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.

1 Like
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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.

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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.

1 Like
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Yeah, I agree. There is definitely a difference between the two days.

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The conditions are arguably the similar enough for LFW. The example is that the conditions are exactly the same, except that one is yesterday and one is tomorrow. It’s the same time choice made freely. And because we’re not talking about causal determinism, the past events are unrelated to your current choice.

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But we cannot rule out the idea that a different choice was made for deterministic reasons if the conditions are different. And the conditions are different in that scenario. Only going back in time to the moment of choice and making a different choice would prove the point.

I believe we could make a different choice in that scenario.

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No, we can’t rule causal determinism out, but causal determinism has nothing to do with the thought experiment or the argument, so we temporarily disregard it. We’re assuming causal determinism is not true in the supposed scenarios. I’m even a causal determinist, and I accept this. When you play on their field, you play by their rules. You can’t use flatland battle tactics in an urban battle.

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My only real point at the moment is that it is impossible for the conditions to be the same 24 hours later.

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This position seems similar to Molinism.

Molinism is a response to the Calvinist view of predestination. The Calvinist view: the omniscient God knows each choice you will make, and therefore those choices are pre-determined.
The Molinist: God’s knowledge of your future choices is passive; it does not cause the choice that you are freely making.

Most proponents of Libertarian Free Will insist that it entails the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP): the view that a libertarian choice means that you actually could have chosen differently. A Molinist denies the PAP is necessary for libertarian free will.

My personal view is that the PAP is absurd. When a choice is made, it is a consequence of prior thoughts and states of mind. Given those thoughts/states of mind, no alternative choice was actually possible.That is,unless there’s a random element involved. But randomness is inconsistent with agency, and therefore not associated with a willed act. This view is similar to your description of logical determinism. And I agree that LFW is consistent with logical determinism.

Nevertheless, logical determinism is also consistent with determinism. A free will that is consistent with determinism is (by definition) compatibilism. So there’s tension in the definitions.

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It’s actually 48 hours later, but that’s not the point.

The point is, this is a thought experiment. And because it’s a thought experiment, we can have the possibility of everything being exactly the same, except the only difference is that one is yesterday and one is tomorrow. Again, because it’s a thought experiment, we’re assuming causal determinism is not true, which allows us to get the same conditions with yesterday and tomorrow and get different results.

So my counterpoint is that it is possible, in this thought experiment, for conditions to be the same as much as it is possible as the thought experiment concerning a person who has no body with not prior experience and his ability to think.

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No, this is not necessarily Molinism. In Molinism, God chooses the world in which you freely choose what he wants. So this is non-causal determinism, not Molinism, as it adds a little extra to my point that I am not making. I know Arminians who agree that God knows the future but does not control it (non-causal determinism). And, of course, it unnecessarily puts God into the picture.

Honestly, what you just described is soft determinism (some people know it as compatibilism), which I actually believe and I agree for the same reasons that the PAP is ubsurd, but it’s not what I’m trying to prove right now. I am, right now, arguing that PAP can be true in the case of logical determinism, if it was non-causal. I’m saying that, assuming non-causal determinism is true, the PAP can also be true.

When LFW advocates fall back and insist that the PAP has to be metaphysical (basically saying that the future can’t be determined in any way), I argue that that is too much to ask of free will.

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Ok, I gotcha.

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Suppose one person haves two cups of water, you made him to chose one ,he chooses one ,it’s free will ,he just followed your order out of respect or any emotion at play and the story ends ,but he didn’t throw the cup on your face as an option,it was far from his intention . Free wills are bounded by emotions and emotions don’t have any apparent reasons to come ,maybe moral,law,ethic,love,respect. . as for materialistic turbulence ,it’s not random at all there’s a hidden pattern behind the structure of atoms and material that copes with universe and actually humans also. Though it may never be known .