Dialogue from a dream I had about free will

The dream was only the very vague gist of this debate, I’ve rewritten it to make it more interesting and easier to follow.

Apprehensa: I have a theory of free will!

Patet: Ah, a topic that has vexed us philosophers for millennia- go on then, what’s your theory.

Apprehensa: I think you have free will to the degree that an action expresses your character.

Patet: Can you give a few examples?

Apprehensa: Charlie stabs someone, Jessica stabs someone while having gotten drunker than she intended, Morgan stabs someone after having gotten deliberately drunk. The ranking of how much their actions reflect their character is Charlie>Morgan>Jessica. Mi commits fraud because she is starving while Ben commits fraud because he just wants more money, Ben’s act expresses his character more because it’s not forced by circumstances. The idea is relatively easy to apply, although there are hard cases.

Patet: Well, sure, I think such an intuition is close to what drives many compatibilists. But what do the terms mean? What does ‘character’ mean? More importantly, what does ‘express’ mean?

Apprehensa: I don’t think I have to tell you.

Patet: *Stares in incredulous*

Apprehensa: “expresses character” is an easier criterion to apply than “did X act freely”. It’s a useful criteria- insomuch as blaming people for actions to the degree that those actions reflect their overall character, rather than some overpowering aspect of the circumstances, generally lines up both with when we tend to blame people, and with when it’s useful to blame people. It’s useful and more simple than the original concept to apply- what more do you want? Character and express are hard concepts, but they’re not as hard as ‘free will’.

Patet: Well, I’m not convinced by your ducking of my question, but we’ll come back to that. Let me give you another objection. Jordan does something incredibly cruel- this doesn’t reflect his overall character, it’s just a one time, inexplicable thing. Shouldn’t he be blamed harshly for this.

Apprehensa: Did circumstances force Jordan to do something cruel, or goad him?

Patet: No, he just did it.

Apprehensa: I don’t think this happens very often, if at all. But let’s say it did, this sort of weird case seems hard to form intuitions about. To the extent I can form intuitions about it, I am somewhat inclined to judge him less harshly, plus the consequences of judging him less harshly won’t be that bad- since these things rarely happen, and he is unlikely to do it again in the future. Our definition mostly holds up, even if, perhaps, not quite. Maybe we’re inclined to blame Jordan a little more than my theory admits, but it’s an exceedingly rare case, and I do think there is a tendency to reduce our blame to Jordan somewhat.

Patet: Now you’re confessing that your approach, in addition to being vague, may sometimes give answers that aren’t quite right?

Apprehensa: Yep.

Patet: Well hmm, we’ll come back to that. it’s difficult to argue with someone who doesn’t share your intuitions, so let’s go to another topic. Jennifer used to be a good person, but after hanging out with the wrong crowd- against her own will- after a neurological injury which changed her character- and after a series of forced crimes that slowly habituated her to evil, she became cynical and cruel in her deepest character. Yet on your account, she is acting on her free will- isn’t it a little cruel to give her complete blame?

Apprehensa: I think you’re confusing two issues. She is acting of her own free will. However, her actions are not as blameworthy as they might otherwise be because they are are partly the result of blameless misfortunes, I agree with Philosophy Bear’s account that her actions are less bad then they would be if they were performed by a person who had suffered no similar blameless misfortunes.

Patet: Ahh yes, Philosophy bear’s account of reduced culpability for blameless misfortunes designed to ensure lifetime expected moral status is equal between people who have and haven’t suffered a given blameless misfortune. It’s very good.

(Both philosophers turn to face the camera and nod in unison)

Patet: Throughout this dialogue you’ve appealed a lot to the usefulness of your way of interpreting things. But either Free will is what you say or it isn’t.

Apprehensa: No, I don’t think that’s true. Concepts aren’t right or wrong. People engage in incredibly complex verbal behavior with concepts to be sure, but concepts are, ultimately just different labelling conventions. Where people diverge on concepts and we as philosophers are trying to fashion something out of the mess of intuitions, usefulness seems a valid consideration. If you’re not a libertarian about free will, it seems incredibly unlikely that any given free will concept ‘carves nature at the joints’- it’s just a moral and definitional debate, not a debate about the structure of the world. Usefulness seems as fine a criteria as any to pick through that mess.

Patet: Coming back round to the issue of clarity- isn’t our project here to give necessary and sufficient conditions for having free will? I suppose “it is present to the degree it expresses one’s character” could be considered a set of conditions, but again, it’s very vague.

Apprehensa: It’s less vague than “free will” - and that’s useful. I’m also not even sure the project of trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions was ever a good one, since real terms in language don’t seem to have them. Maybe if we’d set out to provide useful heuristics that distill 90% of the meaning in something that’s in practice easier to understand that would have been a better task. Look what’s happened with post-Gettier debates about the meaning of knowledge- is anyone or anything illuminated by such debates? “True, justified belief” was a mostly valid heuristic that told us something about knowledge, even if it was vague and didn’t hold up in all cases, my sense is “flows from character” is such a rule in relation to free will.

Pate: You’ve given yourself infinite wiggle room! Anytime comes up with a counterexample, you can just say “ahh well, but nevertheless, our account works 90% of the time, every time”.

Apprehensa: If I were demanding that investigations of the concept stop here, I would agree with you, but at the very least, “flows from character” seems like a useful cairn stone in marking our explorations of conceptual space. The fact that it sort of-kind of works tells us something about Free Will.

Pate: Ah well, now it seems you’ve stripped your claim of all strictly philosophical and useful content.

Apprehensa: We’re just going to have to agree to disagree on that.