Sublating the free will problematic: powers, agency and causal determination

Abstract

Powers and dispositions are all the rage in contemporary analytic metaphysics. i A key feature of the developing anti---Humean approach is that it reverses the presumed direction of fit between behavior and laws. From a dispositional realist perspective, laws hold in virtue of the powers of given kinds of things to effect given kinds of change, not the other way around. It is not laws, but powers - or, some would say, the bearers of powers - that bring about outcomes.Dispositional realism therefore lends itself to a conception of causality as consisting in the display or expression of powers, rather than as anything amounting to sequences, or statements about sequences, regular or not, counterfactual or not. Finally, unlike for the Humean, for dispositional realists the relationship between what something can potentially do and the kind of thing that it is, is one of necessity. This is not to say that a thing must necessarily express its powers ii (let alone that the expression thereof will necessarily issue in an associated effect iii ), only that a thing of a given kind bears the powers of its kind necessarily. iv Jointly, these features of dispositional realism stand to radically reconfigure the debate in analytic philosophy over free will. Or so I aim to show. I begin by establishing what the determinism side of the contemporary free will problematic looks like, from a powers perspective, then do the same for a range of issues associated with the free will side. (To be clear, by "side" I do not mean adherents of one or another position; I mean the constituent categories of the conceptual artifice that is the dichotomy between Humean---inflected determinism and Humean---inflected free will.(Note also that insofar as Kant adheres to a passivist, nomological conception of causation, both Kantian---style determinism in relation to phenomena and Kantian---style escape therefrom count as Humean---inflected for the purposes of the present analysis.) I have made use of the Hegelian term "sublate." To sublate is to re---frame, such that irreconcilable, apparently independent positions may be shown to be misconceived elements of a coherent whole. The claim is that a dispositional realist ontology can be seen to sublate the terms of the free will debate. (Let me also be clear that I do not mean to argue that a powers ontology solves the Humean---inflected problem. I mean to say that it reconfigures it, such that it can be seen to have been ill---conceived in the first place.) As it happens, one consequence of the sublation is a bolstering of the thesis of agent---causation. I therefore end the paper by briefly cataloguing the merits of a dispositional realist version of agent---causation as compared to those of an agent---causal view married to an otherwise---Humean metaphysics. (i) Powers and DeterminismThe contemporary free will problematic does not hinge upon the designs of God or Fate.It presumes only that at any given time t, it is the case that all future states of the world follow necessarily from present condit...

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“…24.Some contemporary philosophers of agency similarly conceive freedom as the ‘meta-causal power (…) we have to modify (…) our causal power profiles’ (Ellis 2013, 186; cf. Groff 2016), though they do not distribute first- and second-order powers across a phenomenal-noumenal divide.…”

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“…An ontological conception opposing the dominant Humean event causal theory and seeing agency instead as involving the irreducible exercise of powers has recently enjoyed something of a revival in the philosophy of science (Bhaskar 1978;Cartwright 1992;Harré and Madden 1975) and the philosophy of action (Groff forthcoming;Steward 2012). On this ontological conception it is real things and their powers or ways of acting that are considered to be knowable and are taken to endure.…”

Free Will, Determinism and the “Problem” of Structure and Agency in the Social Sciences

“…This is a view of the agent as a noumenal or immaterial self with powers of ex nihilo origination. As Randolph Clarke (1996, 20) notes, such a conception of the agent and their powers is regarded “(even by proponents) as strange or even mysterious.” 8 But Ruth Groff (2014, 2016) has recently advanced a critical realist-inspired, naturalistic agent-causal theory that endeavors to eschew this mysteriousness. 9…”

“…Groff (2016, 7-8) argues that both indeterministic libertarianism and compatibilism are susceptible to what Pereboom (2004, 276) calls the “disappearing agent objection.” This objection targets the ontology shared by indeterministic libertarian and compatibilist theories, namely, the idea that free actions are, and are caused (either indeterministically or deterministically) by, events . For both kinds of theory, the events in question are reasons, that is, beliefs and desires that come to the agent’s mind and upon which they deliberate when deciding how to act.…”

“…But from the agent-causalist’s perspective, under event-causal theories, it is not the agent as such that chooses her action; rather, her “choice” is but the outcome of a causal process (the occurrence and effects of beliefs and desires) that just happens . The agent-causalist counters that a free action is one that the agent herself causes “on the basis of,” “for,” or “in response to,” her reasons for acting one way or another (Groff 2014, 86; 2016, 15). But neither the reasons, nor anything else prior to her choice, causes (indeterministically or deterministically) her causing of that choice.…”