1 Responsibility & Free Will Section 3 Evolution, Randomness, ‘Could’ & ‘Would’

2 Darwin His theory of evolution led him to express the fear that the contents of human minds might be determined by the evolutionary process. But he probably did not endorse determinism.

3 Richard Dawkins (Darwinist) Holds that humans are shaped & manipulated by their genes; despite his claims that we can rebel against them, his theory reads as deterministic. But in transferring agency from humans to genes, this theory is implausible.

4 Keith Ward Different interpretation of Darwinism. People sometimes have ‘libertarian freedom’, being free to choose between more than one course of action.

5 Unpredictability & Determinism Albert Einstein’s discovery of the unpredictability of the pathways of individual electrons renders physics non-deterministic, but may make little or no difference to debates about determinism at the macroscopic level.

6 ‘Could Have Done Otherwise’ In the twentieth century, compatibilist accounts of ‘could have done otherwise’ were produced by G.E. Moore & Patrick Nowell-Smith.

7 G.E. Moore: ‘Could’ & ‘Would’ Claimed that ‘could have done otherwise’ is either short for ‘could have done otherwise if he/she had chosen’ or to be analysed as ‘would have done otherwise if he/she had chosen’.

8 Nowell-Smith: ‘Could’ & ‘Would’ Argued that ‘can’ means ‘will, if’ & ‘could’ means ‘would, if’. So, ‘he could have done otherwise’ means ‘he would have done otherwise, if he had had the opportunity & a predominant motive to do so’.

9 J.L. Austin: Reply to Moore Austin’s reply to Moore: ‘Could have’, being the past tense of ‘can’, has no need of a conditional interpretation. ‘If he/she had chosen’ does not express a causal condition. Thus ‘could have done otherwise’ does not relate to different circumstances from those of the actual action.

10 Austin: Reply to Nowell-Smith ‘ Can run a mile’ doesn’t mean ‘will run a mile, given the opportunity & strong enough motivation’. Rather, it affirms the agent’s actual abilities. The same applies to conditional analyses of ‘could have done otherwise’.

11 Hence… Compatibilism seems inconsistent with what we ordinarily say, & probably with what we ordinarily think.

12 Randomness & Responsibility One objection to indeterminism (which rejects determinism & accepts that there are free choices) is that undetermined actions are random & hence not responsible. This objection seems applicable to some models of freedom.

13 J.R. Lucas’s Reply Lucas replies that actions that are inexplicable by sufficient casual conditions may be explicable by the agent’s reasons, & hence neither random nor irrational.

14 Lucas Further argues that only actions that aren’t explicable by sufficient causal conditions are explicable by the agent’s reasons, & that compatibilism is misguided in holding that the same actions can be explained both by causal & rational explanations.

15 Hence… Compatibilism needs to be rejected & some form of libertarian indeterminism to be preferred.

16 Study Exercise Begin to reflect on whether to adopt: compatibilism, or… kinds of determinism that reject belief in free action, or… kinds of indeterminism that accept this belief. We will return to this exercise after you’ve completed Section 4, at which point you should be better positioned to grasp all these stances.