Free Agents Galen Strawson (Philosophical Topics 32 2004: 371-402)
reprinted with minor revisions in G. Strawson Real Materialism and Other
Essays (Oxford 2008: 359–386)
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1 Introduction
Are we free agents? It depends how you understand the word ‘free’. In this
paper I am going to take my bearings from the fundamental sense of the word
in which we cannot be free agents in the absolute way we sometimes suppose
because we cannot be ultimately (morally) responsible for our actions. I will
express this by saying that we cannot be U-free agents. It does not follow from
the fact that we cannot be U-free agents that we cannot have all the freedom of
action we can reasonably want, for we can.
2 The Basic Argument
The short form of the argument that U-freedom is impossible is as follows.
(1) When you act, at a given time t, you do what you do, in the situation in
which you find yourself at t, because of the way you are, at t.
(2) But if you do what you do at t because of the way you are at t, then in order
to be ultimately (morally) responsible for what you do, at t (in order to be Ufree, at t), you must be ultimately (morally) responsible for the way you are, at
t, at least in certain fundamental, mental respects.
(3) But to be ultimately morally responsible for the way you are, at t, in certain
fundamental mental respects, you’d have to be causa sui in those respects.
(4) But nothing can be ultimately causa sui in any respect at all (or if God can
be, nothing else can be).
(5) So you can’t be ultimately morally responsible for what you do—you can’t
be U-free.1
I call this the Basic Argument against U-freedom. Here is a variant.
(A) One cannot be causa sui—one cannot be the ultimate, originating cause of
oneself.
(B) But one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental
respects, in order to be ultimately morally responsible for one’s decisions and
actions.
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1
The way you are when acting at t is a function of many things, including of course your
experience of your situation (the reference to a particular time isn’t necessary, but some find it
helpful). It is not just or especially a matter of your character, and the argument has its full
force even for those who question or reject the explanatory viability of the notion of character
(see e.g. Harman 1999, 2000, Dorris 2002).
(C) So one cannot be ultimately morally responsible for one’s decisions or
actions: one cannot be ultimately morally deserving of praise or blame for
one’s decisions or actions or one’s character or indeed for anything else.
These are brief versions of the argument that U-freedom is impossible, and
both premiss (3) in the first version and premiss (B) in the second can be
questioned. While many think both are obviously true, others think they need
argument. I have argued for both in other places,2 and will take their soundness
for granted in this paper. ‘The causa sui’, as Nietzsche says,
is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape
and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to
entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire
for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still
holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear
the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve
God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be
precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to
pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness….3
3 Causa sui
U-freedom is impossible because one of its necessary conditions—being causa
sui, at least in certain respects4—is unfulfillable. But the fact that U-freedom is
impossible does not prevent us from enquiring into its conditions—into what it
would take to be a U-free agent. We can specify the conditions of impossible
things. We can say what something has to be like to be a round square: it has to
be an equiangular, equilateral, rectilinear, quadrilateral closed plane figure
every point on the periphery of which is equidistant from a single point within
it. It is because we know the content of the concept ROUND SQUARE5 that we
know that there cannot be such a thing, and the same is true of the notion of Ufreedom: we couldn’t know that U-freedom was impossible unless we not only
knew at least one necessary condition of U-freedom, but also knew that that
necessary condition—the causa sui condition—was unfulfillable.6
So we may enquire into the conditions of an impossible thing, and that is
what I want to do in this paper. Suspending judgement on the question whether
it is actually impossible for a thing to be causa sui, I want to try to state
sufficient conditions of U-freedom, reworking my previous attempt to do this
in Part III of my book Freedom and Belief (1986).
—‘Surely a conviction so strong and so central to our conception of ourselves
must at least have an intelligible possibility as its object!’7
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2
See e.g. Strawson 1986: ch. 2, 1994, 2001. (2) may also be questioned, of course; see
Strawson 1986: 29.
3
Nietzsche 1886: §21.
4
I will usually take the qualification ‘at least in certain respects’ for granted.
5
I use small capitals for names of concepts.
6
Some say that statements or concepts that are self-contradictory are meaningless, but this
cannot be right, because meaningfulness is a necessary condition of contradictoriness.
7
Nagel 1987: 6.
2
I think the content of the notion of U-freedom or ultimate responsibility can be
vividly characterized, and is in that sense perfectly—fully—intelligible, even
though it turns out not to be a coherent possibility.
One dramatic way to characterize it is by reference to the story of heaven
and hell. Ultimate moral responsibility is responsibility of such a kind that, if
we have it, it makes sense to propose that it could be just to punish some of us
with torment in hell and reward others with bliss in heaven. It makes sense
because what we do is absolutely up to us. I stress ‘makes sense’ because one
doesn’t have to believe in the story of heaven and hell in order to understand
the notion of ultimate responsibility that it is used to illustrate. Nor does one
have to believe in the story of heaven and hell in order to believe in ultimate
responsibility; many atheists have believed in ultimate responsibility.
A less dramatic but equally effective way of characterizing ultimate
responsibility is this: ultimate responsibility exists if and only if punishment
and reward can be truly just and fair without having any pragmatic
justification.8
Many philosophers set their primary focus on the notion of a U-free action,
rather on the general notion of U-freedom or U-free agenthood. There is,
however, an important sense in which the task of giving a general account of
free agenthood is strictly prior to the task of giving a general account of free
action. This is certainly so in the case of standard compatibilist accounts of
free action that define freedom of action simply as the absence of certain sorts
of constraints on action, for if one defines freedom in this way by reference to
action one needs an account of free agenthood, i.e. an account of what sort of
thing is capable of genuine free action when suitably free from constraint.
Stones, after all, are not subject to any of the constraints standardly proposed
as restrictions on free action by compatibilists (they are not kleptomaniacs,
they do not suffer from OCD, they do not have first-order wants that they do
not want to have), but they are not ipso facto capable of free action. So all fully
spelt out compatibilist Constraint theories of free action have to give an
account of free agenthood. They cannot simply say that freedom is freedom
from some specified set of constraints.
It may seem easy to specify what it takes to be a U-free agent: all it requires
is that one be
[0] causa sui
and that one be
[1] an agent.9
On this view, an agent’s being causa sui is not only necessary for it to be a Ufree agent but also sufficient. So once one has an account of what it is to be an
agent all one has to do is to analyse, as far as one can, what is involved in
being causa sui. And here there seems to be little to say. To be the cause of
oneself is to be the cause of oneself. The notion CAUSA SUI has nothing hidden
about it. If it feels obscure, that is only because it is so evidently paradoxical.
The feeling of obscurity does not show that the concept CAUSA SUI does not
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8
Cf. Strawson 1998: 748-9.
In this paper I will restrict attention to agents that are capable of intentional action, and when
I speak of acts or actions I will mean intentional actions (obviously chemical agents are not
agents in this sense; nor are economic climates that are agents of change).
9
3
come clear before the mind (the feeling may stem principally from the fact that
the notion presents vividly as something impossible, but without the obvious
visualizable impossibility of ROUND SQUARE).
On this view, then, the analysis of U-free agenthood is quickly done, once
we know what it is for something to be an agent: we just add [0] to [1]. But it
is not so simple, for three reasons. First, we need to take account of the fact
that when we are concerned with U-freedom we are necessarily concerned with
what it might be for something to be causa sui with respect to, and so radically
responsible for, certain of its mental characteristics. Thus suppose we have a
good account of what it is to be an agent. It’s not as if adding a completely
general account of what it is to be causa sui (‘It’s really quite simple..in the
case of stones, for example, it’s just for the stone to be—truly—the origin or
creator of itself’) will leave us with nothing more to say about what it is to be a
U-free agent. For the way of being causa sui that concerns us will essentially
involve complicated mental things like the capacity to reflect on the content of
one’s own character traits and preferences in such a way as to choose among
them.
Second, it would be helpful to have some further account of what it is to be
an agent, for in the present context being causa sui is merely the differentia
that distinguishes U-free agents from all those other members of the species
agent that are not U-free agents.
Third, it is not clear that being causa sui and being an agent are sufficient
for being a U-free agent, even if they are necessary. In Freedom and Belief I
argued that even if one were an agent, and even if one were causa sui in the
right kind of way, one might still not be a U-free agent.10 Tom Nagel and
Ingmar Persson disputed this claim in their reviews of Freedom and Belief,11
and I will consider their objections in §16 below.
4 Agenthood
I take it that a dog—Fido—is capable of performing intentional actions for
reasons, and is therefore an agent in the present sense. But no one I know
thinks that Fido can be a U-free agent in the way that many think human
beings can be. No one believes that Fido can be ultimately responsible for what
he does in such a way as to be (without any sort of qualification) fully morally
deserving of praise or blame for his actions. It seems, then, that we need an
account of what we share with dogs that makes both species agents, followed
by an account of what it is that differentiates us from dogs in such a way that
our candidacy for U-freedom survives when theirs lapses.
So what is it to be an agent? I will be brief and take it that one is an agent if
and only if one is
[2] capable of forming beliefs of certain sorts
[3] capable of having desires (pro-attitudes) of certain sorts
[4] capable of self-change (e.g. self-movement)
[5] capable of practical reasoning (in a realistically inclusive sense in which
dogs and year-old children are capable of practical reasoning).
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10
11
Strawson 1986: Part III.
Nagel 1987: 5-6, Persson 1987: 66.
4
Some may say that this list of conditions contains redundancy, others may say
that it states only necessary conditions, not sufficient conditions (even after it
has been allowed that a being can be an agent, an entity capable of performing
intentional actions, even if it never actually acts). Others again may say that it
is circular, because [5] already relies on an understanding of the notion of an
agent. [5] certainly needs further careful exposition, and there is a great deal to
say about all these conditions,12 but here I will take a general understanding of
what they involve for granted. Readers may insert their own preferred account
of what is minimally sufficient for being an agent (a being capable of
intentional action) at this point. No one, I hope, will want to say that dogs,
dolphins, and one-year-old infants are not really capable of intentional action.
5 Self-consciousness
The question is now this: if conditions [1]-[5] state what agenthood is,13 what
has to be added to them to get U-freedom? It seems clear that something must
be added, given that dogs and human infants fulfil these conditions but are not
U-free agents.
Well, [0], the causa sui condition, is presumably crucial, and this creates a
difficulty, because if we want to test the effect of adding [0] to the minimal
case in which [1]-[5] are fulfilled we have to suppose, very artificially, that at
some point in their (individual) pasts dogs and infants have the sophisticated
capacities necessary for becoming causa sui in the required way (e.g. the
capacity to reflect on the content of one’s own character traits and preferences
in such a way as to choose among them) although they revert, after becoming
causa sui, to being things that evidently do not have such capacities.
Let us nevertheless suppose this for the sake of argument.14 Are dogs and
infants, if causa sui, then U-free agents? Are [0]-[5] sufficient for U-freedom?
One may well think not; one may feel that there is some other crucial missing
condition. And there seems to be a leading candidate, the condition that one be
[6] fully and explicitly self-conscious.
Surely any truly U-free agent must be able to explicitly grasp or apprehend
itself as itself, in the way distinctive of and definitive of self-consciousness, in
thinking about itself and its actions—in a way that (we take it) dogs and infants
cannot?
It’s far from clear why [6] should be thought to make the crucial difference,
when it comes to something so momentous as U-freedom, but many think it
can and does. They think that adding [6] self-consciousness to [1]-[5] is
enough to secure U-freedom, or at least full moral responsibility, quite
independently of [0]. To be a U-free agent, they may say, is just to be a
genuinely self-conscious agent, for a self-conscious agent can really know
what it’s doing and that it is itself doing what it’s doing. [6], they may say,
renders [0], the problematic (unfulfillable) causa sui condition, completely
unnecessary:
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12
The beliefs and desires must be such as to link up in a certain way in the mind of the putative
agent.
13
[1] does no work.
14
Some may think this is all too fantastic to be about what really concerns us when we think
about the problem of free will. I think, on the contrary, that it is crucial to understand that we
are led to exactly such places when we think seriously about the problem.
5
—‘That’s right. The capacity for fully explicit self-conscious deliberation in a
situation of choice—the capacity to be explicitly aware of oneself as facing
choices and engaging in processes of reasoning about what to do—suffices by
itself to constitute one as a U-free agent in the strongest possible sense; whatever
else is or is not the case. Causa sui be blowed; one’s full self-conscious awareness
of oneself and one’s situation when one chooses simply annihilates any supposed
consequences of the fact that one neither is nor can be causa sui. The mere fact of
one’s self-conscious presence in the situation of choice confers U-freedom on
one, and obviously so. One may in the final analysis be wholly constituted as the
sort of person one is by factors for which one is not and cannot be in any way
ultimately responsible, but the threat that this fact is supposed to pose to one’s
claim to U-freedom is simply vapourized by the fact of one’s fully self-conscious
awareness of one’s situation.’
I think this view has considerable power and attractiveness. I think it correctly
describes one of the substructures of our deep belief in U-freedom. But I’m
sure that it is not an account of anything that could really constitute Ufreedom, because it ignores [0], the causa sui condition.
What about the converse view that [0], being causa sui, renders [6], being
self-conscious, unnecessary? On this view, if Fido could be causa sui in the
required way he would ipso facto be a U-free agent in every sense in which we
are, and whatever else was or was not the case. If Fido once brought it about
that he was the way he was, mentally, in the relevant respects, at some
strangely lucid time in his past, then he would now be a U-free agent, even
though he is not—no longer—not self-conscious.
Does anyone believe that self-consciousness is not necessary for true
freedom? Persson does not explicitly endorse such a view, but he does raise a
doubt about whether ‘common sense in its judgements of desert and its
adoption of reactive attitudes’ requires self-consciousness on the part of the
agent judged.15
There is a quick reply to this, already touched on. It seems clear that the
causa sui requirement that is supposed to be necessary for U-freedom cannot
possibly be fulfilled by an unself-conscious creature. For to fulfil it one must at
some time have consciously and explicitly decided on a way to be, mentally, in
certain respects, and (roughly) one must then have acted on that decision with
success, and have intentionally brought it about that one is the way one is,
mentally, in the relevant respects.16 But it is not possible to do this in the
required way without being self-conscious, if only because one must grasp that
the mental features one contemplates are one’s own. So fulfilment of [0], the
relevant causa sui condition, requires fulfilment of [6], the self-consciousness
condition, and cannot render it unnecessary.
The reply to this reply has also been touched on. Suppose that a selfconscious being, C, has done everything needed to be causa sui: it has
intentionally brought it about that it is the way it is, mentally, in the relevant
respects; it has set up its own practical-moral constitution in such a way it is
indeed wholly responsible for that constitution, and in such a way that we
judge it to be ultimately morally responsible for what it does. Now, suddenly,
C loses all capacity for self-consciousness, while continuing to be a complex
agent (C, we may suppose, is a cousin of Nemo, a being who is by definition as
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15
16
1987: 65.
See e.g. Strawson 1986: 28-29, 1998: 746.
6
much like an ordinary adult human being as it is possible to be without being
self-conscious).17 Does this mean that suddenly C is no longer a U-free agent at
all, no longer ultimately morally responsible for what it does? Anyone who
thinks self-consciousness is necessary for U-freedom will think so, and I agree,
partly for reasons still to come; but Perssonian common sense may think it far
from obvious.
I will return to this idea when considering Nagel's objection to a different
but related case. For the moment I will assume that [6], self-consciousness, is
at least necessary for U-freedom, in addition to [1]-[5], the basic conditions of
agency.
6 Structuralism and Attitudinalism
Many agree that self-consciousness is necessary for U-freedom, even if they
want nothing to do with the causa sui condition; they think it necessary for
genuine moral responsibility whether or not genuine moral responsibility
requires causa-sui-involving U-freedom. And they not only think that selfconsciousness is the crucial difference between dogs and ourselves, when it
comes to the question of U-freedom (or to the question of causa-sui-free moral
responsibility), or at least that it is one crucial difference between dogs and
ourselves. They also think, much more generally, that whatever the final
analysis of U-freedom turns out to be, U-freedom is and must be simply a
matter of having a certain sort of (suitably complex or sophisticated) agentivecognitive make-up or agentive structure that can be fully described, for all the
purposes of the free will issue, in very general functional-capacity terms like
[1]-[6] above.
I will call this position the Agent-Structuralist position—the Structuralist
position, for short. It is I think both natural and attractive, but I am going to
argue that it is incorrect, and that there are among the conditions of U-freedom
conditions that require that the agent possess certain experiential or as I will
say attitudinal properties over and above any agent-structural properties that
are necessary for U-freedom.18 This makes me an Attitudinalist, as opposed to
a Structuralist, in a sense that I will explain.
Structuralists can scoop up all the conditions so far considered. They can
include [0], the causa sui condition, in the set of agent-structural conditions
along with all the conditions of self-conscious agenthood. They can treat it as
just one more general agent-structural condition. It’s true that it is a condition
of a different sort from the conditions of self-conscious agenthood already
stated ([1] to [6]) in as much as it is not a requirement that one have some
enduring functional capacity but rather a requirement that one’s overall
motivational structure have been generated in a certain way. But Attitudinalists
can simply give the causa sui condition to the Structuralists, allowing it to
count as just one more agent-structural condition in addition to the conditions
of self-conscious agenthood, while continuing to insist that agent-structural
conditions can never be enough for U-freedom, and that further distinctively
attitudinal conditions must be added to any proposed set of agent-structural
conditions.
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17
See Strawson 1986: 19-20.
Frankfurt’s requirement that a free agent must be capable of forming second-order volitions
(Frankfurt 1971) is a straightforward agent-structural condition on the present view of things,
and can be included in the list of conditions of U-freedom by any agent-structuralists who wish
to do so.
18
7
Structuralists may also propose to include the requirement that one be
[99] subject to determinism
or alternatively
[98] not subject to determinism
among the general agent-structural conditions of U-freedom, and once again
Attitudinalists need not object.19 They can allow conditions like [99] or [98] to
be counted as agent-structural conditions in the largest sense (they are clearly
not attitudinal conditions). They can also, perhaps, agree that either [99] or
[98] is necessary for U-freedom—although they are just as likely to think that
neither is (I am going to leave [98] and [99] out of account in what follows).
But throughout all this they will continue to insist that no set of agentstructural conditions can ever be enough for U-freedom—not even when [0],
the causa sui condition, has been included in the set of agent-structural
conditions—because attitudinal conditions are also required.
The Attitudinalists think that the Structuralists are failing to treat the
problem of free will with sufficient generality. The Structuralists, they think,
are not sufficiently aware of how bleak and weird and intuitively unfree
creatures that fulfil all the conditions so far mentioned—[0]-[6] ± [98] or
[99]—might be; they profess to be thinking about the conditions of U-freedom
in an entirely general way, but they are not sufficiently aware of how many
special features of ordinary human beings they are taking for granted and
presupposing. The Attitudinalists hold that some of these features, properly
examined, turn out to be conditions of U-freedom, attitudinal conditions that
are irreducible to agent-structural conditions.
7 The belief-in-U-freedom condition
What might these attitudinal conditions be? One proposal is that
[10] believing one is a U-free agent
—conceiving oneself as a U-free agent, experiencing oneself as U-free,
figuring oneself as U-free—is itself a condition of being U-free. On this view,
U-freedom is not just a matter of possessing certain agent-structural capacities.
A U-free agent must also see or experience itself, think or conceive of itself, in
a certain specific way. It must have a certain attitude to itself and its agency. It
must fulfil the attitudinal belief-in-U-freedom condition. (In what follows
‘belief in U-freedom’ refers only to a creature’s belief in its own U-freedom.)
What does this amount to? The first thing to say, perhaps, is that it is not
strictly necessary to figure oneself as a specifically moral agent, or have any
grasp of the notion of morality at all, in order to fulfil the belief-in-U-freedom
condition. We (human beings) ordinarily associate the idea of U-freedom
closely with moral issues—to such an extent that we may think that to have a
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19
Several compatibilists have favoured [99] (see for example Hobart 1934), and all
incompatibilist libertarians have favoured [98]. There is a presumption that [0] is incompatible
with [99] unless the agent in question is God or the universe, and many red herrings lie this
way.
8
sense of oneself as U-free is necessarily to have some grasp of moral matters.20
But this is not so. Self-conscious agents that face difficult life-determining
choices while lacking any sort of conception of morality can have a sense of
U-freedom—of radical, absolute, buck-stopping up-to-me-ness in choice and
action—that is just as powerful as any sense of U-freedom grounded primarily
in experience of moral requirements. They can fulfil the belief-in-U-freedom
condition just as resoundingly as we do.21
—‘Perhaps, perhaps not. But what is there to back the idea that belief in Ufreedom might be a condition of U-freedom?’
Well, suppose an agent a fulfils all possible agent-structural conditions of Ufreedom. It performs an action and is in no way physically or psychologically
constrained in any of the ways standardly cited in (for example) compatibilist
constraint theories of freedom. Suppose we know all this, and believe that Ufreedom is possible, and take it that a has performed a U-free action. Then we
discover that it really has no sort of conception of itself as a U-free agent, no
sense that it is a U-free agent. Can we still hold it to be truly a U-free agent?
Put yourself in a’s shoes: you act, when you do, with no sense of yourself as a
U-free agent. You have no sense whatever of yourself as something that can be
ultimately, radically responsible for what you do. Is a life spent like that the
life of a U-free agent, something that can be ultimately responsible for what it
does, morally deserving without any sort of qualification of praise or blame or
punishment or reward for its actions? I don’t think so.
Let ‘B(a, p)’ represent ‘a believes that p’, and let ‘Fa’ represent ‘a is Ufree’. The belief-in-U-freedom condition states that
[Fa ® B[a, Fa]]
—that if you are U-free then you believe you are—and that this is so because
believing you are U-free is partly constitutive of being U-free, and not, say,
because being U-free is a property that is necessarily epistemically evident,
like being in intense pain. It seems paradoxical because it appears to offend
against a very basic (even if not exceptionless) epistemic principle, the
principle of independence of belief and thing believed.22 Suppose a has an
ordinary factual belief p.23 If p is true then it is true in virtue of the obtaining of
some state of affairs S1. Obviously. The principle of independence states that
the state of affairs of a’s having p —call this S2—cannot itself be part of S1. If
a has p and p is true in virtue of S1 then S1 cannot include or involve S2. S2, a’s
having p, cannot itself be among the truth-conditions of p. In general, a true
belief must be supposed to be a representation of some state of affairs
essentially other than itself; it must be supposed to be something which can
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20
Kant (1788: 4; Ak. V. 4) took our knowledge of the moral law to be proof that we were Ufree agents—to be the means by which we could know with certainty that we were U-free even
though we could not understand how U-freedom was possible.
21
See e.g. Strawson 1998: 746. I will take it that a sense of things being truly or radically up to
one is the same as, or sufficient for, a sense of oneself as U-free.
22
The converse form of the general claim, [B[a, fa] ® fa], is also interesting.
23
Here ‘p’ refers to a’s actual mental state of belief (or actually entertained thought) rather
than merely to the content of a’s belief or thought considered independently of a’s mental
state. I take it that thoughts or beliefs considered as actual features of the world can be true or
false just as statements can be.
9
always in principle be subtracted from the world in a way that leaves its
object—the state of affairs it is a belief about—untouched.
There are, certainly, cases which appear to contravene the principle of
independence: it is arguable that one makes a promise, or a knight move, or
asserts that p, or obeys an order to do x, or enters into a contract, only if one
believes one does; it is arguable that one is fashionable, or chic, only if one
believes one is.24 These seem to be properties of which it is true to say that
there is some kind of awareness condition on possessing them. Roughly, it
seems that you have to be aware that you have the property in order for it to be
true that you have the property. And this awareness cannot be a standard
matter of your coming to form the belief that you have the property as a
consequence of the fact that you have it, because the awareness appears to be
(partly) constitutive of your actually having the property.25 These properties,
however, are all properties that one has only by virtue of participating in some
conventional activity or other, and it seems that we can give a satisfactory
explanation of their existence by reference to the existence of the relevant
conventions. But the case of U-freedom, we suppose, is not like that at all. If
U-freedom is real, it is certainly not real because of the holding of some
convention, human or otherwise.26
This issue can seem very puzzling, but I am going to leave it here for the
moment. I am going to put [10], the belief-in-U-freedom condition, on hold in
order to ask whether there are any other attitudinal conditions of U-freedom.
And to do this I need to go back before going forward.
8 The ability-to-choose condition
In §4 I offered a base set of agent-structural conditions on U-freedom. A Ufree agent must obviously be [1] an agent, and must therefore be [2] capable of
forming beliefs of certain sorts, [3] capable of having desires or pro-attitudes,
[4] capable of self-movement or self-change, [5] capable of practical
reasoning. I took it that dogs and humans have all these properties in common,
and were on a par in so far as possession of the basic property of agenthood
was concerned. But it may now be said that the base set of conditions of
agenthood—genuine intentional agenthood—is incomplete. It must be
supplemented by the condition that one be
[7] (genuinely) able to choose
i.e. genuinely able to entertain and decide between alternative courses of
action; for [2]-[5] do not by themselves guarantee this.
_______________________________________________________
24
I believe that this is not true of entering into a contract, given UK law. For other cases see
Strawson 1986: 200-225 (for the case of the ‘Mystery Draw’, in which believing you are a
winner is a necessary condition of being a winner, see pp. 207-211).
25
See further Strawson 1986: 201, 303-304.
26
Are there any clear non-conventional cases? Suppose I think (believe) that this very thought
(belief) is puzzling—this mental particular, call it q, the ‘token’ thought (belief) I am now
entertaining. In this case q is the thought (belief) that q is puzzling; that is its content. So q is a
true thought (belief) (if and) only if q is puzzling. So that in virtue of which q is true is not
fully specifiable independently of mention of q itself. This does seem perfectly possible, and
not in any deep way paradoxical, but it is entirely unlike the supposed case of U-freedom.
Crucially, it is not a case in which the claim is that to have a property you have to believe you
have it.
10
Is this true? It depends on how one understands [5], the practical reasoning
condition: on one natural view the capacity for practical reasoning already
involves being able to choose in this way. But one can also allow that [2]-[5]
do not or may not guarantee possession of the ability to choose, and add in [7]
as an extra (agent-structural) condition. I will take the second course, because
there is no harm in having redundancy in the list of conditions of U-freedom,
given that the aim is only to state sufficient conditions.
The basic conditions of genuine agenthood now read as follows. B is an
agent if and only if B is
[2] capable of forming beliefs of certain sorts
[3] capable of having desires or pro-attitudes
[4] capable of self-movement (self-change)
[5] capable of practical reasoning
[7] (genuinely) able to choose.
All conditions of agenthood, including the new ability-to-choose condition, are
a fortiori conditions of U-freedom, and I take it that Fido can fulfil all of
them.27
9 Rich ability to choose
We do not, however, think that Fido is a serious candidate for being a U-free
agent, by comparison with ourselves; and when we ask what makes the
difference it is very natural to think that one crucial thing he lacks is
[6] full self-consciousness
as defined in §5. Some, as remarked, think that self-consciousness makes all
the difference—they think it suffices all by itself to make us U-free where Fido
is not and cannot be U-free. Others like myself doubt that self-consciousness
alone can make such a dramatic difference; but there are a number of things
that can be said in support of its importance. The intuitive case for its necessity
was put on p. 00, and the introduction of the ability-to-choose condition
suggests a different way of conveying its importance. For it may now be said
that the problem with Fido and other unself-conscious beings like Nemo (p.
000) is that they cannot really choose between alternatives—not in the
strongest sense, not in the way that we can—, and that this is so precisely
because they are not fully self-conscious. Part of what it is to choose between
alternatives in the full sense of the notion of choice is to be aware (believe) that
you are able to choose, and to be aware of this in a fully self-conscious
manner. In which case [6], self-consciousness, is a necessary condition of [7],
unalloyed or full ability to choose; so that while we can be truly able to choose,
dogs can’t be. On this view, fully self-conscious awareness of oneself as able
to choose when in a situation of choice doesn’t make the difference between
ability to choose and ability to choose U-freely. Rather, it makes the difference
between being (genuinely or fully) able to choose and not being (genuinely or
fully) able to choose at all.
_______________________________________________________
27
It seems clear that dogs, not to mention other unself-conscious beings like Nemo, can be said
to make choices. For some further considerations in support of this, see Strawson 1986: 141145.
11
Well, this can perhaps seem a natural thing to say—although it appears to
contravene the principle of independence just as clearly as the paradoxical
belief-in-U-freedom condition does.28 In fact I think it equally natural to say
that Fido—and if not Fido then Nemo—can genuinely choose between
alternatives, but for expository purposes (and because redundancy doesn’t
matter when one is attempting to state sufficient conditions) I am going to
allow that
[8] rich ability to choose
is something more than that ability to choose, now reclassified as
[7] basic (genuine) ability to choose
that unself-conscious creatures may be supposed to have; noting that [8]
presupposes
[6] self-consciousness
since rich ability to choose is precisely the capacity to be fully self-consciously
aware of oneself grasped as oneself as able to choose when choosing. But it
does not simply follow, from the fact that one is self-conscious and has basic
ability to choose, that one has rich ability to choose, for it is at least
conceivable that one’s self-consciousness may never turn itself in that direction
(as it were). So [7] and [6] do not strictly entail [8], and [8] needs to be listed
as an independent and separate condition.
Is [8] an agent-structural condition or an attitudinal one? It doesn’t matter
much how one classifies it. Some may hold that it is best treated as an
attitudinal condition because it does not really increase the agent’s agentive
capacities in any way: all it adds to what is already the case, agent-structurally
speaking, is awareness that what is the case is the case; and ability to choose
and self-consciousness are already in the set of agent-structural conditions.
Others, however, may think that it is best seen as an agent-structural condition,
in as much as it genuinely enriches the overall agentive-cognitive complexity
of the agent. I think there are worthwhile arguments on both sides, but here I
am going to treat [8] rich ability to choose (self-consciousness-illuminated
ability to choose) as a further agent-structural condition of U-freedom, because
I want to concede as much as possible to the Structuralists in order to highlight
the force of the Attitudinalists’ claim that there must also be allowed to be
attitudinal conditions of U-freedom.
Is rich ability to choose really necessary for U-freedom? If you already
think that it is enough to be an agent and fulfil the causa sui condition you may
doubt this (in a Perssonian spirit). But it does seem plausible that we would not
judge a being to be a U-free agent—capable of being ultimately responsible for
what it does in such a way that it can be, without any sort of qualification,
morally deserving of praise or blame or punishment or reward for its actions—
if it was not even capable of being fully self-consciously aware of itself as able
_______________________________________________________
28
It takes time and care to lay out the case fully. On one view, one can’t take it that the notion
of a situation of choice is independently available in the way I assume here, because one’s
being in a situation of choice is itself constituted partly by one’s sense that this is so. I pursue
these complications with great but perhaps overexcited ardour in Strawson 1986: ch. 14.
12
to choose when choosing. So I hope you will go along with conditions [8] (and
[6]), at least for the moment.
So this is how things stand. [1]-[5]+[7] give the base set of conditions of
agenthood. And if you agree that merely being an agent and being causa sui
are not enough for U-freedom then you will probably also agree that [6] and
[8], self-consciousness and rich ability to choose, are also necessary for
genuine U-freedom.29 So the present proposed set of conditions of U-freedom
consists of [1]-[5]+[7], the base set of conditions of agenthood, [6], full selfconsciousness, [8], rich ability to choose, and [0], the causa sui condition: [0][8]. The question is: Is this enough? Do we also need [10], the belief-in-Ufreedom condition?
10 Stolidus
Well, one question—an interesting question—is whether [8] already entails
[10] believing you are a U-free agent.
Perhaps to be richly able to choose, fully self-consciously aware of oneself as
choosing when choosing, is necessarily to have the sense that it is truly or
radically up to one what one chooses—in a way that simply amounts to
believing you are a U-free agent. Perhaps an agent that has rich ability to
choose is bound to experience itself as U-free, when choosing, and is therefore
(on one reading of Sartre) bound to be U-free, when choosing. On this view,
there is a crucial, overpowering sense in which such a being, fully selfconscious as it is, can know inescapably what it is doing, in the moment of
choice or action, in such a way that it is for that reason (alone)30—and
inevitably, whether it likes it or not—U-free in fact. (It is a sense in which Fido
and Nemo, not being self-conscious, do not and cannot know what they are
doing.)
Is this right? I don’t think so. I don’t think [8] entails [10]. I am now going
to present some cases in support of this claim, and in order to do so I’m going
to put aside the unfulfillable causi sui condition, because it makes no
difference to the cases.
Consider Stolidus. Stolidus is a being of extremely limited conception, a
very blinkered personage, an agent who comes to be fully self-conscious while
remaining very stunted in his general conception of things, including in
particular his conception of his own agency. Stolidus is emotionally very dull,
mentally very sluggish.31 He is, certainly, able to choose between two things X
and Y in the way that Fido and Nemo can be, and he can (being self-conscious)
come to be fully self-consciously aware of himself as able to choose between
X and Y in a particular situation of choice. And he standardly does come to be
so aware of himself; he has rich ability to choose. But he need not thereby
figure himself as U-free, either in the moment of choice and action or in
_______________________________________________________
29
Once again it doesn’t matter much if they are not necessary, since we are only trying to state
sufficient conditions of U-freedom.
30
In its strongest form this line of thought dismisses the causa sui condition as superfluous
(and metaphysically preposterous), but for the moment we may suppose that the being in
question does also fulfil the (unfulfillable) causa sui condition.
31
Stolidus’ actions are ordinarily of small importance, his thought is mostly concerned with
the more or less immediate present. He moves through time inside a shell of self-concerned,
short-term aims. But these things are not necessary features of the case.
13
general; this self-conception is not forced on him; he need not fulfil the beliefin-U-freedom condition.
He is, in a particular situation of choice, fully self-consciously aware of
himself as now able to choose between X and Y; he is aware that he will very
shortly opt for and actually perform either X or Y. But it does not follow that
his thought must—ipso facto—be informed by any sense that it is radically up
to him which he does. Aware of all that he is aware of, he need and does not
turn round upon himself and figure himself as U-free. And he doesn’t. He
simply lacks this view of things.
Well, this is surely possible. But I think it can be hard to see. It is natural
for us, human beings, to think that any genuine, fully self-conscious, explicit
sense of oneself as able to choose, when choosing, just is a sense that things
are radically up-to-one, and so just is a sense of oneself as U-free. And yet I
think it is a mistake. One might restate the point by saying that although
Stolidus goes essentially beyond any unself-conscious (Fido-like or Nemolike) form of awareness of choice, in being fully self-consciously aware of
himself as now able to choose between X and Y, still the able-to-chooseness
part of the content of his state of awareness may remain in essentials like
Fido’s. It is simply not the case that the able-to-chooseness part of the content
of a state of awareness of choice must transmute into ‘truly-up-to-me-ness’—
into belief in U-freedom—just by coming into the light of self-consciousness.
Belief in U-freedom (experience of oneself as U-free) essentially involves a
further perspective, a further attitude to what is going on, a further way of
thinking of oneself that Stolidus does not have. And it is—I propose—
essentially more than the fullest and most explicit possible self-conscious
awareness or conception of oneself as something that is able to choose what to
do; whether this conception is a general standing conception one has of what
sort of thing one is, or an explicit and occurrent apprehension of what sort of
thing one is in the moment of choice. And it is not any sort of agent-structural
condition.
I think our saturated familiarity with our own case, our tendency to think
that any sense of self must be like our own, causes us to elide, and not to
notice, a transition. The natural thought is this: ‘If I am truly fully aware, now,
that I am able to choose what to do, surely I ipso facto have the experience that
what I do is truly up to me, that I am truly (and inescapably) a U-free agent in
this situation? Surely there is no further basic content to my experience of
myself as U-free than my full awareness of myself as truly, fully, able to
choose?’
Stolidus suggests that this is not so. He makes the point by virtue of his
extremely limited outlook. Moira, the ‘true no-U-freedom theorist’, will make
the same point, later, by virtue of her unusually inclusive outlook. But I want
to delay her entry for the moment in order to ask whether there are any other
attitudinal conditions of U-freedom that we need to take into account before
attempting to face up to the paradoxical belief-in-U-freedom condition.
11 Theoria
I think there are. Consider Theoria,32 the spectator subject, who fails to be a Ufree agent because of her overall emotional attitude or identificatory relation to
her agency. She fulfils all the agent-structural conditions on U-freedom listed
_______________________________________________________
32
From qewrein, to be a spectator at the games.
14
so far,33 but there is something fatally amiss in her attitude to herself as an
agent. She is detached from her motivation in some curious way. She acts, and
for reasons that she can give, but it is as if it is not really she who desires,
decides, and acts, but rather as if her desires and beliefs work it out among
themselves beneath her disengaged, spectatorial, inward gaze.
Theoria resembles Camus’s étranger at his most detached.34 She is
somehow disengaged from life, including her own. When l’étranger,
Meursault, alludes to one of his own desires, it is half as if he were recounting
a fact about a feature of the world which is extraneous to him, for he—what he
most truly is—seems to be just the detached reporting self. The desire seems to
be something that affects his life rather in the way that things external to one,
details of one’s surroundings, do. And yet it is still his desire—it is no one
else’s. It is, one might say, something he apprehends before it is something he
feels, but that it is his is part of what he apprehends. There is no defect in his
self-consciousness.
The same is true of Theoria. She has no strong particular sense of herself as
a decision-making, self-governing agent. She doesn’t really see herself as the
decider and rational planner of action. Or rather, she does, for there is no defect
in her self-consciousness—her ability to grasp herself as herself—considered
as a cognitive capacity, and she is after all aware of practical-rational
calculations going on in her; but she does so only in some spectatorial manner.
She doesn’t feel herself to be an agent in the definite, vivid, participatory way
in which we do. She has no real sense of expressing herself in action, no sense
(such as we ordinarily have) of having a will that issues in action in such a way
that one is responsible for and in some way committed to what one does. She is
aware that her actions are actions executed by a body that is hers, and
motivated by reasons correctly identifiable as hers—they are certainly no one
else’s, and they do in fact motivate this her body. She is able to give reasons
why she did something, as we do—’I wanted X and believed doing Y was the
best way to obtain X, given Z’; and it remains correct to say that she decides to
do Y. No one else does, and she is a single psychophysical thing, and she is not
schizophrenic. And yet there is something vital missing in the way she wants
X, and in her attitude to what are correctly identifiable as her projects and
actions. She never has the experience of participatory involvement in the
mental stages of action-production that we can have—the experience
underlying the sense that it is really I who decide and am responsible for my
actions. And this seems to matter a great deal, when freedom, or at least Ufreedom, is in question. Unlike us, she doesn’t feel herself to be the decider
and animator of action, and it seems that she thereby fails to be the decider and
animator of action in the right kind of way for her to be a U-free agent. She is
not ‘identified’ with the process. She is more like someone who watches an
action-producing process—her own—from an internal point of view. There is
something wrong with her attitude, her affective relation, to herself, so that
although she is a self-conscious agent, she is not a U-free agent.35
_______________________________________________________
33
[1]-[8]; [0] has been put aside.
Camus 1942.
35
On Frankfurt’s theory of freedom it might be thought that Theoria could be ruled out on
agent-structural grounds—on the grounds that she could not form ‘second-order volitions’, i.e.
desires that other, first-order desires that she had should (be such as to) move her to action. But
she can have (the capacity to form) such second-order desires, in just the sense in which she
can have first-order desires; the problem is that she will be spectatorially detached from them
as well.
34
15
Imagine a woman who, although she remains outwardly normal and goes
about her business, has entered into an acute state of ‘existential’ crisis, or
accidie, or, more particularly, depersonalization or aboulia. Imagine someone
for whom life has lost its point, and who acts merely mechanically in some
sense, although outwardly normal, continuing to execute complicated and
calculated actions, continuing with her job, for example. To us, ignorant of her
inner condition, her actions seem to be performed by a normally free and
responsible agent. But this appearance is—I propose—illusory.
Constraint theorists may say that Theoria has as good a claim to be a U-free
agent as any of us—she fulfils all the agent-structural conditions on Ufreedom—and that the reason she is not actually free in her actions is that she
has a psychological condition that counts as a freedom-removing constraint.
But this is not the right way to see her. In my story, Theoria is an alien
creature, and her experience of agency is normal among her kind—the
Theoreticals. The Theoreticals, like ourselves, have just one of the many
possible kinds of experience of self, agency, and life available to beings that
fulfil the agent-structural conditions on U-freedom.
I conclude that if and in so far as we judge Theoria’s kind of experience of
agency to be insufficient for, incompatible with, U-freedom—and I think we
should, even if she fulfils the causa sui condition—we place an attitudinal
condition on freedom, a condition whose fulfilment involves something
essentially more than whatever is involved in fulfilling the agent-structural
conditions. What should I call it? The integration condition?36 The nonalienation condition? I will call it the engagement condition: one must be
[11] engaged
if one is to be a U-free agent. In her detachment Theoria fails the engagement
condition. If complete lack of any such sense of engagement could be
decisively established in a human being (here it is ex hypothesi) it might
suffice even in a court of law to absolve from responsibility.
Let me repeat the point that the Theoreticals’ experience of agency is
merely different from, and in no way inferior to, or somehow incorrect relative
to, our own. It cannot be held to involve some form of psychological constraint
just because it is different in this way. What Theoria’s case shows, I suggest, is
that there can be fully self-conscious agents as complex as we are who cannot
be said to be U-free agents simply on account of the character of their
experiential attitude to themselves and their agency. It looks as if Theoria will
also fail the belief-in-U-freedom condition, but I do not think one has to show
this in order to say what it is about her precludes her being a U-free agent in
spite of fulfilling all the agent-structural conditions.
The general conclusion is that U-freedom cannot consist merely in the
fulfilment of some set of agent-structural conditions: it cannot consist in the
possession of some perhaps as yet undiscovered set of maximally actionenabling cognitive and practical capacities. For we also require a certain
attitude to self and agency, an experiential disposition which it is very hard to
specify precisely in a positive way, but which Theoria at any rate does not
have.
12 The Natural Epictetans
_______________________________________________________
36
I called it this in Freedom and Belief.
16
Suppose we accept [11], engagement, as an attitudinal condition on Ufreedom, a condition that must be added to any plausible set of agent-structural
conditions. And suppose we put aside the controversial belief-in-U-freedom
condition. The question is then whether the engagement condition is the only
attitudinal condition that is needed.
Imagine an enormously congenial world inhabited by a race of gifted,
active creatures. They fulfil all the agent-structural conditions of U-freedom so
far proposed, and the (attitudinal) engagement condition. What is unusual
about them is that they are never undecided in any way. They are fully—
richly—able to choose, but they never hesitate at all about what to do. They
never ponder alternatives, although they are perfectly well aware of them.
They never consciously deliberate about which ends to pursue or about how to
pursue them (they have no need to) and always succeed in doing what they
want to do.
These are the Natural Epictetans—never failing, never disappointed in
their congenial world, always able to do what they want to do because always
wanting to do only what they are able to do.37 Their experience is radically
unlike ours. But they are not like Theoria. The strangeness of their experience
(relative to ours) does not derive from a failure to fulfil the engagement
condition.
The Natural Epictetans take decisions—they are agents responding
variously to circumstances in complex ways, beings who actually act—but
they are never undecided. Decision is not something they ever apply
themselves to in any way. It is not something they live through or dwell on or
notice as such. Decision does not issue from previous indecision. It is not a
resolution or conclusion of anything. Perhaps their world is much less
complicated than ours, but it need not be.38 Their deciding is in any case
effortlessly smooth. They never wonder or worry ‘Which (action) shall I
perform?’.39 Given their capacities, they are always capable of acting otherwise
than they do in fact act, and they are fully capable of the thought ‘I could do
otherwise’. Any natural Epictetan can fully understand a story in which it is
faced with a button, and knows that pushing or not pushing it in the next
twenty seconds will lead to very different results. But we may suppose that
they never in fact think such a thought as ‘I could do otherwise’. And if some
of them, musing philosophically, were to think it, it would have no energy for
them, no relations with the notion or experience of difficult choice; for they do
not know what it is to face or make such choices. It would in effect have no
more import for them than either ‘I have such and such capabilities’ or ‘I might
have been, or wanted, otherwise’.
_______________________________________________________
37
Epictetus enjoins one to adapt one’s desires to one’s circumstances, so that one is never
frustrated by them.
38
They may be extraordinarily intelligent, and find the complexity simple. If God existed, and
were an agent, his experience of agency might be like a Natural Epictetan’s.
39
A creature that was never undecided as to what to do might experience freedom =
unhinderedness of action in unconstrained circumstances solely as a result of the contrast
afforded to such free = unhindered action by experience of hindering constraints in other
circumstances. And if it lacked the immediate Epictetan reflex it might experience hindrance in
doing what it wanted to do and think ‘I could do (have done) A if it were not (had not been) for
C’. It might even reason as follows: ‘Since I cannot do A, I will do B’; or again, thinking
ahead, ‘If I cannot do A, I will do B’. But, thinking these things and these things only, it need
never have any sense of U-freedom at all.
17
The Natural Epictetans, then, can never be frustrated. They are never in a
situation in which they think ‘I could have done A (could do A), if it had not
been (were not) the case that C’—experiencing external constraint or
hindrance. If a natural Epictetan were to encounter constraint or hindrance, in
spite of the fabulous congeniality of its world, so that it found itself unable to
do what it had until that moment wanted to do, then it would by virtue of the
immediate Epictetan reflex always immediately cease to want to do what it
found itself unable to do.
External constraint is one thing; indecision is even more important. The
Natural Epictetans are never in a situation in which they might think ‘I could
do A, and I could do B, and I can’t do both, so which shall I do?’. They are
fully capable of thinking such a thing, cognitively speaking, but they never do
so in fact, given the automatic natural Epictetan nature of their volition.
In one way, then, they enjoy all the freedom that it is possible for any being
to have. And yet there seems to be a sense in which they are not U-free agents
at all because they do not know what U-freedom is. They seem, with respect to
the freedom they enjoy, like creatures that have ears but live in a soundless
world. Such creatures experience total silence—they hear it in the sense that
we can be said to hear it—but we feel that they do not know what silence is.
And if they do not know what it is then there is a sense in which they do not
and cannot experience it as we who know noise can and do. In the same way,
sighted creatures living in a lightless world may have no concept of darkness.
Living in a uniformly blue world, with no differences of shade resulting from
shadow or distance, they may have no concept of blue or of other colours.
But what do these cases show? If one takes two things A and B (such as
freedom and lack of freedom) which contrast in such a way that there is either
A or B but not both, the complete lack of B should not have as consequence
that there is no A. On the contrary; there is nothing but A. What may lack in
such a case, however, is any experience of the contrast between A and B. And
this may lead, as above, to lack of any explicit awareness or conception of
either A or B.
But why should lack of explicit awareness of A be supposed to have as a
consequence lack of A itself, as lack of any sense or conception of U-freedom
seems to have as a consequence lack of U-freedom itself? Well, that is the
question. But it does seem to be so. (Compare the sense in which Adam and
Eve, when innocent, were not and could not be good.) I do not think one can
simply say that the Natural Epictetans are in fact U-free agents, and that their
coming to know this would be a standard case of a belief being formed in such
a way as to represent or reflect an already existing belief-independent fact.
That does not seem true to how things are. There seems to be a sense in which
the Natural Epictetans are not U-free agents at all, precisely because—it is
natural to put it in this paradoxical way—they don’t have a proper grasp of the
fact that they are. Even when we put aside the strong (causa sui requiring)
notion of U-freedom for some weaker notion of freedom we may feel that their
sense of freedom lacks some essential contrastive grounding, either in the form
of experience of constraint, coercion and inability, or, quite differently, and
more importantly, in the form of experience of indecision, of having to make
difficult choices between alternatives. Certainly the Epictetans know that they
are fully free agents in the compatibilist sense: they are utterly unconstrained
and fully self-conscious and do what they want to do and know they do. But if
it is claimed that they are in these conditions bound to figure themselves as Ufree, this is far from clear. If there is any sense in which they experience
18
themselves as U-free, I think it will be like the sense in which the inhabitants
of the silent world experience their world as a silent world.
It may again be suggested that they must at least be able to conceive of
doing otherwise, of constraint, and even of experiencing indecision; whereas
the inhabitants of the silent world cannot conceive of noise at all. It may be
suggested that ability to conceive of the possibility of indecision, and indeed of
choice-out-of-indecision, or at least grasp of the notion of options being open
to one, is essentially constitutive of (and so entailed by) rich ability to choose,
which the Natural Epictetans possess by hypothesis. But one may grant this,
for the purpose of argument. For it is not plausible that mere possession of the
ability to conceive of difficult choice or indecision without any actual
experience of it—nor even any actual thought about the possibility of it—is
bound to precipitate belief in U-freedom of the kind we appear to require of
genuinely U-free agents. Having no natural occasion, the Natural Epictetans
may never formulate the possibility of indecision. They are not speculative
creatures. They are without anxiety. Never having had conflicting desires,
never having experienced indecision, an Epictetan never deploys its general
conception of itself as capable of doing many different things in the thought
that it is now able to do other than what it is now about to do in such a way as
to encounter the strong, immediate sense of open choice that is so central to
our lives.
In fact it is not particularly important whether an Epictetan ever actually
entertains any thought of indecision, or of the possibility of doing otherwise.
What is important is whether it ever dwells on such things, whether they ever
matter to it in a certain way. And it is a consequence of the description of their
case that this does not happen. The Natural Epictetans know they produce the
actions they produce, they know they are causally responsible for them in that
sense, but still they lack any sense of themselves as U-free in their actions.
Agency, for them, is something like what it is like for us when we are involved
in doing something that we entirely unproblematically want to do, and that
there is only one way of doing, and that we can do without any difficulty;
something that involves performing a long sequence of simple intentional
actions with regard to which we have no sort of thought that there might be
alternative ways of doing them. Here there can be a strange resistlessness, no
consciousness of choice or indecision.
The proposal, then, is that the Natural Epictetans aren’t U-free agents
although they are fully self-conscious, engaged agents: they can’t be U-free
agents—even if they fulfil the causa sui condition—because they have no
sense of what U-freedom is. They fail to fulfil condition [10], the belief in
freedom condition; they fail to figure themselves as U-free.40 Some may say
that to be free in such a way that one doesn’t even know that one is is the truest
freedom of all: ‘the sense of liberty is a message read between the lines of
constraint. Real liberty is as transparent, as odourless and tasteless, as water’.41
This is a good thought, but the other thought seems to remain undiminished: to
have no sense of U-freedom at all is not to be a U-free agent.
Here a further point comes into play. If U-freedom requires being causa
sui, and if being causa sui is impossible, then U-freedom is impossible. So any
belief that one is a U-free agent is false. Now it seems that nearly all human
_______________________________________________________
40
They may even have second-order desires, and what Frankfurt calls second-order volitions—
desires that their first-order desires be such that they move or will or would move them to act,
all of which are effortlessly satisfied.
41
Frayn 1974: §85.
19
beings do believe they are U-free agents (although many philosophers try to
pretend otherwise); and it may be that they—we—can hardly help this. But it
would be very surprising indeed if all possible self-conscious agents that had
rich ability to choose— all possible self-conscious agents that were able to
choose and knew it—were by that fact alone compelled to believe that they
possessed such U-freedom. For it would be very surprising if all possible selfconscious agents, however intelligent and knowledgeable they were, were
compelled to believe something demonstrably false. It may be that belief in Ufreedom is a necessary condition of U-freedom even if U-freedom is
demonstrably impossible (being round is a necessary condition of being a
round square), and even if any belief in U-freedom is demonstrably false.
Stranger things have been the case. But one point about Theoria and the
Natural Epictetans that must now be registered is that whatever their defects—
whatever we may think they lack when we compare them with ourselves—it is
most unclear that failure to have a false belief is ever a defect.
There is perhaps a connection here with accounts of spiritually advanced
states of mind, and, more particularly, accounts of what the experience of
choice and agency is like in such circumstances. Krishnamurti puts it as
follows:
You do not choose, you do not decide when you see things very clearly; then
you act [in a way which] which is not the action of will…. Only the
unintelligent mind exercises choice in life…. A truly intelligent [spiritually
advanced] man can have no choice, because his mind can be aware of what is
true, and can thus only choose the path of truth. It simply cannot have choice.
Only the unintelligent mind has free will.42
Saul Bellow has a related thought:
In the next realm, where things are clearer, clarity eats into freedom. We are
free on earth because of cloudiness, because of error, because of marvellous
limitation….43
—‘Surely such clarity and such intelligence, which presumably rule out belief in
U-freedom, must bring U-freedom with them if anything does? And if so, belief
in U-freedom isn’t after all a necessary condition of U-freedom.’
The trouble is that nothing brings U-freedom with it, because U-freedom is
impossible. The highest forms of Krishnamurtian intelligence will indeed rule
out belief in U-freedom, because they will involve clear understanding that Ufreedom is impossible.44 But this will not show that belief in U-freedom is not
a necessary condition of U-freedom.
Einstein backs up Krishnamurti and Bellow, judging that ‘a Being endowed
with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his
doings, would smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his
_______________________________________________________
42
Krishnamurti, quoted in Lutyens (1983: 33, 204). In a similar vein, perhaps, Spinoza
remarks that ‘God…cannot be said…to act from freedom of the will’ (1675: pt. 1, prop. 32,
coroll. 1).
43
1977: 140. I do not think that Spinoza disagrees when he says that freedom is consciousness
of necessity, although he is considering a somewhat different conception of freedom. See S.
Hampshire 1972: 198ff.
44
A stage on the way to Nietzsche’s amor fati.
20
own free will’.45 The basic argument that U-freedom is impossible is entirely a
priori, but there are also extremely strong a posteriori reasons for thinking it
impossible. It seems unavoidable if Einstein’s theory of special relativity is
anything like correct, for example—a point that has received surprisingly little
discussion in recent debate about free will.
13 Indecision
Suppose it granted that the Natural Epictetans are not U-free agents. The
question, then, is what they lack. ‘Well, they cannot be genuine U-free agents
because they do not figure themselves as U-free—they fail [10], the belief-inU-freedom condition.’ Fine, but I want to continue to put aside the belief-in-Ufreedom condition for the moment. Is there anything else they lack? Is there
anything that would tip them over into fulfilling the belief-in-U-freedom
condition.
I do not think there is; but the best candidate, perhaps, is this. If one asks
about the deep sources of belief in U-freedom, experience of indecision seems
far more important than experience of constraint or hindrance. Suppose,
contrary to hypothesis, that the Natural Epictetans experience constraint, and
have thoughts of the form ‘I could have done A, if it had not been for C’.
Suppose further that the experience of such constraint serves as a contrastive
foil against which other, unconstrained actions are experienced by them as
free—as free=unhindered. This doesn’t advance them much, I think, for what
they may still lack in this case is any sort of experience of indecision, of
difficult choice. It is that promises most powerfully to give rise to experience
of things as radically ‘up to one’.46
14 Moira
No doubt—but the question is now this. Is vivid experience of indecision
sufficient for belief in U-freedom? Does it compel belief in U-freedom? The
answer, I think, is No. When we picture an agent that is fully self-conscious,
engaged, richly (fully self-consciously) able to choose, and that is currently
experiencing itself as vividly, even agonizingly, undecided as to what to do, we
may wonder how it can fail to figure itself as U-free, as able to choose Ufreely. It is at this point that we have to reckon with Moira, who is a true no-Ufreedom theorist. Moira sees that U-freedom requires being causa sui, she sees
that being causa sui is impossible, and she lives in the full light of this
understanding—in spite of being an agent who makes difficult choices and acts
in the world.47
Moira is fully self-conscious and she is fully engaged. Experience of
desires of the kind that the engagement condition guarantees, and a strong
_______________________________________________________
45
Einstein 1931. For an excellent presentation of the a posteriori point see Putnam 1967.
Lockwood (2005: ch. 3) effectively rebuts Putnam’s critics.
46
Although it seems that it is precisely because they lack any sort of experience of indecision
that the natural Epictetans fail to figure themselves as U-free, it would be very implausible to
suggest that it is actually impossible to have a sense of oneself as U-free if one does not
experience indecision. There is nothing incoherent about the neo-Epictetans, who are exactly
like the natural Epictetans—they never actually experience indecision—except precisely for
the fact that they do experience themselves as U-free.
47
Her sisters—Pepromene, Eimarmene, and Chreousa—are true or genuine incompatibilist
determinists of the kind discussed in Freedom and Belief (281-4). They make the present point
as well as Moira, but their position depends on a belief—in determinism—that could be false.
21
interest in their fulfilment, are not incompatible with true—lived—espousal of
the no-U-freedom position. And we can put her, too, in front of a button in
such a way that she cannot fail to be aware that she faces a choice. But she is
so deeply intimate with the thought that everything that she is is ultimately not
self-determined that she has no sort of sense of herself as U-free when facing
the momentous button—as U-free to choose in such a way as to be ultimately
morally responsible for her choice—, although she now knows that she is able
to choose what to do. She may well find herself calculating consequences and
very uncertain what to do, but she is not compelled by this into any sense of
herself as U-free in a way she knows to be impossible.
One might say that Moira is a sophisticated fatalist.48 I think that it is
extremely hard for us to imagine what it is like to be her. It requires a
conception of things that is way outside the normal human range (even if not
unattainable by human beings). And yet I think that it must be allowed that she
could exist, and that rich ability to choose cannot in and of itself necessitate
belief in U-freedom. There is, after all, a clear sense in which U-freedom is
demonstrably impossible, and it would as remarked be very strange if it were
metaphysically impossible for there to be an agent that was, like Moira, both
able to comprehend this impossibility and able to grasp that it was in a
situation in which it was able to choose.
This is really the only argument that can be given for Moira’s possibility,
but it is perhaps enough. Here as so often in philosophy argument seems to be
no substitute for imagination directed onto a given description.
Some may still think that [1]-[8]+[11], rich, fully engaged ability to choose,
must simply amount to [10], belief in U-freedom: that the conviction of Ufreedom really must be inescapable in these circumstances in the way Sartre
supposed. It is very natural to think this, and yet I think it is unwarranted.49 If
in the present case we cannot see the gap between [8] and [10] it may be
because we can’t imagine a human being who is a true no-U-freedom theorist
like Moira but is in other respects—including internal phenomenological
respects—normal. But it is not surprising that we cannot imagine this, because
it is impossible: if Moira is human, she is not normal at all. Either we must
suppose that her sense of self is not recognizably human, or we must suppose
that it has dissolved away entirely. The first supposition would seem to be a
reasonable one, for she is a self-conscious, embodied being, and can have an
unexceptionable grasp of the simple truth that she is a single thing in the world,
in addition to possessing that self-presence of mind, normal in the selfconscious, that involves a sense of oneself as something that is somehow
single just qua mental. But, granted that she does have a sense of self, this
cannot be supposed to fall within the range of the recognizably human. A basic
sense of oneself as U-free when unconstrained, as possessed of radical ‘up-tome-ness’, seems indissociable from the ordinary, sane and sober adult human
sense of self, and Moira’s sense of self is not like that at all. It cannot be, given
_______________________________________________________
48
Naive fatalism holds that there is no point in deliberating or in doing anything because
everything is predetermined (or is the will of God) in such a way that nothing you can do can
change how things will be. It is false because one’s doings and deliberations can change
things, being themselves real parts of the (possibly deterministic) causal process. Sophisticated
fatalism doesn’t make this mistake. It consists in the attempt (or is the result of a successful
attempt) to comprehend fully the fact that one is not and cannot be ultimately self-determined
or self-determining. It seems, though, that if one is a ordinary human being, one simply cannot
attain the perspective of sophisticated fatalism in one’s daily life.
49
This, perhaps, is the true—but rarely acknowledged—heart of the philosophical problem of
free will.
22
the nature of her experience of choice and agency: she has no trace of belief in
U-freedom.
The line between rich ability to choose and experience of oneself as U-free
may appear a fine one in a book written for human beings, and by one, for we
may be unable to see the distinction easily, and may have difficulty in
employing the device of sympathetic identification to the case. But in a book
written for creatures of some other planet, perfectly fatal creatures of a deeply
deterministical persuasion, the difficulty might rather be to explain how any
apparently intelligent race could suppose the line between having and
believing oneself to have rich ability to choose (a property widely instantiated,
both on Earth and on this other planet) and believing oneself to be a U-free
agent (an impossible property) could be thought to be a fine one.
Even this may be hard for us to accept, for there remains something very
powerful about the Kantian or quasi-Kantian idea that any rational agent that is
fully self-consciously conscious of being able to choose cannot but suppose
itself to be a U-free agent by reason of that consciousness alone. But, having
considered Stolidus, Theoria and the Theoreticals, Meursault and his variants,
the Natural Epictetans, Moira and her sisters, I submit that this idea is
nevertheless wrong. And for all that I have painted Moira as not recognizably
human, I don’t suppose Einstein differed much from her in respect of his
attitude to free will.
15 Maximal ability to choose
—‘All right. Rich ability to choose as so far defined50 may not be sufficient for
belief in U-freedom, but you have not yet described the fullest form of ability to
choose: maximal ability to choose. Maximal ability to choose is indeed sufficient
for belief in U-freedom, and it involves something more than rich ability to
choose as currently defined. For it involves a certain sort of active deployment of the
concept of choice. It emerges as something more than rich ability to choose precisely
when someone like you goes in for thought-experiments designed to track the
minimal case, as here.
Maximal ability to choose is nothing special or mysterious. It’s a widely
possessed property. The trouble with Stolidus and the Natural Epictetans is that
they don’t really have—deploy—the concept of choice at all, and therefore do not
have maximal ability to choose. As for Moira, either she too doesn’t have it, or
she is not what she claims to be: it is impossible for a being that genuinely possesses
and deploys the concept of choice to be a true no-U-freedom theorist. Fully to
possess and deploy the concept of choice is necessarily to have something more
than that full-consciousness-on-the-point-of-action-of-the-fact-of-facing-actionalternatives that has been allowed to Stolidus and his more enlightened
companions. If the concept of choice is properly active in experience of rich
ability to choose then rich ability to choose is maximal ability to choose—which
amounts to belief in U-freedom. The concept of choice adds to the minimal fully
self-conscious option-facing awareness allowed even to Stolidus the essentially
belief-in-U-freedom-involving idea that I can (and do—and must) pick the option
I favour, that what happens lies in my hands, is truly up to me, and so on. It is
given in the very concept of choice. So you need to add
[9] maximal ability to choose
_______________________________________________________
50
‘The capacity to be fully self-consciously aware of oneself grasped as oneself as able to
choose when choosing’.
23
to
[8] rich ability to choose
as a condition of U-freedom—or simply replace [8] by [9]. And then you must
take account of the fact that fulfilling [9] is sufficient for fulfilling [ 0], the beliefin-U-freedom condition.’
To which the reply is that Moira certainly has and deploys the concept of
choice. She blocks the claim that [9] entails [10] in any form in which it does
not beg the question by simply building belief in U-freedom into any
possession of the concept of choice that is allowed to count as ‘full’ or
‘genuine’.
—‘Your assertion that she is possible, possessing [9] and lacking [10], also begs
the question.’
Well, but I am fond of her; and she is backed by the thought that being causa
sui is provably impossible, and that it is very hard to believe that it could be
metaphysically impossible that any (finite) self-conscious rational agent should
believe—live—the truth.
The first reply, then, is simply that Moira as described does fulfil condition
[9], but not condition [10]. The second, more determined reply is that it still
seems wrong to say that anything at all is lacking, intellectually or cognitively
speaking, even in Stolidus’s case, so far as possession of the concept of choice
is concerned. His self-conscious awareness that he faces options is his being
aware that he (he) has action-alternatives. He knows what it is to act, and that
he can act. He knows, in sum, that he is able to choose between different
courses of action. If we still think he lacks something this is probably because
we blend the concept of choice with affective or non-cognitive elements that
make it hard for us to see that he has all that is cognitively necessary, so far as
possession of the concept of choice is concerned. We build an attitudinal
element into what we claim to be a merely agent-structural condition.
The same goes for the Natural Epictetans, whatever the resistlessness of
their agency. We can put them all—Stolidus, Moira, Theoria, the Natural
Epictetans—in front of the momentous button. They are intellectually fully
aware of the nature of the situation. It is just that they do not live it in anything
like the way we do. They experience being able to choose, and in a fully selfconscious manner, but they do not experience themselves as U-free. But this
(as remarked) can hardly be a defect, since U-freedom is impossible.
16 Is belief in U-freedom really a condition of U-freedom?
—‘But you put this impossibility to one side at the beginning of §10, before
introducing Stolidus, and it is still to one side. So we may suppose, for purposes
of argument, that all these creatures are in fact causa sui in the required way. In
which case Moira is just wrong about the impossibility of being causa sui. She
herself is in fact truly causa sui, although she believes she is not (she has no
memory of having done whatever is necessary to being causa sui), and has, ex
hypothesi, no sense of being U-free. Surely we must then hold her to be U-free. I
will grant for the sake of argument that no unself-conscious creature is U-free
even if it is appropriately causa sui; I will put aside Stolidus, Theoria, even, if you
24
like, the resistless Natural Epictetans. But Moira—entirely self-aware, engaged,
maximally able to choose and causa sui…surely she is indeed U-free, ultimately
morally responsible, without any qualification whatever, for her actions? She has,
by hypothesis, no sense or belief that she is U-free. But how can she not simply
be wrong, in this case?’
This, in effect, is the objection Nagel raised in 1987. After summarizing my
position—that if a man never really experienced or believed himself to be Ufree then even if all the other conditions of U-freedom were met (including the
causa sui condition), he would still not be U-free and would not be truly or
ultimately responsible—he objects to it as follows:
this is a difficult claim to assess, since it involves a counter-possible
conditional: but it doesn’t seem right to me. If true responsibility [U-freedom]
were possible, couldn’t someone be deceived (even self-deceived) about
whether he had it? Couldn’t he act with the illusion that all this was just
happening to him, while actually it was his doing, and he was fully responsible
for [U-free in] a choice which saved or failed to save ten other people from
torture?51
In reply, note first that this description somewhat misrepresents the case, for in
not believing that one is U-free one does not think that what is happening when
one acts is ‘just happening’ to one. One is, like Moira, fully aware when
acting, that it is indeed oneself that is doing what is being done and that one is
performing an intentional action; it is just that one feels oneself to be entirely
clear on the point that it is not possible to be ultimat ely morally responsible
for what one does. Now one is in fact wrong about this, given the present
‘counter-possible’ hypothesis, and in that sense one is under an illusion, but
one’s illusion is not that one’s action is ‘just happening’ to one.
This, though, is a minor misunderstanding, and the core of Nagel's question
is simply this:
Couldn’t this person act with the conviction that he is not U-free, not able to be
ultimately morally responsible for what he does, while actually being causa sui
and so U-free in his choices and actions?
I have said No. If he really has no sense at all of being U-free, then he cannot
be U-free, even if he is causa sui. But I am not sure what to say if you
disagree. Here we are reaching the end of argument, and it may be best to stop.
But we can perhaps expose a little more structure by considering one more
addition to the proposed set of conditions of U-freedom—which state, so far,
that to be U-free one must be
[0] causa sui
[1] an agent
[2] capable of forming beliefs
[3] capable of having desires (pro-attitudes)
[4] capable of self-movement (self-change)
[5] capable of practical reasoning in the inclusive sense noted on p. 00
_______________________________________________________
51
1987: 5-6; Persson () has a similar doubt. The example of torture is used in Freedom and
Belief (p. 103) in an attempt to dramatize the idea that there are situations in which one could
not possibly fail to feel U-free.
25
[6] fully self-conscious
[7] possessed of basic ability to choose (p. 00)
[8] possessed of rich ability to choose (p. 00)
[9] possessed of maximal ability to choose (p. 00)
[10] possessed of the belief or sense that one is U-free
[11] engaged (in the special sense defined on pp. 00-00).
Consider, then, the proposal that one must be
[12] possessed of the conception of U-freedom
whether or not one applies it to oneself and thereby fulfils condition [10].52
[12] is entailed by [10],53 but does not entail it, so we can consider a Moira
who fulfils [12] but not [10], and a Moira who fulfils neither [10] nor [12].
The point of doing so is simply that some may be prepared to allow that
[12] may be a condition of U-freedom, while denying, with Nagel, that [10] is.
If Moira fulfils [12] but not [10], they may say, the error she makes about
herself, in failing to recognize that she possesses a property of which she has a
perfectly good grasp, simply does not remove her from the company of the Ufree. Even if she has no sort of belief that she is U-free, she is none the less
capable of being ultimately morally responsible—without any qualification
whatever—for what she does, given that she fulfils [12]. But if she fails [12],
and a fortiori [10]—if she has no sort of conception of U-freedom, and a
fortiori no belief that she herself is U-free—then even if she is causa sui she
cannot really be counted among the company of the U-free.
You may be wondering why [12] on its own should make such a difference.
I sympathize—and although I’ve been prepared for the sake of argument to let
[12] classify as a merely cognitive requirement, a merely agent-structural
condition of U-freedom, it is arguable that the cognitively most powerful
minds won’t actually be able to understand the conception of U-freedom that is
in question (for them it will be as difficult as visualizing a round square is for
us). Which leads me to wonder whether grasp of the conception isn’t
essentially partly an attitudinal matter, in some covert way, and not a merely
cognitive matter.54
17 Conclusion
What one should make of all this? I’m really not sure. I find I still hold the
view I formed in 1979. I think there are ineliminable Attitudinal conditions on
U-freedom in addition to Structural conditions and, in particular, that if
anything is truly U-free then this is essentially partly because it believes it is.
One is U-free, if one is, partly because one sees oneself and one’s action in a
certain way—as U-free. The proposal is that this is an outright metaphysical
_______________________________________________________
52
To possess the conception of U-freedom is not to have thought the notion through in such
way as to see that it is impossible. One may possibly have done this but few of those who
actually possess it have done so.
53
Just as [2]-[7], at least, are entailed by [1].
54
A final proposal might be that one must not only have a general, standing sense that one is
U-free, but must also be [13] capable of having one’s outlook animated or informed by an
explicit sense of oneself as U-free when choosing or acting; this must in fact be one’s standard
condition, when engaging in choice or actions of moment. [13] is triggered by the possibility,
so far left open, that a being might fulfil [10] in general while being somehow incapable of
having any trace of any explicit thought of itself as U-free in the moment of choice or action.
26
condition of U-freedom, a constitutive condition of U-freedom, although it is
an Attitudinal condition, and a paradoxical one at that, given that it offends
against the principle of independence.55 U-freedom is not just a matter of
certain practical capacities, on this view. A U-free agent must see or conceive
itself in a certain specific way, and its seeing itself in this way is not a
necessary consequence of its possession of any set of abilities or capacities or
attitudes that does not include this way of seeing itself.56
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