Mesh, Reasons-Responsive, Leeway Theories 225in view of the phenomenology, understanding of our agency as free is best
explained in terms of our ability to choose among options, and this provides
reason to accept leeway compatibilism.
9.11. Vihvelin’s New Dispositionalism
Vihvelin develops a sophisticated compatibilist theory of free will that revives a
conception that had largely been set aside for half a century, one that attempts to
reconcile causal determination with our being able to do otherwise from how we
in fact act. As we saw in Chapter 3, this tradition, developed with intensity
during the first half of the twentieth century by philosophers such as G.E. Moore,
R.E. Hobart, and A.J. Ayer, features a family of compatibilist conditions on free
will. Most prominently, these philosophers, following Hobbes, Locke, and
Hume, advocate a conditional account of the ability to do otherwise. In Hume’s
version, to be free in the sense at issue, an agent must satisfy the following cri-
terion: “by liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting
according to the determinations of the will—that is, if we choose to remain at
rest, we may; if we choose to also move, we also may” (Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding, §8). G.E. Moore advanced a view of this type, arguing
that to say that I could have acted otherwise is to claim that I would have acted
otherwise if I had so chosen. The satisfaction of this condition is compatible with
causal determination: even if I am causally determined to act as I do, it might
still be true that I would have acted otherwise if I had so chosen to act.
Again, such conditional analyses of “could have done otherwise” were con-
tested in the mid- twentieth century by C.D. Broad (1934), C.A. Campbell
(1951), and especially forcefully in the 1960s by Roderick Chisholm (1967) and
Keith Lehrer (1968, 1976). As a result of these criticisms, and of Frankfurt’s
challenge to the alternative possibility requirement for free will and moral
responsibility (see the discussion below), compatibilist positions of this type
were almost completely abandoned. More specifically, compatibilists largely
rejected the alternative possibilities requirement on free will, and instead
advanced a view in which this requirement has no role.
The following is the most prominent type of objection to the conditional ana-
lysis. Suppose Brown does not at some time t jump in the sea to save a drowning
child, and we say:
(1) Brown could have jumped into the sea at t.A proponent of conditional analysis proposes that (1) is equivalent to:
(2) If Brown had chosen to jump into the sea at t, he would have jumped
into the sea at t.(Variants of (2) substitute for “chosen”: “willed,” “tried,” “set himself,” or
“wanted.”) Chisholm argues that this sort of analysis is subject to a counterexample