Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism 55

3.1.3. Indeterminism’s Threat to Free Will and Moral Responsibility

One provocative classical compatibilist objection to incompatibilism, related to
their compatibilist protest against liberty of indifference, is that indeterminism
does not enhance control. Instead, it would undermine control because it would
preclude a sufficiently stable relation between an agent and an action. Hume
writes:

not only ’tis impossible, without the necessary connexion of cause and

effect in human actions, that punishments cou’d be inflicted compatible with

justice and moral equity; but also that it cou’d ever enter into the thoughts

of any reasonable being to inflict them. The constant and universal object of

hatred and anger is a person or creature endow’d with thoughts and con-

sciousness; and when any criminal or injurious actions excite that passion,

’tis only by their relation to the person or connexion with him. But accord-

ing to the doctrine of liberty or chance, this connexion is reduc’d to nothing,

nor are men more accountable for those actions, which are designed or pre-

meditated, than for the most casual and accidental. Actions are by their very

nature temporary and perishing; and where proceed not from some cause in

the characters and dispositions of the persons, who perform’d them, they

infix not themselves upon him, and can neither redound to his honour, if

good, nor infamy, if evil. The action itself may be blameable; it may be con-

trary to all rules of morality and religion: But the person is not responsible

for it; and as it proceeds from nothing in him, that is durable and constant,

and leaves nothing of that nature behind, ’tis impossible he can, upon its

account, become the object of punishment and vengeance.^12

The idea is that if the relation between agent and action were indeterministic, the
action would be just a random or chance happening, something that cannot
warrant attribution of any moral quality in the agent, let alone blaming or pun-
ishing the agent. Moral responsibility for an action instead requires that a deter-
ministic causal relation hold between the agent’s durable and constant character
on the one hand, and her action on the other. If the action were not causally
determined by the agent’s durable and constant character, then there would be
nothing in the agent to which blame and punishment could appropriately be
directed.
This argument assumes that there is no relation between an agent and her
action sufficient for moral responsibility other than a causally deterministic one,
and that the absence of causal determination entails that the action is merely
random or a matter of chance.^13 One way that incompatibilists have resisted this
argument is by arguing that there can be probabilistic causal relations between
events such that causal antecedents need not determine their consequences in
order to cause them (Kane, 1996). Another incompatibilist response is to main-
tain that agents do cause their actions but that agents are not in turn causally
determined by anything to cause their actions (Chisholm, 1964; Clarke, 1993;