Revisiting van Inwagen, Lewis, and the Consequence Argument
43 Ramsini
The struggle between the compatibilists and the incompatibilists concerning determinism and free will has been a long one. But there has been some recent work done on one argument by Peter van Inwagen known as the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism. I will first introduce this argument and clarify David Lewis’ objection to it, and then explain the disagreement between Michael Huemer and Helen Beebee, a dispute similar to the one between van Inwagen and Lewis, over the validity of the Consequence Argument. After presenting everyone’s case, I will argue that Beebee and Huemer have strayed away from Lewis’ original objection by focusing too much on when it is possible to do otherwise, rather than how this is possible. Once that is clear, I claim that the work for both the Lewis-style compatibilist and the van Inwagen-style incompatibilist lies in discerning the concept of free will that we must attribute to individuals that is either consistent or inconsistent with determinism. Determinism is the theory that past events combined with the laws of nature determine exactly one future. Van Inwagen defines free will as “the power or ability of agents to act otherwise than they in fact do” (Incompatibility 20). To further clarify, he explains that in order for arbitrary person S to have free will with respect to the proposition p, it has to be the case that “S can render [could have rendered] [p]…false” (Incompatibility 21). His original Consequence Argument follows a story of a judge who is currently deciding whether to impose the death penalty on a criminal appearing before him. In this specific judge’s country, in order for the criminal to be granted clemency, the judge simply has to raise his hand. After the judge does not raise his hand, the question is asked whether he could have raised his hand or not. Assuming that no unusual circumstances are present that could prevent the judge from raising his hand, van Inwagen proceeds with an argument to show that if determinism is true, the judge could not have raised his hand. In general, the argument goes as follows: if determinism is true, then the state of the world at some point in time before someone’s birth in conjunction with the laws of physics necessarily entails a particular state of the world with respect this individual at some later point in time. In the above example, the state of the world before the judge was born in conjunction with the laws of physics necessarily entails that the judge not raise his hand. For the judge to have instead actually raised his hand, he would have had to have changed the laws of physics (since he is unable to change the state of the world before his birth); however, since this is not possible, the judge could not have raised his hand.1 This argument, known as the Consequence Argument, is intended to argue for the view of incompatibilism, whose proponents claim that determinism is incompatible with free will, while compatibilists claim that determinism is compatible with free will. This argument has incompatibilism as one of its implications because it is due to determinism being assumed in the premises that the judge (or anyone) is unable to do otherwise than he actually did, and thus, according to van Inwagen, not have free will. The controversial line of the argument is the one which claims that the judge could not have rendered the laws of
aegis 2009
Larsa Ramsini
