As well as Sean Gabb on free will, see also Antony Flew's reply to this article, plus those of Kevin McFarlane, Ben Best, Danny Frederick, and Nicholas Dykes.

One

In 'The Case for Determinism' (Free Life No. 17, January 1993) Sean Gabb's first paragraph reads: "According to the common view of things, when I sat down at my word-processor, I had a real choice in whether or not I should begin this piece. Nothing compelled me...I could as easily have chosen to go and treat the rust on my motor car."

Fair enough. For Mr Gabb has here described a paradigm case of acting of his own freewill; the sort of case, that is to say, which we should need to present if we were asked to explain the meaning and to illustrate the proper application of the expression "of his own freewill". For the contrast implicit in the assertion that a choice was made of an agent's own freewill is in truth with a choice made under compulsion. Thus, to reemploy a favourite example, when a Mafioso presents some unfortunate businessman with "an offer which he cannot refuse" it is idiomatically correct to say that, because he was compelled to choose between having his brains or his signature upon the Deed of Gift transferring his enterprise to "the Organization", he had no choice, or no real choice. But of course literally to have had no choice at all he would have had to be like the rival gangster who was without warning gunned down from behind.

In his second paragraph Mr Gabb goes on to say that, although "in my everyday reasonings, this is a view that I accept...., when I rise to a more abstract consideration, I find myself strongly inclined to doubt its truth." For, even while still insisting that he is "not in the least doubting our ability to choose between alternatives or that our choices have consequences", Mr Gabb confesses that "What I do doubt is whether our choices are free in so far as a perfect knowledge of the circumstances preceding them would not allow of their being infallibly predicted...I say that the will is not free."

So Mr Gabb would now have us, at least during philosophical discussions, restrict the application of the expression "of our own freewill" to cases in which the choices made by the agents to be so described were in principle unpredictable. Unfortunately he did not think to tell us why he wants to introduce this restriction. Certainly Mr Gabb's proposed restriction would be an innovation, and a revolutionary one at that. For to say - employing this key expression in accordance with ordinary, everyday usage and in its consequent ordinary, everyday meaning - that someone acted of their own freewill by no means precludes the possibility of predicting on sufficient grounds that they would choose to act in the sense in which they did choose to act. What it does preclude is not prediction but (external) compulsion. Consider, for example, the electoral behaviour of the politically committed. Formidable forms of coercion would be required to induce us to choose to vote in senses opposite to those in which those who know us can confidently predict that, so long as we are able freely to choose, we will act.

Before leaving Mr Gabb's second paragraph something needs to be said about its penultimate sentence. The last three read: "What I do doubt is whether our choices are free in so far as a perfect knowledge of the circumstances preceding them would not allow of their being predicted. I am inclined to say that the operations of my mind - and yours - are no more spontaneous, no more capable of deviating from a regular course, than is the movement of a pendulum along its ellipse. I say that the will is not free."

What Mr Gabb is here "inclined to say" is flat inconsistent with what he himself has just said, in an earlier sentence of that same second paragraph; namely, that "I am not in the least doubting our ability to choose between alternatives." For to be able "to choose between alternatives" just is to be "capable of deviating from a regular course". Yet that is not at all the case with "the movement of a pendulum along its ellipse." The source of the confusion here is Mr Gabb's failure to notice a crucial difference: that between following one particular course while nevertheless being capable of choosing and following another; and following a particular course while being incapable of choice and alternative behaviour.

Two

After these two introductory paragraphs Mr Gabb proceeds to develop what he sees as "The Case for Determinism"; a case, as he puts it in his final paragraph, for "a minimal hypothesis, according to which the will is unfree". So far I have tried to show that - if and inasmuch as Mr Gabb's case is, as seemed initially to be promised, a case for the in principle predictability of the senses of all choices made - then it does not after all constitute a case for saying, in any ordinary understanding of the words, that no one ever either acts of their own freewill or makes choices between possible alternative courses of action. So what is it which, in Mr Gabb's view, we have not got; and why should the alleged lack of this absent somewhat be cause for concern?1

Obviously it is neither freedom nor choice in any ordinary understanding of these terms, nor even spontaneity in so far as that is to be defined - along the lines of the Concise Oxford Dictionary - as involving "acting, done, occurring without external cause; voluntary, without external incitement". Is it, therefore, a matter of acting or choosing, in whatever senses we do act or choose, altogether unpredictably and for no reasons at all? If that is indeed what Mr Gabb requires in his meaning for "the freedom of the will", then he is absolutely right to maintain that such "freedom" is something which human beings do not have, but just as wrong to assume that having what we have not got is a presupposition of legitimate accountability. On the contrary: if defence counsel can establish that clients had no reason, no motive for their admittedly criminal behaviour, that it was in consequence altogether inexplicable, then they are surely well on the way to making a case for at least diminished responsibility if not for its complete absence.

So far my argument has been largely negative and destructive. It is time to offer some constructive suggestions for advancing discussion. The first is that we need to distinguish two fundamentally different senses of the word "cause" and of its several semantic associates. When we are talking about the causes of some purely physical event - an eclipse of the Sun, say - then we employ the word "cause" in a sense implying both physical necessity and physical impossibility: what happened was physically necessary, and anything else was, in the circumstances, physically impossible.2

Yet this is precisely not the case with the other sense of "cause", the sense in which we speak of the causes (or reasons or motives) of human actions. If, for instance, by bringing welcome news my action is what my hearers if they choose to respond by celebrating will quite properly describe as the cause of their celebration, then I do not thereby make their celebration necessary and their abstention therefrom impossible. To adapt a famous phrase of Gottfried Leibnitz, causes of this second, motivating sort incline but do not necessitate.

To mark this fundamental distinction we can best borrow terms from Hume. Since he denied the legitimacy of the concept of physical necessity, Hume himself was unable to make the distinction in the way in which it has just now been made. Nevertheless his choice of labels does point towards a fundamental difference between the moral or social sciences and the natural.3 In his Essay "Of National Characters" Hume wrote: "By moral causes, I mean all circumstances, which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons....By physical causes I mean those qualities of the air and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone and habit of the body...."4

Given these two fundamentally different senses of the word "cause" it becomes clear that we now, at least while we are discussing the behaviour of human beings, need to distinguish two correspondingly different senses of "determinism": determination by physical causes; and determination by moral causes. Certainly if a piece of behaviour (what Behaviourists call a behaviour) is fully determined by physical causes, then the behaver did not choose to behave in that way. Nor could he, at least at the time when that behaviour occurred, have prevented it from occurring. But determination by moral causes is quite another matter. For to explain someone's conduct by reference to their reasons or motives for - that is to say the moral causes of - their acting as they did is to presuppose that they could have acted differently. Desires and wants are certainly not as such irresistible compulsions: most of us frequently refrain from doing things we should very much like to do.

By failing to make these fundamental and crucial distinctions many are misled into construing all explanations of conduct in terms of any kind of cause as providing support for an all- excusing doctrine of physically necessitating determinism. Thus it seemed to the usually very sensible and level-headed author of an excellent review of criminological literature that "if causal theories explain why a criminal acts as he does, they also explain why he must act as he does."5 But the most commonly suggested causes of (a rise in) crime - poverty, unemployment, boredom, poor parenting, inadequate education and so son - are all moral causes, "circumstances...fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons". They are thought, no doubt correctly, so to work on the minds of some of the victims as to mislead them to commit crimes.

But as moral causes these causes do not necessarily constitute acceptable excuses. To understand all where that all is the motives and circumstances of agents certainly should not be to pardon all. Presumably it was because so many people nowadays do assume that to explain the causes of crime is necessarily to provide criminals with sufficient excuses that recently, in response to public concern about a reported escalation in the prevalence of criminal activity, the Prime Minister insisted that we need more condemnation, and less understanding.6

Three

So far perhaps so good. For it should by now be clear that the reality of choice and the consequent permanent possibility of alternative courses of action, however unacceptable these actual alternatives may sometimes be to the agents concerned,7 is not threatened either by the determination of moral causes or by in principle predictability as such. It is physical causation which generates less tractable problems;8 problems which Hume escaped by denying the legitimacy of the concepts of physical necessity and physical impossibility.

I suggest that the most promising approach to these problems, is by way of the great chapter "Of Power" in Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding. So let us consider three short passages from that chapter. It is regrettable that in the third of these Locke mistakenly believes himself to be elucidating the meaning of "a free agent" rather than of "an agent" simply:

This is least I think evident, that we find in ourselves a Power to begin or forbear, continue or end several actions of our minds, and motions of our Bodies....This Power...thus to order the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest, and vice versa in any particular instance, is that which we call the Will.9....

Every one, I think, finds in himself a Power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several Actions in himself. From the considerations of the extent of this power of the mind over the actions of the Man, which everyone finds in himself, arise the Ideas of Liberty and Necessity.10

We have instances enough, and often more than enough in our own bodies. A Man's Heart beats, and the Blood circulates, which 'tis not in his Power...to stop; and therefore in respect of these Motions, where rest depends not on his choice...he is not a free agent. Convulsive Motions agitate his legs, so that though he wills it never so much, he cannot...stop their motion (as in that odd Disease called Chorea Sancti Viti,) but he is perpetually dancing: He is...under as much Necessity of moving, as a Stone that falls or a Tennis-ball struck with a Racket.11

Contemplation of these and similar passages in Locke should be sufficient to show, first, that we all of us have the most direct, and the most inexpugnably certain experience: not only both of physical (as opposed to logical) necessity and of physical (as opposed to logical) impossibility; but also both, on some occasions, of being able to do other than we do and, on other occasions, of being unable to behave in any other way than that in which we are behaving.

So it is in terms of our fundamental distinction between movings and motions that we establish and explicate the even more fundamental concept of action. An agent is a creature which, precisely and only in so far as it is an agent, can and cannot but make choices: choices between alternative courses of action both or all of which are open; real choices, notwithstanding that sometimes by choosing one or even any of these open alternatives the agent would incur formidable costs. Agents, too, qua agents - it is the price of privilege - inescapably must choose, and can in no way avoid choosing,12 one of the two or usually many more options which on particular occasions are open and available. For the nerve of the distinction between the movements involved in an action and those which constitute no more than items or partial components of necessitated behaviour just is that such behaviour is necessitated, whereas the senses of actions not merely are not but as such necessarily cannot be.

It therefore becomes impossible to maintain that every movement in the Universe - including every human bodily movement, the movings as well as the motions - is determined by physically necessitating physical causes. The most which can be allowed is that we are thus necessitatingly so determined to be people who will in fact choose to act in whatever senses we do severally choose to act. Nevertheless, this said, we have at once to add that it is the previous choices of every individual which must play a large part in physically causing that individual to be the person who will in fact make his or her always physically unnecessitated choices in whatever several senses he or she chooses.

That should, surely, be sufficient to justify holding at least some - Why not most? - individuals fully responsible for at least some - Why not most? - of their actions; providing, of course, that the buck really stops with them and there is no other person, or quasi-personal Being physically necessitating those individuals to be the people who do in fact choose in whatever senses they do choose.13 To this proviso, as General Macarthur said in quite another context, "I will return."

It is impossible to overestimate the crucial importance of the contention that none of what are here the key notions could be explained, acquired or understood by creatures without the sorts of experiences, capacities and incapacities to which Locke referred in the chapter "Of Power". For it is the truth of this contention which precludes all possibility of making out that what "According to the common view of things" is rated and accepted as "our ability to choose between alternatives" is not really and truly choosing between alternatives.14 The sorts of experiences, capacities and incapacities in question, to repeat, are: on the one hand those of confronting physical necessities and physical impossibilities wholly beyond our control; and, on the other hand, those of agents able and having to choose between acting in one way or another, and not being necessitated to act in this way rather than that.

Those who persist in doubting that crucial contention are hereby challenged to excogitate their own alternative accounts of how all these key notions, including the perhaps so far not sufficiently emphasized key notion of counterfactual conditionality, might be explained, acquired, and understood by creatures who were (are) not agents and who did (do) not have such experiences. Maybe this challenge can, after all, be met; maybe. But, until and unless it is met, and met convincingly, the prudent philosopher is bound to adopt the archetypical attitude of the man from Missouri. Notoriously, if his reluctance to believe is to be overcome, he has to be shown.

Four

We return, finally, to that proviso. Individual human beings can be held fully and ultimately responsible for at least some of their actions providing that the buck really stops with them and there is no other person, or quasi-personal Being, physically necessitating those individuals to be the people who do in fact choose in whatever senses they do choose. It appears that for the theist this crucial proviso cannot be satisfied.

Typically Christians think of the relations between the Creator and the Creator's human creatures on the model of those between a human father and his children. And, of course, it is only in certain scandalous and extremely exceptional cases that parents can properly be held responsible for the misdeeds of their grown up children; and then, even in those rare cases, only partially and rather remotely. But in this aspect, which is here crucial, that preferred model is totally inapplicable. For if we were indeed creatures of a Creator in any Christian or Islamic understanding, then as the ultimate sustaining cause of everything which exists or happens within the supposedly created Universe God must necessarily make us the various individual people who, confronted inescapably with choices to be made, do in fact choose as we do choose. Such a God must therefore, ex hypothesei, be the ultimately responsible necessitating cause of everything; and everything means everything, including all those sins for which unforgiven sinners are to be punished with extremes of unending torture.

To this the usual indignant response is to protest that it is only hard, unfashionable Calvinists who believe in the predestination which carries such appalling implications. The rest instead insist that the Creator endowed human beings - "made in His own image" - with freewill, thus, they believe, ensuring that God is not responsible for our making the sinful choices which we so perversely and persistently do make.

To show that this response is baseless and misguided it should here be sufficient to quote a few passages from great theologians. Thus the insistence of Aquinas that his God must necessarily be the ultimate (necessitating) cause of everything, repeat everything, in the created Universe, is characteristically lucid and categorical:

...just as God not only gave being to things when they first began, but is also - as the conserving cause of being - the cause of their being as long as they last...so he also not only gave things their operative powers when they were first created, but is also always the cause of these in things. Hence if this divine influence stopped every operation would stop. Every operation, therefore, of anything is traced back to him as its cause.15

God alone can move the will, as an agent, without doing violence to it....Some people... not understanding how God can cause a movement of our will in us without prejudicing the freedom of the will, have tried to explain... authoritative texts wrongly; that is, they would say that God "works in us, to wish and to accomplish" means that he causes in us the power of willing, but not in such a way that he makes us will this or that....These people are, of course, opposed quite plainly by authoritative texts of Holy Writ. For it says in Isaiah (xxvi, 2)16 "Lord, you have worked all our work in us." Hence we receive from God not only the power of willing but its employment also.17

It can be salutary to compare and contrast Luther's treatment of the same questions. Noticing that he wrote de Servo Arbitrio [On the Enslaved Will] and St Augustine de Libero Arbitrio [On Free Will], but then forgetting that Luther had been an Augustinian friar, some have falsely assumed that their doctrines here were as contrary as the titles of these books. We may begin to suspect the different truth when we find the Reformer saying:

Now by "necessarily" I do not mean "compulsorily"...a man without the Spirit of God does not do evil against his will, under pressure, as though he were taken by the scruff of his neck and dragged into it, like a thief or a footpad being dragged off against his will to punishment; but he does it spontaneously and voluntarily.18

The highest degree of faith is to believe He is just, though of His own will he makes us...proper subjects for damnation, and seems (in the words of Erasmus) "to delight in the torments of poor wretches and to be a fitter object for hate than for love". If I could by any means understand how this same God...can yet be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith.19

It is not for us to inquire into these mysteries, but to adore them. If flesh and blood take offence here and grumble, well, let them grumble; they will achieve nothing; grumbling will not change God! And however many of the ungodly stumble and depart, the elect will remain.20

In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God..., they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned...the Divine Justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed, while the pains of the damned will cause it indirectly...the blessed in glory will have no pity for the damned.21

NOTES

1. I suspect that Mr Gabb is regretting that we are not endowed with the mysterious theological freewill which was somehow supposed to save the God of Christianity and Islam from being the ultimate cause of all the sins for which He promises to torture unforgiven sinners eternally. I shall not pursue this suggestion here. But see, for instance, Note F to Bayle's "Paulicians". That is perhaps least inaccessible in R.H. Popkin (Ed.) Pierre Bayle Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 179-86.

2. Notice in passing that physical necessity and physical impossibility, which Hume so misguidedly denied notwithstanding that both are essential to the very idea of a law of nature, must always be distinguished from logical necessity and logical impossibility. When the physical necessity of the occurrence of an eclipse is validly deduced from a conjunction of the relevant general laws of nature with statements of the particular circumstances, that deduction must follow from those premises as a matter of logical necessity. For some explanation and defence of these claims see my David Hume: Philosopher of Moral Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 69-79 and passim.

3. For more, and much more, about this difference and about the peculiarities of the former, see my Thinking about Social Thinking (London: Harper Collins/Fontana, 1992).

4. Essays Moral, Political and Literary, edited by E.F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 198.

5. J.Q. Wilson Thinking about Crime (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 58.

6. The Archbishop of York, as always more respectful towards The Guardian than the Gospels, characteristically responded by protesting that it is impossible to have too much understanding. For evidence revealing the statist, "anti-judgemental" and surprisingly secular approach of such representative clerics to perceived social problems see, for instance, "Self-improvement: And its neglect by the contemporary mainstream churches", in Digby Anderson (Ed.) The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (London: Social Affairs Unit, 1992).

7. When Luther before the Diet of Worms so famously protested "Here I stand, I can no other. So help me God." such total unacceptability was, of course, what he was claiming; not that, seized by a sudden total paralysis, he had become rooted to the spot and physically unable to hightail it to his Saxon refuge.

8. In his "Dialogue on Free Will" the Humanist Lorenzo Valla develops an elegant argument to show that, whereas reconciling our responsibility for our own actions with God's omniscient foreknowledge of the senses of those actions is comparatively easy, to reconcile it with God's predestining omnipotence is altogether beyond human powers. See E. Cassirer, P.O. Kristeller and J.H. Randall Jnr. (Eds.) The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 1948), pp. 147-182.

9. P.H. Nidditch (Ed.) John Locke: An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), II (xxi) 5, p. 236.

10. Ibid., 7, p. 237.

11. Ibid., 11, p. 239: the Latin translates "St Vitus' dance".

12. For even "Not to choose is, in effect, to choose not to choose." See J-P. Sartre Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 481. The excited French Existentialist Sartre had been anticipated in this observation by a calm, sober, commonsensical Anglo-Saxon a quarter of a millennium earlier. See Locke, op. cit. 23, p. 245-6.

13. It is said that Harry Truman (US President 1945-52) kept on his desk a tablet reading, "The buck stops here!"

14. As Damon Runyon might have said, if that is not the real thing, then it will at least do until the real thing comes along.

15. Summa Contra Gentiles, translated by A.C. Pagis (New York: Doubleday, 1955), Book III, Ch. 67.

16. Of the numerous texts to the same effect the most notorious and the most influential on Luther himself and on the whole Lutheran tradition, has been Romans IX, 18-34: "Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth....Thou wilt say unto me, "Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?" Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, "Why has thou made me thus?".... What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much long suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction; and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory, even us, whom he hath called...?

17. Aquinas, op.cit., III, 88-9.

18. Martin Luther The Bondage of the Will, in E.G. Rupp, A.N. Marlow, P.S. Watson and B. Drewery (Eds. and translators) Luther and Erasmus: Freewill and Salvation (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1969), p. 139.

19. Ibid., II 7, p. 138.

20. Ibid., II 6, p. 139.

21. Summa Theologica, III Supp. xciv, 1-3. Anyone eager to penetrate the nightmare world of classical theology more deeply may be referred to the first series of Prometheus Lectures, included in my Essays in Atheist Humanism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, forthcoming).