Divine freedom

Consider this sketchy argument against libertarianism: It is impossible for God to choose wrongly. But freedom requires the ability to choose otherwise if libertarianism is correct, and significant moral responsibility requires the freedom to choose wrongly. Hence, if libertarianism is correct, God lacks significant moral responsibility. But God has significant moral responsibility. Thus, libertarianism is incorrect.

There are various somewhat shaky details here. There is, for instance, the question whether the ability to choose otherwise that libertarians insist on has to imply an ability to choose wrongly in the relevant case. And there is the issue that some libertarians are only source-incompatibilists, and source-incompatibilism does not imply an ability to choose otherwise in the special case where the agent is God.

But I want to make a different point, namely that there is an argument in the vicinity that applies just as much on compatibilism as on incompatibilism. Consider this moral intuition:

1. Someone who in ordinary circumstances chooses not to commit moral horrors lacks perfect virtue.

But no circumstances are going to press God extraordinarily, and God does not merely avoid moral horrors. Pushing on this intuition leads to the following suggestion:

2. God does not choose to act non-wrongly.

Of course, there are various non-wrong things that God chooses to do, but he does not choose them over acting wrongly. That the things that God does are non-wrong is not something that counts in their favor in his choice, because all of the options he is choosing between are non-wrong. But, now, plausibly:

3. Significant moral responsibility requires that one choose to act wrongly or that one choose to act non-wrongly.
4. God has significant moral responsibility.

In (3), by "choose to act Fly", I mean something contrastive: choose to act Fly over acting non-Fly. But now (2)-(4) are contradictory.

Observe two things about this puzzle. First, the argument nowhere makes any use of incompatibilism. The intuitions behind (1) and (2) are either neutral between compatibilism and incompatibilism, or slightly favor compatibilism (because the compatibilist lays greater stress on the connection between action and character).

Second, someone who rejects one of the premises (2)-(4) will be untroubled by the original sketchy anti-libertarian argument.

If one rejects (2), then one will think that God chooses between non-wrong and wrong. But a rational being does not choose between options he knows to be possible and impossible options, and so the only way an omniscient and perfectly rational being could choose between non-wrong and wrong would be if it were possible for him to choose the wrong. Thus, someone who rejects (2) will reject the claim that God cannot choose the wrong.

If one rejects (3), then one will surely also reject the claim that significant moral responsibility requires the freedom to choose wrongly.

And (4) is just as much a premise of the original argument as of this one.

But everyone should reject one of (2)-(4) since these premises are logically incompatible. Therefore, everyone should reject one of the premises of the original anti-libertarian argument.

What should the theist do? I think the theist should reject the conjunction of (3) and (4): The sort of significant moral responsibility that logically requires choosing to act non-wrongly is not worth having, and so God doesn't have it.

Two kinds of choices

We should distinguish between two kinds of choices. Intrinsically free choices are free solely in virtue of the internal features of how the choice is made (if externalism about the mind is true, we may need to allow mental facts to count as "internal" for the purposes of distinguishing between chocies). Any exact duplicate of an intrinsically free choice will also be free. Extrinsically free choices are free in part in virtue of something occurring or not occurring outside the choice itself, typically facts about the history of the agent.

Paradigm libertarian-free choices are intrinsically free. If Curley is choosing whether to take a bribe or not, and he is causally and psychologically able to take it and causally and psychologically able not to take it, and he has non-overwhelming motivations in favor of taking the bribe (he desires money) and non-overwhelming motivations in favor of not taking the bribe (he desires to avoid moral degradation and he desires to avoid jail), then it does not matter whether he was brainwashed into having a desire for money and a desire to avoid moral degradation. His choice is intrinsically free. Note that, interestingly, Frankfurt examples trade on our intuition that at least some of our choices are intrinsically free—that's why the neurosurgeon's standing by does not affect the choice's freedom.

Libertarians can, of course, admit that there are extrinsically free choices. Thus, if my earlier free decisions have formed, through the right kinds of causal chains, a character that is unable to give my son a scorpion when he asks for bread, I may still act freely when I refrain from giving my son a scorpion when he asks for bread. However, this is an extrinsic freedom. For if I were brainwashed into having this sort of character, I would not be acting freely.

Compatibilists are committed, I think, to the claim that it is possible for all of one's free choices to be merely extrinsically free.

We can then argue for incompatibilism by arguing that the freedom of an extrinsically free choice always depends on one's being antecedently (to the choice) responsible for something outside the choice itself, and that anything one is responsible for depends on a free (intrinsically or extrinsically so) choice or on something else one is responsible for. For then, if all choices are extrinsically free, an infinite regress will be generated.

One might make a similar distinction about responsibility, and then try to argue that intrinsically free choices are the only thing one can be intrinsically responsible for. If one could do that, and then argue that anything one is extrinsically responsible for one is responsible for in part because one is responsible for something else, again a regress results if there is nothing that we are intrinsically responsible for.

Freedom and coercion

Martin was being mugged. His wallet was empty. He was told to get a hundred dollars from the ATM and give it to the mugger, or he'd die. He did so. I think most people would say that Martin didn't hand over the $100 freely. But here is the puzzle: We can also imagine that Martin in exactly the same circumstances refusing to cooperate despite knowing that this will cost him his life (maybe he could have acted on a motive of ensuring that crime doesn't pay).

An initial reaction to the imaginability of Martin not giving the hundred is that this shows nothing very interesting. It simply shows that there is a sense of freedom that goes beyond what one might call "alternate possibilities" kinds of freedom (and I mean that very loosely to be neutral between all libertarian options, including origination based ones; this may even include compatibilist kinds of freedom, as long as the compatibilist is willing to admit of a sense in which Martin acted freely in handing over the money). In the "alternate possibilities" sense, Martin acted freely in handing over the money. But in some meatier sense, Martin acted unfreely. Very familiar: one recalls Aristotle's discussion of the captain throwing cargo overboard.

But I still think there is something puzzling about the case. Focus in on that meatier sense of freedom, call it "freedom-plus". The idea is that Martin lacks freedom-plus when he hands over the hundred. But But now imagine the alternate scenario where Martin dies for refusing to cooperate. Did he act unfreely, in the sense of lacking freedom-plus, in refusing to cooperate? Surely not. His refusing to cooperate, while occurring in circumstances of coercion, was eminently not the result of coercion. The act of resistance was misguided, but not at all unfree.

So, when Martin was threatened, it was still up to him whether to act with freedom-plus. This means that freedom-plus does not supervene on the choice situation (the "choice situation" is easiest to describe in the libertarian case, where the choice situation is basically all the facts about the options available, the chooser's mental state, and so on, but not including what choice was made). Freedom-plus, rather, supervenes on the combination of choice situation with the actual choice (broadly understood).

This also means that Martin can actually deliberate over whether he should act freely or unfreely. That sounds paradoxical, but in the sense of "freedom-plus" it is entirely unparadoxical. In fact, we can imagine that the counterfactual Martin, who presumably sins against prudence by resisting[note 1]

So, oddly, cases of coercion, when they do not take "alternate possibilities" freedom away (they might in cases where the coerced agent panics and loses the ability to reason) are cases where it's up to the coerced agent whether she has freedom-plus.

Moreover, I wonder if it's not possible for coerced agents to have freedom-plus even if they cooperate. Suppose Martin thinks about refusing to cooperate. He likes that idea, and is quite willing to die to ensure that one does not profit from crime. He does not have any family to worry about. But while being very much attracted to that idea, he decides that to refuse to cooperate would be to sin against charity for the mugger. For he foresees that if he does not cooperate, he will very likely be shot. And if he is shot, then his life will be on the mugger's conscience. And it is a very bad thing to have someone's life on one's conscience. In acting from a set of motives like that, Martin is surely completely free in the freedom-plus sense. After all, in no sense is he acting out of coercion.

But what about a mid-way case? Martin thinks about refusing to cooperate. But then he reflects on the fact that the virtue of prudence calls for cooperation. Desiring to act virtuously, he cooperates. In this case, it seems he is acting out of coercion. But maybe not. Maybe a distinction must be made be in simply responding to threat by trying to save one's hide and thus cooperating (not that there is anything morally wrong with that in this kind of a case)—in which case one lacks freedom-plus—and responding to the threat by cooperating because that is the virtuous thing to do, all things considered, with the threat being one of the considered things. In the latter case, the decision-making process is mediated by virtue, and the action seems intuitively free in every sense that matters.

But if so, then this does not mean that when we initially judged Martin to be unfree in handing over the hundred, we were unfairly judgmental of Martin? For we had no right to assume that he wasn't moved by virtue.

On the other hand, perhaps the way out of all of these perplexities is simply to abandon any concept of "freedom-plus", and to say that our desire to call cases of coercion as cases of lack of freedom simply comes from a failure to acknowledge the freedom that we have (for whatever reason—maybe in order to hide the correlate responsibility from ourselves)?