Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues 297Dana Nelkin proposes the following positive deliberation- incompatibilist
requirement for deliberation:
(I) Rational deliberators who deliberate about an action A must believe, in
virtue of their nature as rational deliberators, that there exist no conditions
that render either [her doing] A or not- A inevitable. (Nelkin, 2004a: 217,
2011: 121)Someone who rationally deliberates about an action A would then believe that
there are no conditions that make either her doing A or not- A inevitable. If she
also believed in determinism and its evident consequences, she would believe
that there are conditions that make either A or not- A inevitable. She would then
have inconsistent beliefs.
It’s indeed credible that when agents rationally deliberate about what to do,
they presuppose that they have plural distinct options for action. But the sense of
“can” or “could” featured in such beliefs might not be metaphysical. Perhaps it
is epistemic. When you are deliberating about whether to do A, and you believe
determinism is true, you would very typically not know whether you will in fact
do A, since you lack the knowledge of the preceding conditions and laws that
would be required to make the prediction based on these factors. Thus even if
you believe that it is causally determined that you deliberate and act as you do,
you might well in this deliberative situation believe without inconsistency that it
is epistemically possible—possible for all you know—that you will do A and
that it is epistemically possible that you will do not-A.
A number of deliberation- compatibilists have developed the claim that the
beliefs about the possibility of acting salient for deliberation are in some
key respect epistemic (e.g., Dennett, 1984; Kapitan, 1986; Pettit, 1989). A
deliberation- compatibilist might propose, for instance, that to deliberate ration-
ally between distinct actions A and B, what’s key is that the deliberator can’t be
certain that she will do A and can’t be certain that she will do B. However, some
deliberation- compatibilists don’t think that this is enough. The reason is that
there is a type of situation, first brought to our attention and illustrated by van
Inwagen, in which an agent who satisfies such an epistemic openness condition
would still be incapable of rational deliberation:
Imagine that [an agent] is in a room with two doors and that he believes
one of the doors to be unlocked and the other door to be locked and
impassable, though he has no idea which is which; let him then attempt to
imagine himself deliberating about which door to leave by. (van Inwagen,
1983: 154)About this example, Nelkin points out:
While it seems that I can deliberate about which door to decide to try to
open and even which door handle to decide to jiggle, if I know one of them