by this objection and that his remarks can be amplified so as to furnish a defence against the allegation that freedom is factually incompatible with determinism.

It is my contention that it is a critical insight to recognize that when a person identifies with certain of his motivations whether the process is initiated by the example of others, conversations with others, as a result of a process of self- reflection or the like, such motivations may legitimately be regarded as his or hers. (Given that undomesticated animals do seem to undergo a form of socialization and yet do not appear to evaluate the desires they have, the suggestion made by Frankfurt that this process is a uniquely human one has a certain amount of bite.) This insight fits illuminatingly into the framework I outlined previously. There I argued, on the one hand, that when the processes of our socialization are brought to the level of consciousness (and in being laid bare become open to critical evaluation) this can have a liberating effect in enabling us to get free of desires we should prefer not to have, and, on the other, that raising people's consciousness leads sometimes not to their rejecting the desires which have hitherto motivated them, albeit unconsciously, but to their coming to identify with them. Provided this identification occurs in connection with procedures which do not keep the agent ignorant of his or her true motivation and preserve rather than by-pass the agent's reflective powers (and here I include not just the agent's ratiocinative ones) the consciousness-raising will be liberating and there will be good grounds for regarding the motivations thus made manifest as truly his or hers.

If we glance for the moment at what we do in situations where we aren't consciously concerned with the implications of the truth of determinism, it is of some significance that we commonly resort to testing the genuineness of a person's



374 NOCS

professed motivations by ascertaining the person's prepared- ness to follow through some expressed preference. It is just such tests (of what the legal tradition terms 'informed voluntary consent') which provide the theoretical underpinning for the 'cooling off periods that now find a place in consumer protection legislation, in the making and ratification of wills and the like. Such a device has also been proposed by advo- cates of voluntary euthanasia who seek a legal entitlement to make a so-called advance declaration (or 'living will') in which a preference for easeful death is expressed. Where such an advance declaration is confirmed when the person is in a condition appropriate to the administration of voluntary euthanasia, only a paternalistic scepticism could prevent our acknowledging the person's expressed wish to die as his or her true desire.

This is a conclusion with which we can rest content provided that we can avoid the regress argument alluded to above, that the only people who can reject or identify with previously hidden motivations once these motivations are ele- vated to consciousness, are those whose socialization permits them to do so. And surely we can avoid such a regress argument because the argument I have been advancing distinguished between cases where individuals are conscious of the socialization they have undergone and those where they are not. I have urged that in the latter what is crucial is the position the agent takes up regarding the motivations of which he was previously unaware. While such motivations remain obscure to him there is no question of his actively acquiescing in them, resisting them, passively accepting them or whatever. In such a state he remains subject to the dominion of forces over which he has no control. Once he comes by awareness of them and his preferences regarding them there is a real possibility that they may no longer dominate him because this experience brings the person's previously hidden desires within reach for appropriation or rejection, whereas when they are subject to the manipulation, the coercion or the undue influence of other parties or institutions the claim that the motivations are those with which the person would identify were he otherwise placed is defeated. The argument from our socialization to the factual incompatibility of freedom and determinism as stated was that our motivations, preferences, principles, ideals and the like are not truly ours because we come by them




wholly passively. In turn I have argued that the subsequent process of gaining evaluative self awareness sometimes vitiates such socialization.

But surely, it may be objected, people could be socialized so as to scrutinize their motivations and then always, say, to identify with them, in which case we would be precluded from trying to rescue human freedom by pointing to people's identification with certain of their wants. Strictly, of course, a defender of the factual incompatibility argument we've been considering needs more than the mere possibility of such a thing's happening but I waive this point because the objection remains a serious one. Suppose some person, S, has been socialized so as always to scrutinize his motivations and sub- sequently to come to identify with them. Suppose further that an exact replica ofS, SR, undergoes a like process but is at some later time apprised of how he came to engage in the process of self-reflection, evaluation and identification. Here SR has an advantage not available to S in that he has a new vantage point, if you like, from which to critically and coolly survey his engagement in the process into which he was socialized and to endorse or reject his previous judgments. It is just this which enables us to distinguish S's motivations, which are in an obvious but restricted sense his, from SR, which have been made his own. This reply may be thought to give rise to a far-fetched picture of vantage points from which to view vantage points and so on. I do not think that this is an implica- tion of what I have said because in the real world the socialization we experience occurs at the level of our first-order desires and there will, therefore, be no need for a Richard Scarry-like series of vantage points. But whether this is so or not the objection that the regress cannot be stopped from becoming vicious has been shown to fail.

V

It may be suggested that I have not accorded proper significance to the formative role which our biological heritage plays in making us the persons we are with the capacities and desires we have. There are several reasons why I have said little on the matter. To begin with, hereditary properties are neither produced nor transmitted in a vacuum. There is ongoing interac- tion with the environment. There is no.scope here for discus-



376 NOOS

sing the respective contributions of 'nature' and 'nurture' in this process. I can only indicate that my assessment of the debate is that the environment plays a critical role in modify- ing and sometimes trammelling the heritable.9 So one cannot speak just of hereditary properties in isolation. Secondly, though, it appears that to the extent one can sensibly speak of the contributions of these properties it is more in connection with the determination of our capacities than our desires. Now it is undoubtedly true that the capacities one has exert a powerful influence on the desires one has. Even so, people still desire what is beyond their capacity and fail to desire what is quite within their capacity. Hence there is no tight correlation between what people can do and what they want to do. Since my concern in this paper has been with defending the clause in the formulation of the compatibilist position dealing with the agent's desires rather than that treating of his capacities, it has seemed defensible to concentrate on the formation of people's desires rather than their capacities.

VI

My reply to the charge that compatibilism is implausible in the face of known facts about the effects of socialization, social conditioning and heredity on the formation of our wants has been in two stages. I pointed out firstly that the thesis about conditioning cannot be applied across the board since there are many very simple actions which we regularly perform when we want to and which it would be quite unconvincing to think of as the outcome of a process which deprives us of any control over our wanting to do such things. I argued secondly that in the course of bringing certain of our desires to the level of self-conscious evaluation we may either break the hold of those desires which we have unawares been conditioned into regarding as our own, or we may so identify with them that they do thereby come to be ours legitimately. When this latter occurs such desires may legitimately be said to be ours in the way that the compatibilist position requires.

The position of the compatibilist is, therefore, not bereft of plausibility because of the way in which people in our world come in fact to have the desires they do. Nevertheless, it is probably a consequence of the defence of compatibilism I have offered that fewer people are free and for less of the time than we are inclined in our unreflective moments to believe.10




REFERENCES

[1] N. Block and G. Dworkin, 'I.Q.: Heritability and Inequality,' Philosophy and Public Affairs, 3(1974): 331-409; 4(1974): 40-99.

[2] G. Dworkin, 'Acting Freely,' NOUS, 4(1970): 367-83. [3] , 'Autonomy and Behaviour Control,'Hastings Center Report, 6(1976):

23-8. [4] H. Frankfurt, 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,'Journal of

Philosophy, 68(1971): 5-20. [5] A. Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,

1970). [6] V. Held, 'Coercion and Coercive Offers,' in J.R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman

(eds.), Coercion: Nomos XIV (Chicago: Atherton Press, 1972): 49-62. [7] N. Holmstrom, 'Free Will and a Marxist Concept of Natural Wants,' The

Philosophical Forum, 6(1975): 423-46. [8] K. Lehrer, "'Can" in Theory and Practice,' in M. Brand and D. Walton (eds.),

Action Theory (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Co., 1976): 241-70. [9] Daniel Lyons, 'Welcome Threats and Coercive Offers,' Philosophy, 50(1975):

425-36. [10] J. Murphy, 'Total Institutions and the Possibility of Consent to Organic

Therapies,' (cyclostyled). [11] W. Neely, 'Freedom and Desire,' Philosophical Review, 83(1974): 32-54. [12] V. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957). [13] J. T. Stevenson, 'Volition under Hypnosis,' Dialogue, 15(1976): 441-78. [14] G. Watson, 'Free Agency,'Journal of Philosophy, 72(1975): 205-20. [15] G.H. von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1973). [16] R. Young, Freedom, Responsibility and God (London: Macmillan and New York:

Barnes and Noble, 1975).

NOTES

ICf. [5] ch. 7. K. Lehrer's employment in [8] of the notion of'havinganadvantage in some possible world which the agent does not have in the actual world' has a similar import. My own approach in ch. 11 of [16] took the same form as the one sketched here.

2Strictly what is needed here is the requirement that the agenteither knows what he has to door is culpably ignorant for failing to know. I omit the latter disjunct only to facilitate the expression of my claim.

3A compatibilist cannot refer to such a performance as 'lucky' or as the result of 'chance' since neither notion has a place in a deterministic world.

4The evidence here is somewhat cloudier. See e.g. [13] esp. section V. Stevenson points out how difficult it is to get adequate evidence about either the usual (non- hypnotized) behaviour, or the belief states, of persons who undergo hypnosis, and, in addition, the difficulty there is in distinguishing the behaviour of persons under hypnosis from that of those under the charismatic influence of a Svengali, the latter of which he believes we hold to be free and responsible.

5Cf. [7] p. 436. Holmstrom's concern is similar to mine though she shows little familiarity with compatibilist views more recent than Schlick's or Hobart's.

8As Anna Cushan forcibly reminded me. 7For related discussions see also [11] and [14]. The latter is critical of the notion

of 'orders of desires' as stated in [4]. 8In [11] Neely makes it a condition of an agent's having freely performed some

action that, had he been given what he took to be good and sufficient reason for not doing what he did, that he would not have done it. Quite apart from the epistemologi-



378 NOS

Cal difficulties which this resort to counterfactuals introduces, Neely's condition also suffers from too intellectualist an orientation in virtue of its stress on the role of reasoning.

9For an outstanding discussion of these issues which provides detailed support for my contention see [1].

101 would like to thank Frank Jackson, Bruce Langtry, John Kleinig, Robert Fox and members of the Victorian Branch of the A.A.P. for helpful comments and discussion on an earlier draft. Thanks are also due to the editor for drawing my attention to several points where greater clarity was needed.



Date post:	20-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	robert-young
View:	218 times
Download:	4 times

Compatibilism and Conditioning

Documents