60 Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism
- If she had wanted to purchase the Coltrane album, she would have
purchased it. - If she had wanted to purchase no album at all, saving her money instead,
she would have refrained from making any purchase.
Here now are several false claims regarding what it was within Jasmine’s capa-
bility to do at 4:20 on April 20, 1984:
- If she had wanted to purchase the Muddy Waters album, she would have
purchased it. - If she had wanted to purchase more than one album, she would have pur-
chased more than one album. - If she had wanted to purchase the Moby album, Play, released in 2000, then
she would have purchased it. - If she had wanted to fly like a bird to Tangier, she would have flown like a
bird to Tangier.
These true and the false counterfactuals track the actions that were within, and
were not within, Jasmine’s ability to act at the time of her purchase—or so says
the classical compatibilist. According to the classical compatibilist, this is ade-
quate to show what Jasmine was freely able to do from what she was not freely
able to do at the time she made her purchase: She was free to buy the Coltrane
album, the Stones album, or no album at all. At the time she purchased the
Marley album, she could have done otherwise in any of these ways. But she was
not free to purchase the Muddy Waters album at that time since the store did not
have it available. She was not free to purchase more than one album, because at
the time of her purchase she did not have enough money for more than one
album. She was not free to buy the Moby album since, in 1984, the 2000
released Moby album did not exist. She was also not free to fly like a bird to
Tangier, because she did not have wings, etc.
Notice that any one of the false counterfactuals listed above could be
amended to be made true. For instance, if the first were revised to read “If she
had wanted to purchase the Muddy Waters album, and if the store did have the
album in stock, she would have purchased it,” it would come out true and not
false. But to make it true, the counterfactual conditions require that the descrip-
tion of the actual world in which Jasmine purchased the Marley album be
amended in ways having nothing to do with Jasmine’s wants at the time of her
acting. According to the classical compatibilist, for it to be true that she could
have acted of her own free will in some manner other than the way in which she
did act, the only thing that can explain why she did not act that way is that she
did not want to. There was nothing other than her preferences that prevented that
alternative outcome from having been the actual outcome.
How might the classical compatibilist reply to the classical incompatibilist
challenge that the conditional analysis offers only a hollow freedom? She can
maintain that, in assessing an agent’s action, the analysis accurately distinguishes