How to Think about the Problem of Free Will

Van Inwagen recently produced a very clear proposal for thinking about free will. It is a paper to appear in The Journal of Ethics entitled How to Think about the Problem of Free Will.

It starts with a very concise wording of the Standard Argument against Free Will that includes the Determinism, Randomness, and Responsibility Objections.

• There are seemingly unanswerable arguments that (if they are indeed unanswerable) demonstrate that free will is incompatible with determinism.
• There are seemingly unanswerable arguments that (if indeed . . . ) demonstrate that free will is incompatible with indeterminism.
• But if free will is incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism, the concept “free will” is incoherent, and the thing free will does not exist.

There are, moreover, seemingly unanswerable arguments that, if they are correct, demonstrate that the existence of moral responsibility entails the existence of free will, and, therefore, if free will does not exist, moral responsibility does not exist either. It is, however, evident that moral responsibility does exist.

Van Inwagen concludes:
It must, therefore, be that at least one of the following three things is true:

• The seemingly unanswerable arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism are in fact answerable; these arguments are fallacious
• The seemingly unanswerable arguments for the incompatibility of free will and indeterminism are in fact answerable; these arguments are fallacious. We call this the Responsibility Objection
• The seemingly unanswerable arguments for the conclusion that the existence of moral responsibility entails the existence of free will are in fact answerable; these arguments are fallacious.

The “problem of free will” is just this problem (this is my proposal): to find out which of these arguments is fallacious, and to enable us to identify the fallacy or fallacies on which they depend.

Van Inwagen recognizes that the philosophical discussions of free will are clouded by the use of vague terminology. He recommends some terms be avoided – ‘libertarianism’, ‘hard determinism’, and soft ‘determinism’ – and that terms be confined to ‘the free-will thesis’, ‘determinism’, ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism.’ He says:

"There is a tendency among writers on free will to oppose ‘compatibilism’ and ‘libertarianism’; but the fundamental opposition is between compatibilism and incompatibilism".

Here is a major example (not entirely unconnected with my minor example). Philosophers who use the term 'libertarianism' apparently face an almost irresistible temptation to speak of 'libertarian free will.'

What is this libertarian free will they speak of? What does the phrase 'libertarian free will' mean?
Although van Inwagen says he has presented the free-will problem "in a form in which it is possible to think about it without being constantly led astray by bad terminology and confused ideas," he himself is apparently confused by the ambiguous term incompatibilism.

Incompatibilists are of two opposing types; libertarians who take incompatibilism plus the free will thesis to mean that determinism is not true, and determinists who deny the free will thesis because determinism is true.

So "libertarian free will" and "compatibilist free will" nicely distinguish between an indeterminist view of free will and the view that free will is compatible with determinism.

And it is impossible to define a libertarian with just one of van Inwagen's set of terms.
van Inwagen makes his confusion clear:

Phrases like ‘free will’ and ‘compatibilist free will’ and ‘libertarian free will’ are particularly difficult for me. I find it difficult to see what sort of thing such phrases are supposed to denote. In serious philosophy, I try never to use an abstract noun or noun-phrase unless it’s clear what ontological category the thing it purports to denote belongs to. For many abstract noun-phrases, it’s not at all clear what sort of thing they’re supposed to denote, and I therefore try to use such phrases only in introductory passages, passages in which the reader’s attention is being engaged and a little mush doesn’t matter. Van Inwagen

Van Inwagen then looks closely at the noun phrase "free will" and asserts that it always means the same thing, that the agent is/was able to do otherwise: ‘free will’, ‘incompatibilist free will’, ‘compatibilist free will’ and ‘libertarian free will’ are four names for one and the same thing. If this thing is a property, they are four names for the property is on some occasions able to do otherwise. If this thing is a power or ability, they are four names for the power or ability to do otherwise than what one in fact does.

All compatibilists I know of believe in free will. Many incompatibilists (just exactly the libertarians: that’s how ‘libertarian’ is defined) believe in free will. And it’s one and the same thing they believe in.

This seems to be word jugglery. Libertarians and compatibilists are using the same noun phrase, but they are denoting two different models for free will, two different ways that free will might operate. Free will is not just the words in a set of propositions to be adjudicated true or false by analytic language philosophers.

John Locke explicitly warned us of the potential confusion in such noun phrases, and carefully distinguished the freedom in "free" from the determined "will." Van Inwagen's problem stems in part from taking this phrase to be a single entity.

In Latin and all the romance languages, as well as the Germanic languages – in short, all the major philosophical languages (excepting the Greek of Aristotle, before the Stoics created the problem we have today and Chrysippus invented compatibilism) – the concept of free will is presented as a complex of two simple ideas – free and will.
liberum arbitrium, libre arbitre (French), libera volontà (Italian), livre arbítrio (Portuguese), va gratuit (Romanian), libre voluntad (Spanish)
Willensfreiheit (German), fri vilje (Danish), vrije wil (Dutch), fri vilja (Swedish)
ελεύθερη βούληση (Greek), свободную волю (Russian), स्वतंत्र इच्छा (Hindi).
Even some non-Indo-European languages combine two elementary concepts – vapaasta tahdosta (Finnish).
Polish – woli – is an exception to the rule.

The reason Aristotle did not conflate freedom with will, according to his fourth-century commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias, was because for Aristotle the problem was always framed in terms of responsibility, whether our actions are "up to us" (in Aristotle's Greek ἐφ ἡμῖν), whether the causes behind our actions, including Aristotelian accidents (συμβεβεκός), come from within us (ἐν ἡμῖν).