A Defense of Free Will for Logical Determinists

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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The goal of this essay is to reduce the opinion that a guaranteed knowable future makes it impossible for free will to exist. The argument runs close ties with Libertarian Free Will (LFW).

First, my personal definitions.

  1. Causal determinism: A kind of determinism in which the future is entirely determined by past causes. This is what most people think of when they hear, “determinism.” I am of this view as a soft determinist, a.k.a. compatibilist (I redefine free will to argue that people can still be held accountable despite a caused world). The definition here is included to emphasise the difference between the two kinds of determinisms.
  2. Logical determinism: The view that the future is determined but not necessarily caused. Aristotle is known for this view. The intention of this is to say, “it’s true that I will choose chocolate tomorrow.” Similar to this is theological determinism, where God knows the future, but that’s enough of a nuance that put that under the “logical determinism” umbrella.
  3. Libertarian Free Will (LFW): A kind of free will that serves as the pinnacle of those who believe in free will. I define it to be the condition of which a person genuinely has the freedom to choose. This means that if I chose chocolate yesterday, I still very well could have chosen vanilla, because I was deciding of my own free will, uncaused. It takes philosophical ignorance to believe that LFW is compatible with causal determinism, but with logical determinism, it becomes tougher.

Many people argue that LFW is incompatible with logical determinism because it requires people to be genuinely able to choose otherwise. I would argue, however, that even if it’s true that you will choose tea instead of coffee tomorrow, you have genuinely made it your own decision.

To help understand this, imagine an indeterminist scenario. Yesterday, you chose coffee over tea. You made this decision of your own free will, abiding to the rules of LFW, and still it’s true that you have chosen coffee. Now, imagine this scenario tomorrow. You end up in the same conditions, and, freely, abiding to LFW, you will choose tea. No rules broken, but it’s still true that you will choose tea. There’s nothing that makes this scenario different from yesterday’s except that I don’t actually know whether you will choose tea or not. My not knowing, anyone’s not knowing, doesn’t make it any less true of which you will choose. If you will choose tea, you always were going to choose tea. If you choose coffee, you always were going to choose that. That concludes my opening argument, but it still leaves space for objections.

A classic objection to this is that this would mean that whatever you do, you don’t have any real control over what you do because it was always true that you were going to choose tea. This objection basically tries to turn logical determinism into fatalism. However, logical determinism is not fatalism because in my argument’s scenario, it being true that you were going to choose tea depends completely on your choice and whether you chose tea, giving you power, whereas in fatalism it’s reversed; whether you chose tea depends on it being true that you were going to choose tea, so you have no power here. I personally think that this fatalism argument is terrible and is only argued because people refuse to consider deterministic free will, and because the logic is complicated, it’s easy to be blinded into thinking that it works in your favor.

A better objection here is that LFW requires that you metaphysically, genuinely, have to have been able to choose otherwise, not just essentially. However, my response to this is that asking for a metaphysical ability to do otherwise is too much for a definition of free will. When it comes to realisticality, people’s accountability, and freedom of choice, essentially being able to do otherwise is as good as metaphysically being able to choose otherwise. Including the metaphysical part is just an unnecessary addition, and by doing so, you forfeit your claim to being the “true free will” and shift your claim to “metaphysical free will.”

Therefore, LFW is absolutely compatible with non-causal determinism, logical determinism, unless you force LFW to be an unnecessary metaphysical definition.

I do hope that I properly explained these objections and their solutions because I’m gonna get a bunch of comments using those very objections to refute such compatibility because they don’t understand its working and how I countered it. So, finally, I would much prefer that you take up the objection by countering my solutions, or creating a new objection, and I fervently request that you don’t just repeat the original objection if you comment.

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Hi

Welcome to the forum.

Your post seems to me a clear statement of compatabilist free will.

I think your definition of libertarian free will is debatable as some people will argue that LFW has by definition a metaphysical aspect but other than that quibble, the logic is sound.

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I apologise for the confusion, I was hoping my definitions would clear that up, though it’s not surprising they didn’t.

This is not a statement of soft determinist (compatibilist) free will, because soft determinism is causal and, thus, incompatible with LFW. This, on the other hand, is a statement of non-causal determinism’s compatibility with free will.

The only difference between soft determinist and a strict determinist is that soft determinists think people are still responsible for their actions.

I do thank you for appreciating my argument though. Your point that LFW is considered metaphysical by definition is why I called it a stronger argument; because saying that the definition is too much to ask doesn’t change the way it’s defined.

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There are an entire day’s worth of events and experiences that might change the choice, if Casual Determinism is how we make our “choices”.

Welcome to TPF!

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What does that mean? I’m not arguing for the causal determinism’s free will, I’m arguing form non-causal determinism’s free will.

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I confess, I failed to distinguish an actual argument in what follows, but I think your thesis can be made more simply by examining this concept of “logical determinism.” If I understood correctly, logical determinism is a putative metaphysical fact about the state of the world in the past, present and future. It is a free-standing fact, independent of physical causality or knowledge. Whether or not there is a causal chain leading to some event A, whether or not event A is known to anyone, it is still the case, independent of anything else, that A is what did, does or will happen.

Put this way, it is clear that logical determinism is compatible with everything and everything is compatible with it, including genuine freedom to choose – unless, of course, you stipulate otherwise, for “genuine” is one of those table-pounding words that people use to avoid the need to make a genuine argument.

1 Like
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What I mean is, you say, “You end up in the same conditions”. That is not correct. You have lived another day. You have experienced 24 hours of events. So the conditions are not the same.

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Basically, when I said logical determinism, I mainly meant non-causal determinism. And I’ve run into a couple of people who don’t think that non-causal determinism is compatible with genuine free will, using the arguments I attempted to rebut.

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Welcome to the forums!

I basically agree with the OP, but as you may have seen in the parallel thread, I hesitate to call myself “compatibilist” or anything like that.

Because I think free will as it is typically defined, certainly libertarian free will, is not even a coherent concept in the first place. I don’t think LFW can exist in any universe, whether deterministic or otherwise.

Furthermore, I think that choice is inherently deterministic. It’s an entity with preferences using its understanding and memories to make a decision. Choice can still happen in a non-deterministic universe – as ours may well be – but the more deterministic, the better. Or I guess hypothetically choice could exist in an “island” of determinism in an otherwise random universe, but either way, it needs determinism.

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By “can” do you mean “should”? Because it’s trivially true that people are physically capable of holding others accountable even if determinism is true. But if determinism is true then it’s not at all clear what “should” (or “shouldn’t”) would mean; we just either do hold people accountable or we don’t, as determined by physical law.

Any claim that we “shouldn’t” hold people accountable if determinism is true seems to sneak libertarian free will back in — but only for the judge, jury, and executioner; not for the defendant.