By the way, if I were to argue the other side and defend pure libertarian freedom, i would argue that our experience of moral guilt is incompatible with any sort of determinism.

I don’t really see a difference here because I think I can sometimes choose from among various things I want or desire or value and then act accordingly, not arbitrarily, but making potentially important decisions.

I don’t have any experience of making choices that I go on to care deeply about or define myself by without being motivated by some prior value.

First, yes, I do choose some of my profound values that define me, but on introspection, I always find that my choice was motivated by some yet deeper value that I held antecedently to that choice.

Second, I find this applies even to choices of which of several antecedent given values I will favor. So, let’s say it is a given that I naturally desire (prior to choice) both to experience sensitive pleasure rather than pain (so I naturally want sex and good food and good alcohol, and I want not to be vivisected or to live with debilitating and painful medical conditions) but I also naturally desire genuine deep friendships. Let’s say at some point I confront these two desires and choose which is more important to me, which of the two I will prefer (and by how much I will prefer it) when and if I am ever forced to choose between them.

In my experience such a choice is always made by reasoning about prior, given desires. Perhaps my desire for one just is, as given, stronger, and I’m not so much choosing one of the two as I am simply coming to recognize the given fact that I do, as a sort of brute fact, just care about one of the two more than I care about the other. Perhaps, there is some other, even more basic desire in relation to which I chose to favor one over the other.

What I am getting at is that I have no experience of choosing anything–even choosing between goods I have some natural inclination to–without that choice being motivated by a more basic (than the choice) given desire. I can’t find in my experience that moment of, what I will call, unfettered freedom. I can’t find the moment when I have several goods to choose between, and I choose one in a way that is not able to be traced back to, (i.e., fully explained by) my prior desires and knowledge. I cannot find a moment where I deliberately choose with a radical freedom that is unconstrained or limited even by my own given desires.

That is really what this all comes down to. Is there at least one critical choice, where I am unconstrained even by my internal desires and beliefs? Is there a choice in which at least two options are totally open to me as fully eligible, even given all relevant prior data, including my own prior desires and beliefs?

If there is, I can’t find it. I can’t find that moment when nothing explains why I chose this rather than that (aside from truly trivial choices, like which vegetable to serve). And if I could find such choice–a choice that nothing prior explains, it would not be clear to me that that choice was one I should be held accountable for. If there really was nothing prior that inclined me decisively to one rather than the other, if it really did seem to me a coin toss as to which of the two options was better, why should I be held morally accountable for that?

I hate to keep going back to Aquinas, because I know this crowd doesn’t share my regard for him and the philosophical school he gave rise to, but there has been so much ink spilled among Thomists trying to isolate that critical moment, that moment of genuine self-defining freedom, where we choose whether to be good or bad. And the problem is you just can’t isolate that choice–you always push the problem back another step (there was always a prior choice that set you on the road to make this choice) or you just embrace what amounts to determinism.

Everything we choose we choose under the aspect of good. Everything we choose we choose because it seems to us, at the moment, desirable. You might say that a thing’s seeming desirable is itself a result of a prior choice–why focus on this thing under this aspect (in which is seems desirable) rather than under that aspect (in which it seems undesirable), but then you are just pushing the problem back.

If pure libertarian freedom is a thing, it must be a mystery. We can never explain it because if we did explain it we would in fact explain it away.

To postulate that pure libertarian freedom is to make us like God, we defy (or at least we stand outside the scope of) the principle of sufficient reason. Just as the classical monotheistic god is taken as having no further explanation, but is understood to be the whole explanation for himself, so too a genuinely, radically, libertarianly free choice has no explanation but itself.

The problem is retaining responsibility in the face of that.

For a bad act to be imputable to the agent, we have to say the agent knew better than he chose. (a similar argument can be made for a good act–the agent needed a truly eligible alternative). But we never choose what seems to us, overall, to be bad (that is, undesirable). Even in sin, we choose to sin because we see some good that we wish to attain in the sin. So we have to say that for an agent, freely, to act badly, he had to choose what he knew to be overall bad, i.e., ultimately undesirable. But in my experience (and according to the analyses of Aquinas and Aristotle) that is psychologically impossible. Anything we choose, we choose because it seems to us good.

When we choose we chose for the sake of something. If you say that you sometimes chose your most ultimate values, then I ask, for the sake of what did you chose them? What motivated that act of will whereby you chose that value? There must have been some more basic value that motivated that choice, so what we started by asserting as a most ultimate value which you chose, turns out not to have been most ultimate–there was some more ultimate value that motivated you to chose it.

I do think there are a lot of very deeply held values that we can choose to change, I just don’t think those are actually our most ultimate values. The very fact we can choose to change them convinces me that if we dig a bit deeper we will find yet more ultimate values that motivated those life-defining choices.

I also accept the possibility that our actual most ultimate values might change over time, but I don’t think this is because of free choice, I think it is because of new beliefs or new experiences. Our desire for our most ultimate values is elicited not chosen.

I subscribe to the Aristotelian principle that choice is of the means, not the end. As you dig deeper into your motives, you must necessarily, eventually arrive at one or more ends that you desire simply as ends in themselves and not a means to anything further. You desire these things simply for their own sake.

And it is certainly true that how I apply those most ultimate values will change depending on circumstances. That is the domain of choice.

And I agree that all this by itself doesn’t prove determinism. But it does rule out one particularly attractive locus of libertarian freedom.

The fact that I or others can explain or understand why I made some choices does not mean that I could not have made other choices, does it?

I think it depends how thorough the explanation is. If I give a complete, non-circular explanation of why I chose this rather than that, I have effectively shown the reason I couldn’t choose otherwise than I did. An explanation of a choice that only gets you to why you might or might not chose this thing isn’t really an explanation of the actual choice.

How does one account for differences among individuals of the same species among bodily creatures? Differences in prime matter, I imagined for a while when I first read Aristotle in translation, but I now doubt that’s a correct understanding of prime matter. To address this weakness of the Aristotelian Thomistic metaphysics, the medieval Franciscans invented an individual formal element that was unique to each individual, haecetitas or this-ness.

Of course you are a Scotist. Old allegiances die hard.

Oh, and for Aquinas, bodily creatures of the same species are individuated by signate matter (matter considered insofar as it is extend in space and subject to dimension, thus giving the individual that informs that matter a unique position). But the other differences (being tall or short, being smart or dull) are accidents that can be caused in various ways.

This too sounds to me like limited freedom!

But remember, insofar as I am defending compatiblism, I’m not arguing against freedom, only against libertarian freedom. I think the agent is free to do what he wants to do, but what he wants is ultimately determined.

just because I might be able give a full account (can I, can Thomas, can anyone?) of why I chose one course of action, I still don’t think that means I could not have made a different choice for different reasons.

What sort of other reasons? Are they reasons I wasn’t aware of in choosing? (In which case the consideration is something of a red herring. Sure I might have chosen differently if I had been aware of other reasons than the reasons I was actually aware of when I chose.) Or are they reasons I was aware of that just failed to move me? And if they failed to move me, well, what explains why they failed to move me? You haven’t explained the free choice until you can explain why the agent wasn’t moved by those other reasons. This is what I’m getting at when I say libertarian freedom, in principle, resists explanation.

I think Stephen raises an important consideration, in distinguishing randomness from freedom.

I think the motivation for libertarian freedom is a desire to protect human responsibility. My acts are mine and are imputable to me (not just in a courtroom, but also within my own conscience). Well, if my acts are ultimately determined by something random, then they aren’t mine.

I don’t think this is actually how it works, but let’s imaging that whether I go on a homicidal rampage, when other conditions outside of my immediate control are right, is determined by whether an atom with a very very long half-life happens to decay. In that case, my going on a homicide rampage isn’t mine. I was a slave to whims of that atom. Reducing free will to randomness is just another form of determinism. Replace the atom with anything you like; if its random it isn’t me.

We are apt to think there needs to be something more that makes my free acts really be mine so I am morally responsible for them. The problem is saying what precisely that something more could be. And that is a question I’d leave you with: What specifically is it that makes your acts be yours?

It seems to me we have this intuition that there needs to be something special that makes my acts really mine, but at the end of the day, I don’t think we can locate any such thing, aside from simply the desires I have. I want certain things and that is all there is to it. If I am able to pursue those things I want, I’m free. The fact that I really want them makes the acts I perform in order to get them mine.

How would you differentiate between what I’ve described so far as limited freedom and what you refer to as libertarian freedom? How would you differentiate my position from your own version of compatiblism?

I don’t really know, largely because I can’t pin down precisely what the limited freedom you are defending consists in, aside from your thinking that what I describe as compatiblist freedom is just a name.

I did mean my question sincerely,

We are apt to think there needs to be something more that makes my free acts really be mine so I am morally responsible for them. The problem is saying what precisely that something more could be. And that is a question I’d leave you with: What specifically is it that makes your acts be yours?

I think trying to answer that could be truly illuminating.

In generally, I want to push the libertarian to give a clear and precise explanation of what he thinks freedom consists in (positively, not just negatively) and why that gives rise to responsibility.

Something more than my acts being random.

On the one hand, we have things that are deterministic. The prior state, in principle, determines the outcome. (Although we may not have nearly enough information to predict that outcome accurately.)

On the other hand, we have things that are random: The prior state gives us at most a probability of any given outcome, but there is, in principle, no full explanation for why one outcome actually occurred rather than the other possible outcomes, and there was for the same reason no way to predict, with certainty, the actual outcome ahead of time. What actually happens is random.

How does free choice relate to those two?

Obviously libertarians reject identifying free choice as deterministic.

It seems to me we need something more than just randomness to account for human responsibility. I don’t think the moral agent is the equivalent of a die. What is that something more? Or would you dispute the premise of the question?

I think it is an exhaustive division.

Either a process is deterministic–in which case it is totally determined by the initial state and is therefore in principle perfectly predictable.

Or a process is non-deterministic (i.e., random or merely probabilistic), in which case the prior conditions are not met. I’m not saying the outcomes of a random process have to be equally weighted. The decay of an unstable atom with a very long half life, for example: At any given moment the overwhelming odds are that it won’t decay at that moment, but it could decay at any of them.