Superagency: Sources of the Libertarian Intuition

In which are suggested some causes of supposing we're not fully caused.

First, just a reminder: the overall objective of The Good Determinist (TGD) is to promote an unabashedly naturalistic, cause-and-effect view of ourselves as both true and beneficial. We’re far better off, practically and ethically, sticking with what science says about the human animal than to suppose we’re outside or above the natural order in some respect. As described in the opening gambit, a naturalistic view of agency has it that our powers of choice and control depend on there being reliable causal relations - physical and psychological - between who we are and what we do, not on our being causally exempt from such relations. We needn’t be uncaused causers to be effective agents, and indeed any sort of causal disconnection between us, our situations, and our actions would hinder, not help us realize our goals. The widespread assumption that determinism (even what I call pragmatic determinism) somehow disempowers us is thus itself disempowering. It blocks access to a thorough-going causal analysis of ourselves and our behavior since determinism supposedly means we cease to exist as effect, responsible agents. But this panicked conclusion doesn’t follow, as explained in parts three and four of TGD.

Here I just want to suggest some factors that explain why we might assume, hope, or believe we’re not fully caused to become who we are and act as we do. That belief has it that we somehow transcend our past and current circumstances, internal and external, such that we might have done otherwise in an actual situation, but (crucially) in a way that’s up to us and not chance. Call this the libertarian intuition. It sets up the agent as a radical self-originator with ultimate control over itself such that it bears ultimate responsibility for itself and its actions - it’s what we might call a superagent. Superagency contrasts with the naturalistic, ordinary agency most of us have: as coherent ensembles of character, values, desires, and cognitive capacities, we control our behavior in service to our ends. But we can’t step out of ourselves to exert a further level of control of ourselves not already determined by who we are. Since there’s no credible evidence or logical basis to think any system could have such ultimate control, superagency should be discounted as akin to something supernatural, hence non-existent if we’re naturalists - in the same suspect category as souls, spirits, and gods. But why might we suppose we’re superagents, as many folks do? Here are some reasons, and your corrections and additions are invited.

Bad press about determinism. As noted in the opening gambit, we in the West have been enculturated to think determinism obviates agency and responsibility, as in the phrase “free will vs. determinism.” Since determinism is widely (but wrongly) conceived as equivalent to fatalism, and as undermining moral responsibility, it’s no wonder that our self-concept includes a large dose of libertarianism, of being free from those nasty causal constraints as we shape ourselves, deliberate, and make choices. To question the libertarian intuition is thus perceived as a threat to our very nature, a denial of what makes us most human. To suggest we’re not contra-causal agents is as verboten in polite company as declaring oneself an atheist at a tent revival. Being an out-of-the-closet determinist is not (yet) a good strategy to win friends and influence people, but as pragmatic determinism gets better press - the objective here - the stigma attached to it will recede. Then we can get real about causation when it comes to ourselves.

Dualistic cultural inheritance. We are the inheritors of long religious and secular traditions of dualism about the human person, a dualism that supposedly exempts us from determinism in some crucial respect. Except for Calvinism, the Abrahamic religions have it that contra-causal free will, exercised by the immortal soul, is a God-given capacity that makes us, not God, responsible for evil in the world. Moreover, only such freedom allows us to love God voluntarily (and if we don’t we’re justly consigned to hell). Descartes, the arch-dualist, argued that we are categorically mental agents - souls, more or less - that control our bodies by means of choices that are ultimately up to the agent, nothing else. How this mind-body interaction worked via the pineal gland was never quite made clear, but it left the soul free to take ultimate credit and blame for behavior. And although most contemporary naturalist philosophers are compatibilists about free will (they see responsible agency as compatible with determinism) some continue to defend libertarian, contra-causal free will despite the dearth of evidence for it. So both the religious and secular traditions and their modern variants hold that by having immaterial essences, or some capacity to transcend our merely physical determinants, human beings have the ultimate control of superagency. Fortunately, the rise of the sciences and naturalistic worldviews are challenging this assumption.

The phenomenology of choice. One source of the libertarian intuition noticed by Spinoza long ago is that we often don’t have introspective access to all the moment-to-moment causes of our decisions and choices, even though there presumably are such causes at the biological and psychological levels. Those causes are a function of who we are, essentially, which means we determine our choices even if we lack access to the exact determinants. For example, let’s say you’re a fan of classic British novels. If, as sometimes happens, you weren’t privy to the subtle determinants of your choice (plus any indeterminism involved - not your doing so we’ll leave that aside) it might seem that you could have selected Middlemarch, not Howard’s End, as your next read. You made the choice alright, but it might well feel that you could have chosen otherwise just as you were in the actual situation. No one forced that choice on you, after all. This phenomenology of voluntary action might suggest that you’re an agent who isn’t fully determined in making decisions but who nevertheless determines them, so bears ultimate responsibility for them. But of course you shouldn’t take your introspective limitations as any proof superagency exists, and (crucially) the choice remains yours even if you were fully determined - by your very own tastes and idiosyncrasies! - to make it. You don’t need to be a superagent with ultimate control to have real control over your behavior. And any indeterminism playing a role in the choice wouldn’t be your doing, so can’t add to your responsibility for it.

Soul-body dualism of conscious agency. Deterministic causation is often portrayed as a matter of energy transfer, of billiard ball style, push-pull interaction among physical parts governed by more or less mechanistic regularities at various levels - atomic, molecular, chemical, biological, etc. As physical beings, there’s no reason to think our neuro-muscular parts deviate from such regularities (some of which might involve indeterministic or probabilistic relations) even though our behavior usually can’t be explained in terms of them, but only in psychological terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, and so forth. Still, those psychological states, grounded in neuronal and bodily processes, can only determine our behavior because we are physical beings. Our physicality, complex and finely tuned by evolution, puts our psychology firmly within a causal context. But of course many, perhaps most folks don’t accept naturalistic physicalism but are mind-body dualists, or better, soul-body dualists. After all, given the nature of consciousness, it might very much feel to you as if you’re a non-physical, mental agent sitting inside your head. Thus you might suppose your desires and will float free in some important respect from your body: the non-physical (thus mental) soul controls it in a way not fully constrained by your biological nature. Such “soul control,” it’s supposed, gives us the contra-causal power to have done otherwise, even willed otherwise, no matter our physical state. Of course this poses the Cartesian puzzle of how the soul gets a grip on the body, but such concerns are usually left to the theologians, leaving the libertarian intuition intact as a folk-metaphysical assumption. But if we take a science-based view of ourselves - the cognitively rational thing to do as argued here - the dualism underlying that assumption looks untenable.

Reactive attitudes. For reasons traceable to the evolution of social species, we’re strongly predisposed to blame and punish wrongdoers. Our moral emotions, aka reactive attitudes, tend to focus on individuals as the most proximate, salient cause of a transgression, not the circumstances that explain who they are and their behavior. Although our desire to retaliate has an obvious instrumental value in deterring and incapacitating wrongdoers, it finds a powerful justification in the idea that the person who harmed us could have acted otherwise but simply chose not to. The assumption of contra-causal superagency makes that person a fully deserving target of the punishment we want to mete out, giving us license to inflict maximum suffering. It’s thus no surprise that people don’t want to hear that offenders are fully caused in their character, motives, and behavior since that distributes causal responsibility for the offense outside the wrongdoer, to his historical and surrounding circumstances. It makes him less deserving target of punishment than he would be according to the libertarian intuition, in which causal responsibility inheres solely in the agent. The bottom line, therefore, is that our penchant for retaliation works against taking a causal view of ourselves and for attributing superagency. We usually don’t want to be talked out of our moral anger. But fortunately, this psychological dynamic can work in the opposite direction: if we take determinism on board, that can mitigate our reactivity, helping us to second-guess our retaliatory instincts in favor of addressing the root and situational causes of bad behavior. Such a perspective serves us well both personally and societally, making us less prone to anger in our daily lives and less needlessly punitive in our criminal justice policies.

Psychological reinforcement. Superagency flatters the self by assigning us ultimate credit for our good deeds and achievements. It also allows us the satisfaction of assigning ultimate blame to others for their failings and wrongdoings, as for instance in exacting retributive punishment. We can set ourselves up as self-made saints, others as self-made monsters. The libertarian intuition also lets us off the hook by implying that we don’t have to worry about the conditions under which people fail or succeed; after all, those conditions don’t finally determine what people do, it’s their contra-causal choices. Superagency is thus the perfect justification for laissez faire economic and social policies: since he can make it on his own, if he just chooses to, we aren’t responsible for being our brother’s keeper. Oppositely, questioning superagency and seeing that social determinants are critical to human flourishing can foster a sense of mutual responsibility for each other’s welfare.

There are undoubtedly other sources of the libertarian intuition, and I invite your additions and corrections to what I’ve covered above. Despite its empirical and logical shortcomings, that intuition has long-standing psychological and cultural inertia so won’t go quietly into that good night. But it should go, given the bad cognitive and ethical consequences of belief in superagency and the manifest benefits of taking on a naturalized conception of ourselves. Those benefits - psychological, practical, and moral - will be the focus of installments to come.