Is There Actually An Argument for Incompatiblism?

You're getting this assignment because I think you've written a paper that assumes, but does not prove, that incompatibilism is true.

Incompatiblism is the doctrine that, as Donald Palmer says, "determinism rules out the possibility of freedom. If everthing is necessary, then nothing is free." (Does the Center Hold, P. 216.)

Here's an illustration of the difference between compatibilism and incompatibilism.

Imagine that you order vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate. The fact you like vanilla and hate chocolate determines that, in those particular circumstances, you would never order chocolate. But there was nothing physically stopping you from ordering chocolate, so you could have ordered chocolate, IF you had wanted to. Compatibilists (soft determinists) say this is enough to mean that you ordered vanilla of your own free will.

Incompatibilists (hard determinists and "libertarians") believe this isn't good enough. For them, you could only have ordered vanilla of your own free will if it was possible for you to order chocolate whether you wanted to or not. This means that they think an action is only free willed if it was possible for you to have done something other than what you chose to do. (This makes no sense whatsoever to me, but that's what Palmer says they think.)

The doctrine of incompatibilism has been stated a couple of different ways:

Statement 1. "Free will requires genuine choices. If the choice you make is determined, then you didn't really choose."

On this definition of free will, if you did something because you wanted to do it, it wasn't free will.
(Compatibilists believe that if you do something only because you wanted to do it, then it was free will.)

Statement 2."Free will means you could have done otherwise. If what you did was determined, then you could not have done otherwise, so you don't have free will."

This statement of incompatibilism defines "free will" in what I think is a very strange way.

Let us again suppose that you decide to buy ice cream, and because you like vanilla and dislike chocolate, you choose vanilla and not chocolate.

Let us also suppose you have no reason to choose chocolate. You know what chocolate tastes like. Your tastes have not changed. No-one has persuaded to give chocolate another try. You don't like it!

On this definition of free will, if there was nothing to stop you from ordering chocolate if you had happened, for some reason, to want chocolate, that's NOT good enough for you to be acting under free will if you order vanilla. The incompatibilist's criterion for free will requires it to be possible for you to order chocolate even when you are absolutely not going to order chocolate. In other words, for the incompatibilist, free will requires it to be possible that you will do things you didn't decide to do. Which means that, for the incompatiblist free will requires the possibility that you will, without coercion, do things against your own will.

This is why compatibilists think that incompatibilists are complete raving loonies.

It's important to remember that statements 1 and 2 above are just statements of incompatibilism. They are not arguments because the key points ("determinism rules out choice," "if it was determined, you could not have done otherwise,") are themselves just statements of incompatibilism, and therefore need to be supported by arguments. If the incompatibilists don't have an argument for this point, they don't have an argument at all.

Here's an example to illustrate the difference between instances where free will is present and free will is absent.

You are in a hallway with three doors, all opening off to the side except the last one, which is ajar and opens into a really boring meeting. The other two doors open into, first a party with food you like, drinks you like, people you like and entertainment you like, and second a fully grown and healthy but ravenous and ill-tempered man-eating tiger. There is also a massive piston being slowly pushed down the hallway towards the door to the meeting. If you go through door number one, you will have a good time. If you go through door number two you will be torn to shreds and die in agony. If you go through door number three you will be so bored that you will wish you had chosen the tiger. You are not suicidal, not insane, and have absolutely no desire to have a bad time if you can possibly avoid it.

Let's try this scenario three ways. Two with determinism and one without determinism.

Situation 1. You want to avoid the tiger and the meeting, so you try to go through the door to the party. (This only works under determinism. Because your desires can only determine what you do if they determine what you do.) Unfortunately, that door is locked, and the piston pushes you out of the corridor into the boring meeting. In this case, circumstances determined that you would go to the meeting, but external forces did not allow your own desires to determine what you did, so this was not of your own free will.

Situation 2. You want to avoid the tiger and the meeting, so you try to go through the door to the party. The door is not locked, so you go through and have a great time. (This is determinism, because in this case your desires determine what you do.) In this case, circumstances determined that you would go to the party, and external forces did not prevent your own desires from determining what you did, so this was of your own free will.

Now let's try it without determinism.

Situation 3. All three doors are unlocked. However, the determinism has somehow been removed from the part of your brain that makes you do things, so your desire to go to the party has absolutely no way to determine that you will go to the party. Because what you do here will be random, you have an equal chance of going through door one, door two, door three or staying in the hallway and being pushed through door three. So, if you don't have determinism in your brain to connect your desires to your actions, you have a fifty percent chance of going to the meeting, a twenty-five percent chance of going to the party, and a twenty-five percent chance of walking through door number two and being torn to pieces by a hungry and irritable tiger.

Incompatibilists, of course, will radically disagree with my analysis of situation 2. They will say things like:

"Because you were determined (by your desires) to go to the party, you didn't do so of your own free will."
"Because your choice to go through door one was determined (by your desires), you didn't really choose."
"Because your desires determined that you would go through door number one, you could not have done otherwise, so it wasn't free will."

At this point, I want you to ask your self if it is possible that the determinism of your brain in situation 2 somehow locked the other doors and magically pushed you through door one? Because, quite frankly, that is the only way I can see for determinism to take away your free will in situation 2.

Now, if these incompatibilists are also libertarians their views logically imply that only in situation three do you act freely. If you went to the meeting, you did so freely because you did so randomly. If you went to the party, you did so freely because you did so randomly. And, if you went to the tiger and met a horrible death, you did so freely because you did so randomly. (To be fair, Libertarians don't agree that their views imply this, and assert, in effect, that a lack of determinism doesn't imply a lack of determinism. I don't see how this can even begin to make sense, but they seem happy with it.)

Lets think about what it means to say that determinism rules out free will. First, to be precise, we're talking about determinism in the part of your brain that determines what you do, or try to do. It's determinism with respect to your volitions, your effective impulses to action. We'll call this "volitional determinism." Since the opposite of determinism (or "necessity") is indeterminism (or "randomness"), we'll call the alternative "volitional indeterminism." Since things are either determiniate or indeterminate, there's no third choice. Here are those definitions again.

Volitional determinism is the doctrine that people's volitions, the impulses that result in them making decisions and/or taking actions, are all follow by necessity from their immediately preceeding brain states. The state of your brain at time t-0 precisely determines the decision you make at time t-1.

Volitional indeterminism is the doctrine that people's volitions, the impulses that result in them making decisions and/or taking actions, are all completely random with respect to their immediately preceeding brain states. The decision you make at time t-1 has nothing to do with state of your brain at time t-0.

Now lets think about free will. You act on your own free will when what you do depends on your decisons and no-one elses. You act without free will when you do something that wasn't a result of your own thinking process.

Consider first the role free will plays in our society. Contrast this with the last movie you saw all the way through in a theater. If you stayed in the theater because you chose to watch the movie, then you stayed of your own free will. If you had stayed only because someone had tied you into the seat, then you wouldn't have stayed of your own free will.

Now consider four people who go to see the same movie. Alan sits through the whole movie because he like it, and chooses to stay. Bert hates the movie, and only sits through the whole movie because a gang of pirates holds him in his seat at gunpoint. Clem also hates the movie, and chooses to get up and leave. (The pirates let him go.) Dave loves the movie, and tries to stay and watch it, but a gang of ninjas invade the theatre and whisk him away to nearby sushi bar where they force him to listen to all the reasons ninjs are better than pirates. (Now, I personally think it's pretty clear that Alan and Clem both acted of their own free will, and that Bert and Dave didn't. I don't think that there's even the slightest doubt of this. If this hypothetical example matches the kind of real examples we see all the time, then there is no doubt whatsoever that free will exists.)

The first thing I want you to notice is that we managed to describe the difference between free will and unfree will without saying anything about determinism. You were able to tell the difference between Alan and Bert without thinking about whether either of their decisions was determined or not. You did not say "I can't tell whether Alan and Clem acted of their own free will because the scenario didn't state whether or not their decisions were determined by their previous brain states" and I'll bet you didn't say "if Alan and Clem acted at random, then they acted of their own free will, if what they did depended on their own previous brain states, then they didn't act of their own free will." Am I wrong? Because if you're an incompatiblist, you can only tell the difference by telling whether the decision was determined or undetermined.

Now, think about what incompatibilism implies about the difference between free and unfree will. Incompatibilism actually implies that there's no difference between any of these people as far as free will is concerned. Incompatibilism says that, if determinism is true, neither Alan nor Clem acted of their own free will, which makes them the same as Bert and Dave, who didn't act of their own will either. And if volitional determinism is false, they all acted of their own free will, because none of their actions were determined by their previous brain states. (They just happened to randomly do what each of them did. Whatever was going on in their minds had nothing to do with what they did. Nothing whatsoever.)

If we take the normal definition of free will, incompatibilism is the doctrine that if determinism is true, everyone will be coerced into doing whatever it is they do. Which means that if Alan had decided to leave, pirates (or something) would have magically appeared to make him stay! Now I ask you, if determinism is true, does that mean that some coercive agency, like ninjas, would magically appear any time you tried to do something you had not decided to do? Where would they come from?

If incompatiblism is true, then determinism must imply that free will in the ordinary sense of free will doesn't exist! Incompatibilists don't get to say that free will and determinism are incompatible if they mean something different by the term "free will." It doesn't matter if they can call something else "free will," and then prove that determinism is incompatible with this other thing. In the ordinary, everyday, sense of "free will," something is done of my own free will if I do it as a result of my own volition, and not of my own free will if my volition is overridden by some outside force. This is the only definition of free will that makes sense of the Alan, Bert, Clem and Dave example above! Now, do you really think that, if volitional determinism were true, there would be ninjas, or some other coercive force, waiting there to keep Alan in his seat? If you don't think that determinism can conjour such things into existance, then how can you think that determinism, if true, would rule out free will?

The second thing I want you to notice that this example, if plausible, gives us very good reason to think that volitional determinism is true. Alan liked the movie, so he stayed. Bert hated the movie, so he wanted to leave. If not prevented, he would have left. Clem also hated the movie, so he left. Dave liked the movie, so he wanted to stay. If not prevented, he would have stayed. In each case the person's volition was determined by his previous brain state.

The third thing I want you to notice is that an incompatiblist description of the situation doesn't make sense. Alan and Clem both acted of their own free will, right? So if incompatibilism is true they acted without volitional determinism, which means that their actions were random with respect to their previous brain states. Alan wanted to watch the movie, but this fact could not determine what he would do, or he would not be acting freely. Fortunately for him, he had a completely random volition to stay and watch the movie. The same goes for Clem. He hated the movie, but since he had free will, which (according to incompatibilism) means that he can only act randomly, he was helpless to make himself get up and leave the theatre. But mysteriously, he had a completely random impulse to get up and leave! If you think that all of your free decisions are the result of random impulses, then this picture will make sense to you. If you think that Alan stayed because he wanted to watch the movie, then you have to accept that his desire to watch the movie determined what his volition would be, which means accepting that volitional indeterminism is false.

Now, given that incompatibilism requires us to believe that all of our free decisions are`made randomly, do we have any reason to think that incompatibilism is true? In fact, has anyone ever given an argument for this view? And if so, is it a logically compelling argument?

Or are the incompatibilists like the underpants gnomes of South Park, assuming that something leads to something else without any reason to think that it does.




But, before you start, I want you to ask yourself if you have previously had any argument for incompatibilism. This is an important thing to think about because, if you were not previously aware of an argument for incompatibilism then, up to this point, you should have believed that incompatibilism was false. To believe something without having an argument for it is to hold an unsupported belief, it is to have a prejudice and that's just not doing philosophy.

Remember, if the incompatibilists have no argument, then we have no reason to agree with them.

Once you have found (or failed to find) an argument for incompatibilism, go on to consider the following argument for compatibilism, the doctrine that free will and determinism are compatible.

Argument for Compatibilism

1. We have overwhelming reason to believe determinism is true down to the atomic level because none of our science and technology would work if determinism is false above the subatomic level. We also have very good reason to believe that our brains are, although highly complicated, still deterministic systems. (If you think your brain is indeterministic where it counts, click on

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