Suppose determinism and compatibilism are true. Imagine that a clever alien crafted a human embryo and the conditions on earth so as to produce a human, Alice, who would end up living in ways that served the alien’s purposes, but whose decisions to serve the alien had the right kind of connection with higher-order desires, reasons, decision-making faculties, etc. so that a compatibilist would count them as right. Would Alice's decisions be free?
The answer depends on whether we include among the compatibilist conditions on freedom the condition that the agent’s actions are not intentionally determined by another agent. If we include that condition, then Alice is not free. But it is my impression that defenders of compatibilism these days (e.g., Mele) have been inclining towards not requiring such a non-determination-by-another-agent condition. So I will take it that there is no such condition, and Alice is free.
If this is right, then, given determinism and compatibilism, it would be in principle possible to produce a group of people who would economically function just like slaves, but who would be fully free. Their higher-order desires, purposes and values would be chosen through processes that the compatibilist takes to be free, but these desires, purposes and values would leave them freely giving all of their waking hours to producing phones for a mega-corporation in exchange for a bare minimum of sustenance, and with no possibility of choosing otherwise.
That's not freedom. I conclude, of course, that compatibilism is false.
5 comments:
Alex
Compatibilism is the position that persons do something because they are who they are.
It's more complex, of course, but that's what it comes down to.
I "choose" to write this post because I am a person who likes to discuss these things. My wife doesn't post here, because she is not interested in discussing this.
Now, imaging libetarian free will were true. Then, all of a sudden, I could "choose" to become a murderer or a rapist.
I prefer to think that I am the kind of person who will never choose to rape or murder.
Yes, it would, in principle, be possible to produce a group of people who would economically function just like slaves, but who would be fully free (in the compatibilist sense). Those people would "choose" slavery because they like being slaves. It's their decision based on who they are.
You choose based on who you are, but you cannot choose who you are. That's compatibilism, and you may not like it, but a libertarian is no better off. Because if we have LFW, we "choose" on some other mysterious basis that we have no more control over than over who we are.
"freely giving all of their waking hours to producing phones for a mega-corporation in exchange for a bare minimum of sustenance, and with no possibility of choosing otherwise"
One need not invoke `determinism` or `compatibilism` to assert that having this happen consistently without lots of exceptions in a large group of individuals is close to impossible. I doubt you could ever get this to work reliably with a group of draft horses in all cases, starting with newborns and following the group through training. At best you could select a few in a large peer group that could remain performing to that specification for many years.
Biology makes things too unpredictable for such a production, free will or no.
William:
We are assuming determinism and I am saying it's "in principle" possible. Of course, we may have to control nearly every particle's position prior to the person's birth.
If you have to control the position of every molecule, you are not really using behavioral controls where reasons and motives matter. You have determined the body's movements directly, without any need for motives.
If you have decided to only determine the motives and tendencies, the biology will still vary too much to allow the consistency the scenario requires as outcome.
If Alice literally can't ponder her own state or will a higher good than pointless servitude, then she's not rational, which means that (at least by Aristotle's defintion) she's not even human. So, sure, Alice isn't free. But she's also no threat to compatibilism, because her reasoning faculties would have to be completely non-functional for the thought experiment to work. Suppose we reverse the story. Alice, who has LFW, chooses to devote her life to corporate servitude, making phones in slave labor conditions. She has the power to choose otherwise, but doesn't, for the same reasons as her designed-by-aliens counterpart. Given that only an insane person could choose such a pitiable and pointless existence, I conclude that Alice is not free, and liberatian free will is undesirable and hopefully false. Both stories ignore the important of rationality to human free will, and so neither actually works as a thought experiment.
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