66 Classical Compatibilism and Incompatibilism
This means that, in one very strict sense, there can be no science of man. If
we think of science as a matter of finding out what laws happen to hold, and
if the statement of the laws tell us what kinds of events are caused by other
kinds of events, then there will be human actions which we cannot explain
by subsuming them under any laws. (33)In the previous chapter (Section 2.4), one of the philosophical strategies we dis-
cussed was that of the insulator, who attempts to insulate important features of the
manifest image of the human condition and thereby protect it from any challenge
from the framework of the scientific image. Here, in Chisholm’s remarks we have
an especially vivid illustration of this strategy in an attempt to preserve free will.
The classical incompatibilists’ appeal to agent causation offered an elegant
way to solve the problem of accounting for free will under the assumption of
indeterminism. It did, however, bring with it its own particularly heavy burdens.
One was that it presupposed claims about the human condition that at least some
take to be unlikely to be true. But there are further problems, internal to the
structure of the concept of agent causation. For example, if agents are not events
or are not constituted by events, then when they act, why do they act when they
do? Why not a little earlier or a little later? It would seem that we cannot in prin-
ciple identify any time antecedent to the free act in which there was some state
or condition that agent was in that accounts for her acting that way just when she
did, since such features could be accounted for in terms of prior event causes.
This problem and others have been taken to count against agent causation. We
shall return to this issue in Chapter 10 when examining contemporary variants of
agent causation.
3.5. Reflections on the Classical Debate
We shall close this chapter by reflecting on a range of considerations that help to
characterize the classical debate, considerations that in one manner or other have
changed considerably.
First, focus on the classical compatibilists account of free action in terms of
acting on unencumbered desires, wants, or inclinations. This simple picture of
action and of agency makes use of very few ingredients. Indeed, it seems that the
picture is a very simple one: action is produced by desire, perhaps in conjunction
with belief. And while there is often mention of choice or decision, there is no
detailed explanation of what these action- theoretic ingredients are. Con-
temporary developments make use of further ingredients, including intentions
and reasons. There is currently more attention paid to the internal structure of the
psychology of a free agent, concerning how her preferences can be directed
toward her own internal states.
Second, the notion of causation was limited to one in which causes determine
or necessitate their effects. In more recent times, it has been recognized as an
open possibility that a cause might produce or generate its effect without neces-
sitating or determining it. While in an actual situation it did produce its effect, it