Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

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Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views 267

between compatibilists and incompatibilists is irresolvable, and hence that each
of the conflicting compatibilist and incompatibilist notions of free will are part
of the concept of free will. Another argument of his defends an irrealist position
about moral judgments in general, according to which they cannot be true, then
contends that “moral responsibility” and “the sort of free will required for moral
responsibility” are moral notions, and concludes that claims that agents exem-
plify these notions also cannot be true.
In Double’s view, propositions of the sort “X has free will” will in fact be
necessarily false because free will is a conceptual impossibility. By analogy, “X
is a round square” is also necessarily false because a round square is a concep-
tual impossibility. Double is thus committed to a no- free-will- either-way theory
of an especially strong sort. Galen Strawson’s position is in a sense weaker,
since he is a no- free-will- either-way theorist not for the reason that free will is
conceptually impossible, but because it is metaphysically impossible that beings
like us have it.
There is perhaps reason to doubt Double’s claim that his conceptual-
impossibility irrealism about free will gains powerful support from the irresolv-
ability of the debates that separate compatibilists and incompatibilists. Examples
of such debates Double cites are the dispute about the Consequence Argument
from determinism to the claim that we could not have done otherwise, and the
controversy over Frankfurt- style cases. However, we have as much reason to
believe that most central debates in philosophy are irresolvable, but we might
still want to resist subjectivism about, for instance, Fregean versus Russellian
theories of meaning, or Humean versus anti- Humean theories of causation.


11.4. A Neuroscientific Case against Free Will


In recent decades, certain neuroscientific studies conducted by scientists such as
Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wegner have been taken to demonstrate that we lack
free will (Libet, 1985; Wegner, 2002; cf. Harris, 2012). On their accounts, we
lack free will because there is no conscious state of willing that is causally effi-
cacious in producing action. In Libet’s view, any state that is conscious comes
too late in the causal sequence to be efficacious in producing action. Instead,
unconscious neural states cause action. Brian Leiter (2007) points out that this
view has a progenitor in Friedrich Nietzsche, who contends that any state picked
out by conscious phenomenology is not causally connected to the resulting
action. Instead actions are physiologically caused.^2
In several of Libet’s studies (1985, 2004), subjects whose brains are monitored
by EEG (electroencephalogram) are asked to flex their right wrists whenever they
wish.^3 When participants are regularly reminded not to plan their wrist flexes and
when they do not afterward say that they did some planning, an average ramping
up of EEG activity (550 ms before muscle motion begins) precedes the average
reported time of the conscious experience (200 ms before muscle motion begins)
by about one- third of a second (Libet 1985). Libet claims that decisions about
when to flex were made at the earlier of these two times (1985: 536).

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