320 RELIGION, MORALITY, FAITH, AND REASONpsychological, and physical capacities is required by not lying; Jane’s not
lying is, in that sense, competently available. Perhaps it is true that if she
had chosen not to lie, she could have refrained from lying; then, in that
sense, Jane’s not lying is counterfactually available. Even if all this is so,
either her choosing to lie or her not choosing to lie is incompatible with the
whole past package.^17 Since she lies, her lying is in fact inevitable – it is in
fact inevitable that she does not choose not to lie. So even if it is true that if
she had not chosen to lie she would not have lied, it is also true that it was
in fact inevitable that she did not choose not to lie.
On one version, then, of the compatibilist account,
Jane’s lying to John at T is a free action entails Jane’s not lying
to John at T is logically, naturally, competently, and counter-fac-
tually available to Jane at T.Perhaps there is more.
Perhaps this should be added. Suppose that Jane ordinarily has a set of
only true beliefs about what one can expect from ordinary computers, but
that one morning her colleagues discover her trying to fry eggs on her
keyboard. Jane is, in this respect, irrational in the sense that, given beliefs
anyone familiar with computers has, she should know that the result of her
keyboard-and-egg behavior will not be breakfast.^18 A compatibilist may
wish to add that actions that are irrational on Jane’s part are not free
actions. If so, we then get:
Jane’s lying to John at T is a free action entails Jane’s not lying
to John at T is logically, naturally, competently, and counter-fac-
tually available to Jane at T, and Jane’s not lying to John at T
would not be irrational.It should be noted that being irrational here involves such things as
having wildly implausible beliefs or reasoning in a chaotic fashion or
the like; it is not a sense of irrational in which, for example, acting
wrongly is inherently irrational.
Finally, perhaps lack of irrationality in the rough sense broadly
characterized should also be added to Jane’s act of lying. If we do this,
and put the resultant positive and negative stories together, we get this
result:
Jane’s lying to John at T is a free action entails Jane lied to
John at T. An action chain that includes Jane’s lying to John
at T passes through Jane, Jane’s lying to John at T is (in the
sense defined) congenial to Jane. At T, Jane is neither coerced