Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism 61between those actions she would have performed if she wanted, and those
actions she would not have performed even if she wanted. This, the classical
compatibilist will maintain, effectively distinguishes between those alternative
courses of action that were within the genuine scope of the agent’s abilities at
the time of action, from those courses of action that were not within the scope of
the agent’s abilities at the time of action. And this just is the distinction between
what an agent was free to do at the time of action and what she was not free to
do at the time of action. This is not at all a hollow freedom; it demarcates what
persons have within their control from what falls outside that purview.
Despite the classical compatibilists’ ingenuity, their analysis of could have
done otherwise is generally regarded as unsuccessful (see Lehrer, 1968, 1976,
1980). The classical compatibilists wanted to show their incompatibilist interloc-
utors that when one asserted that a free agent had alternatives available to her—
that is, when it was asserted that she could have done otherwise—that assertion
could be analyzed as a conditional statement, a statement that is perspicuously
compatible with determinism. But as it turned out, the analysis was refuted when
it was shown that the conditional statements sometimes yielded the improper
verdict that a person was able to do otherwise despite that at the time the person
acted, she had no such alternative and therefore was not able to do otherwise
(Chisholm, 1964, in Watson, 1982: 26–7; van Inwagen, 1983: 114–19; Lehrer,
1968). Here is such an example:
Suppose that Danielle is psychologically incapable of wanting to touch a
blond- haired dog. Imagine that, on her sixteenth birthday, unaware of her
condition, her father brings to her two puppies to choose between, one being
a blond labrador, the other a black labrador. He tells Danielle just to pick up
whichever of the two she pleases and that he will return the other puppy to
the pet store. Danielle happily, and unencumbered, does what she wants and
picks up the black lab.When Danielle picked up the black lab, was she able to pick up the blond lab by
choosing to do so? It seems not. Choosing to pick up the blond lab was an altern-
ative that was not available to her. In this respect, she could not have done other-
wise. Given her psychological condition, she cannot even form a want to touch a
blond lab, hence she could not choose to pick one up. But notice that, if she
wanted to choose to pick up the blond lab (more than she wanted to pick up the
black one), then she would have done so. Of course, if she wanted to pick up the
blond lab, then she would not suffer from the very psychological disorder that
resulted in her being unable even to want to pick up blond- haired dogs. So the
classical compatibilist analysis of “could have done otherwise” fails: the analysis
delivers the verdict that when Danielle picked up the black lab she was able to
pick up the blonde lab, even though, due to her psychological condition, she was
not able to do so in the relevant respect.^16
So it appears that the classical compatibilist attempt to answer the incompati-
bilist objection fails. Since, as the objection goes, free will requires access to