Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism 59agents. Our having such dispositions does not clearly conflict with the truth of
determinism, since it’s open that the laws that govern them are deterministic.
For the reasons just adumbrated, the classical compatibilists made much hang
on the success of their conditional analysis. But the question remains, could it
speak to the incompatibilist objection presented above? If an agent is determined
to have the wants she has, and if these wants determine her to act as she does
act, how does it aid her free will for it to be true that, with a different causal
history giving rise to different wants, she would have acted differently?
The compatibilist will reply that such counterfactuals effectively locate the
action- generating capacities of free agents. To illustrate, suppose that Jasmine, a
free agent, lives in a deterministic world, and in that world at a certain time, say
April 20, 1984 at precisely 4:20 p.m., she does exactly as she wants in purchas-
ing the Bob Marley album, Exodus. Imagine that, just prior to this, say between
4:10 and 4:19 p.m., she deliberated over whether to purchase the Marley album
or instead one of three other albums she had recently heard, the Rolling Stones
album Exile on Main Street, the John Coltrane album Blue Train, or the Muddy
Waters album King Bee. She could only purchase one since she did not have
enough money to purchase more than one. Grant that when she purchases the
Marley album she does so unencumbered. She is not constrained, coerced, or
compelled by an overwhelming desire to spend all of her cash. She just does
what normally functioning agents do. She acts. But she lives at a deterministic
world. Hence, the facts of the past, facts made true long before her birth, com-
bined with laws of nature, laws that she cannot alter, entail that at that moment
in time, Jasmine will buy that Marley album. It seems that given that exact past
and those very laws, she has no alternative to buying that album.
So how will the conditional analysis of ability help the compatibilist to claim
in a convincing way that Jasmine could have done otherwise? One of the facts of
the past relevant to the time of Jasmine’s purchase is that, just prior to that time,
at 4:19 and 30 seconds, she wanted to purchase that Marley album more than she
wanted to purchase the other albums that she was considering. That is one of the
facts figuring into the deterministic causal history giving rise to Jasmine’s act.
But imagine that she instead did not want most to purchase that Marley album
and that she instead preferred to purchase the Rolling Stones album. One might
also imagine that she preferred the Muddy Waters album, or the Coltrane album,
or that she wanted not to make any purchase after all, wishing instead to save her
money. Let’s also suppose that unbeknownst to her the store she was shopping
in had in stock only two of these other albums, the Stones and the Coltrane
album, but were out of the Muddy Waters album. Even though it is true that
Jasmine was determined to purchase that Marley album just when she did, and
this fact is entailed by the facts of the past and the laws of nature, here are
several other counterfactual claims involving Jasmine that are also true at 4:20
on April 20, 1984:
- If she had wanted to purchase the Stones album, she would have pur-
chased it.