A Feature of the Human Soul: the Material Existence and Realities - Essay Example

An Adjudicatory Essay Concerning the Dispute between Kane and Pereboom on Free Will Regarding the question whether man is endowed with ‘freewill’, Robert Kane seems to vehemently oppose Derek Pereboom. In simple words, whereas Robert Kane argues that man enjoys freewill, Derek advises his readers to learn to live without it. Indeed, what Kane argues for can be called “libertarianism”. His concept of “libertarianism” claims that man, indeed, enjoy free will. In this regard, Kane does not directly argue for man’s freewill; rather he first claims that causal determinism is false. According to him, ‘libertarianism’ is based on the “truth of indeterminism”. He argues that though indeterminism and freewill are incompatible, human being’s ‘self-forming’ or libertarian actions are essentially the result of freewill. Therefore, they are morally responsible for their actions. Unlike Kane, Derek Pereboom argues that both determinism and libertarianism are incompatible with freewill. Indeed, he remains agnostic about the truth of determinism. But he argues that whether determinism is true or not, freewill is incompatible with it. So, human being should learn to live without freewill. Yet the incompatibility of freewill with determinism does not imply that man is free from moral responsibility. Since, according to him, an agent’s action is either the result of causal determinism (self-forming action) or the manipulation of some external power, in both cases, the agent will remain responsible for his action. It is because though freewill does not exist, man’s action (even though the agent is tricked, by some external power to perform that action) will seem to be caused by his freewill. In fact, Kane has an impulsive tendency to argue against “compatibilism” on the ground that man will never be able to learn whether his ‘will’ is determined by some other power or not. Therefore, the question about the compatibility of Freewill and determinism is absurd. Referring to Frazier’s perception of Skinner’s “Walden Two”, he says that “the deeper freedom of the will is an illusion in the first place. We do not have it anyway” (Kane 427). This assertion has two meanings simultaneously: first, it can be assumed that he attempts to says that man does not freewill, since it is an illusion. Secondly, it can be assumed that since the concept of freewill is an illusion, man is free to act according to what he calls his will. Kane calls this freedom of man to act on his own at some particular moment as ‘libertarianism’. Indeed, he believes in the agent’s mundane power to be responsible for his action, as he says, “If we are to be ultimately responsible for being what we are, there must be acts in our life histories in which parenting and histories….did not completely determine how we acted, left something…to be responsible for them and there” (Kane 429). In fact, Kane seems to be worried the implications of libertarianism about moral responsibility. He says that indeterministic fate or chanciness will supposedly undermine a man’s moral responsibility. He explains the problem as following that if freewill is incompatible with determinism, it is also incompatible with indeterminism. If man is not determined by something else such as his past histories or some other supernatural power, then his action will be purely arbitrary or capricious. The traditional indeterminists rely on some ‘extra ordinary forces’ to explain the incompatibility between freewill and indeterminism. According to Kane, the ‘extra ordinary force’ which plays a significant role in the agent’s indeterminist decision-making is the agent’s libertarian ‘self’. Indeed, the action what the agent makes is what he or she really wants to be. Kane argues that the agent’s action may be determined by a set of previously done actions and principles; but there must be situation when human being may need to decide what course action he or she will take, as Kane says, “Such undetermined and self-forming choices and actions occur at those difficult times of life when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become” (423). In order to exemplify his view about indeterminism and freewill, he draws an example of a businesswoman’s attempt to decide whether she should help a crime victim on her way to an important business conference. Kane says that decision of a man in such situation is not “determined because of the preceding indeterminacy” (Kane 430). In such situation whatever the decision of the businesswoman is, it is undetermined. He further argues that the agent who have to take decision in such situation can be held responsible for the action or choice he or she will make. He calls this freedom of a man’s decision-making as ‘self-forming action’. Kane argues that ‘self-forming actions’ are not predetermined; rather they are exclusively the outcomes of the agent’s freewill. Unlike Robert Kane’s approach to freewill as the libertarian ‘self forming action’ of the agent, Derek Pereboom argues that since freewill is incompatible with both determinism and libertarianism, human being cannot have freewill. In harmony with Kane’s view, Pereboom also argues that freewill is not compatible with determinism. Moving one step further, he claims that it is incompatible with libertarianism also, as he says, “The case for hard compatibilism involves arguing against two competing positions. The first of these is compatibilism which claims that freewill of the type required for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism…..the second is libertarianism” (Pereboom 444). According to Pereboom, “hard incompatibilism” is based on the denial that human being posses the sort of freewill is necessary to hold the doer responsible for his action. He further argues that despite human being’s lack of freewill, this lack will not invoke the moral disaster as it is envisaged by the compatibilists and the libertarianists. He says that despite human being’s exemption from being morally responsible will not destroy man’s intuitive moral life and hard compatibilism itself implicates some moral consequences, as he says, “A conception of life without this kind of free will need not exclude morality or sense of meaning in life” (Pereboom 444). Pereboom’s reasoning for ‘hard compatibilism’ is quite interesting, though not convincing. Indeed, Pereboom considers incompatibilism as true, arguing directly against libertarianism’s proposition that man is the causal determinist of his own actions. He attacks the compatibilists’ tendency to endow man with freewill on the basis that there is no basic difference between a man’s self-willed actions and manipulated actions. While arguing against compatibilism, Pereboom directly opposes Kane’s idea of event-causal libertarianism. He complains that Kane’s event-causal libertarianism does not give any satisfactory reply to the luck objection. Through his ‘four case’ logic, he claims that what Kane assumes as man’s ‘self forming action’ can, indeed, be explained as man’s actions which have been manipulated by some other forces. He further propounds that even Kane’s agent-causal libertarianism is defenseless against the claim that the agent himself or herself is a part of the manipulation. Finally, he says that since neither libertarianism nor compatibilism can explain man’s action as free of predetermination, man cannot hope to possess freewill or to act on his own without any external manipulation or internal determination. In four cases, Pereboom envisages four scenario in which Plum desires and decides to kill his wife White for some personal advantages. All of these cases meet all the compatibilist conditions; but the twist of Pereboom’s example is that in all cases, Professor Plum’s psychology is determined and manipulated by some neuroscientists. He concludes that since Plum himself is the factor which provokes him to commit the action, he cannot be held morally responsible, as Pereboom says, “the best explanation for the intuition that Plum is not morally responsible is that his action is produced by a deterministic causal process that traces back to factors beyond his control” (Pereboom 446). Indeed, Pereboom’s argumentative exemplifications seem to be convincing in the sense that they exhume the seeming lacks of Kane’s argumentation for man’s freewill which is permitted by causal determinism. But a critical analysis of Pereboom’s approach to freewill and man’s moral responsibility will necessarily reveal that Pereboom himself has failed to consider the scenario in a large context. According to Kane, the agent’s decision is a self-forming action which is what he or she wants to be. Though the agent may belong to a predetermined universe, his decision making is not a part of determinism or manipulation. He is free to choose any way. Pereboom conjures this same picture but with a manipulator behind the scene. As a fictional reality or poetic truth, his argumentative exemplification are quite convincing; but Pereboom is not cautious enough to envisage other scenarios also to exhume the lacks of his proposition. If there were two manipulators, what would happen? Suppose, in Pereboom’s “four cases”, there are two groups of neuroscientists. One group of those two are engaged in manipulating and provoking Professor Plum to his wife; on the other hand, another group manipulate him to kill his wife. What would happen, if both of these two groups are equally expert in their field. If Professor Plum is a man of freewill, he will decide either this or that. That is, either he will kill his wife or he will not kill. It means that his decision-making or freewill is not predetermined. Therefore, man is responsible for his action, because his freewill is not determined by any external or internal forces. Logically, Kane’s claim is more convincing than Pereboom’s. Though Pereboom has attempted to portray man as the help victim in the hand of fate, man must be responsible for what he does. May be, the fact whether he is a criminal or not is a different question. But he has the power to decide on his own. According to Kane’s libertarianism, man has the sort of freewill by which he can be held responsible for his actions. Freewill is basically human being’s autonomy to decide and to choose and determinism assumes that fate of everything and every course of action in the universe has been determined prior to its existence by a supreme planner or a super power. Those who believe that human mind is predetermined defy their own rational being. Indeed, here the determinist often fails to perceive that freewill is essentially a feature of human soul which itself is free of the material existence and realities. It may be biased by physical realities; but there is no hard and rule that God as well as physical realities predetermines human mind. Works Cited Derk Pereboom, “Why We Have No Free Will and Can Live Without It”, in Reason and Responsibility, pp. 443-56. Robert Kane, “Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes”, in Reason and Responsibility, pp. 425-38. Read More