Opening Gambit: Could You Have Done Otherwise?
Yes and no.
Causal determinism, roughly the idea that there’s only one next possible state of affairs given the reliability of natural laws, is widely seen as a threat to human agency. It’s often supposed that if you couldn’t have done otherwise in an actual situation with all internal and external conditions just as they were – the strong deterministic scenario – then you don’t really make choices and can’t be held responsible for them. On a causal view of ourselves, had conditions been otherwise you might have chosen otherwise, for instance if instead of wanting vanilla you wanted sherbet, you likely would have ordered it, not the vanilla. But the determinist points out that this simply describes an alternative, counterfactual (counter to fact) causal story: the determinants are imagined to be otherwise, so a different choice might have arisen. But the actual situation was as it was, so obviously the choice was what it was given the situation that explains it, any randomness or indeterminacy aside (which we’ll get to below).
Why people sometimes find deterministic accounts of behavior disturbing is an interesting question. After all, for us to be effective, responsible agents, we have to determine – cause, bring about – our choices. And unless we’re coerced into behaving against our interests and preferences, we generally determine them in a way that’s up to us, an important freedom of action. Were those choices not a causal function of who we are and what we want, that would undermine our agency, not enhance it. So clearly causation – here the existence of the psychological determinants that explain our choices – is not a problem; rather it’s an essential ingredient of being a responsible agent.
Of course, universal causal determinism is quite possibly false given what we know about the micro world of quantum mechanics. At the quantum level there seems to be an inherent unpredictability about what will happen next, albeit within a well-known probability distribution given by the Schrodinger equation. But obviously this bit of indeterminacy can’t give us more control over things or make us more authentic originators of our choices. Nor does it subtract from the very reliable causal relations that exist at higher physical levels – chemical, biological, and behavioral – or invalidate the various commonsense psychological regularities we appeal to when explaining ourselves to each other. The reliable causal connection between mental states such as desires, beliefs, intentions and the behavior that they explain is still in place even if your micro-constituents aren’t perfectly deterministic in their operation. So the determinism that I will focus on here, that of the higher-level causal regularities we appeal to in accounting for human development and behavior, isn’t upset by the falsehood of universal determinism.
If it’s the case that the causal connections involved in human behavior at higher levels are probabilistic, not strictly deterministic, this again wouldn’t make you a more responsible agent, that is, make choices more up to you. True, you might have done otherwise in an actual situation given the causal slack introduced by a probability distribution, but not in a way that adds to your responsibility: you’re not in control of the probabilities themselves. Probabilistic and indeterministic relations between events set the limits of control: if they exist it might be less likely that you’ll perceive a situation accurately or bring about exactly what you want to happen. In which case, what happens might be less up to you and less optimal than if the relations were deterministic. The bottom line here is that indeterminism and probability don’t add to agency even if they allow, as determinism does not, for real alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. They would only introduce a less reliable connection between your desires, intentions, and your behavior, thus attenuating your control over it. And it’s the exercise of control that makes you responsible for what you do.
But, you might wonder, why talk about determinism in the first place? Why not just talk about causation? No one particularly objects to talk of cause and effect, but determinism evokes all sorts of negative reactions, precisely because it’s widely portrayed and perceived as the enemy of freedom, agency, and responsibility. That perception is concisely wrapped up in the familiar phrase “free will vs. determinism” (try Googling it). Everyone wants free will, so if determinism is opposed to it so much the worse for determinism. But causal determinism just is causation, causation in its strongest form: exceptionless laws connecting one event with another. Given the complexity of human behavior, there may not be simple, exceptionless laws governing it, but there are a host of very reliable causal regularities at multiple levels - chemical, biological, neural, behavioral, and psychological - that apply to us, both as certified by common sense and as shown by controlled scientific experiments. And as we’ve seen above, human agency and responsibility depend on reliable causal connections between who we are, what we want, and the choices we make, not exceptions to them.
Talk of determinism, what I aim to defend here, highlights the fact that we rationally should want such reliability, not causal slack, when it comes to acting effectively in the world in a way that’s up to us, a very desirable sort of agency. It also focuses our attention on the actual causes – what are often called the determinants – of who we are and what we do. Such knowledge potentially gives us more control in creating the conditions conducive to getting what we want, including becoming better agents. So it looks like determinism, construed as reliable causal connections, is not only compatible with agency – autonomous, self-directed action – but an essential condition for it. Since universal determinism is likely false, I call this pragmatic determinism: for practical purposes of understanding, prediction, and control we should suppose there are sufficient causes and conditions that explain – determine – human development and behavior. Plus, we’ve seen that indeterminism does nothing to enhance effective agency, rather the opposite (we might call this the disutility of indeterminism). For these reasons I think it’s eminently rational to be a pragmatic determinist: we should operate on the assumption that there are, usually, a sufficient set of causes that account for what we do. Of course, we often can’t know precisely what these are in many situations, but it’s nevertheless rational to suppose something explains our behavior, not that it comes out of the blue.
What if we think of human agency as somehow in conflict with causality, as the phrase “free will vs. determinism” suggests? That means we’d be choice makers who operate in some crucial respect independently of what we ordinarily suppose explains our decisions. For example, we’d have to believe that when deciding whether to give money to charity or spend it on ourselves we could have decided otherwise given all the determinants in play, in this case the competition between the desire to help others and the inclination for self-indulgence. We might be influenced one way or another, but if we’re undetermined, uncaused deciders, the choice isn’t, finally, explained by such influences but is a radically free act of will: we could have chosen otherwise in that exact situation. The problem is that such freedom disconnects the choice from who you are, which is the competing set of desires in play as you make the decision. It actually makes the choice unintelligible from your standpoint as a motivated agent. You wouldn’t be able to explain why you chose as you did; there would be no reason – a stronger desire to give to charity, for instance – that explains it. Moreover, there’s no good evidence to support the claim such an uncaused decider exists; what does exist is you as a physically discrete organism embedded in an environment, physical and social, with causal transactions going in both directions: from you to your situation, and from your situation to you. All told, the picture of ourselves as a radically free arbitrator doesn’t help the cause of agency, either in making sense of our choices or in making them more, instead of less, up to us as we were at the moment of choice.
A better, more realistic and rational picture of agency is that of being a coherent nexus of preferences, goals, and behavioral capacities that responds flexibly in situations, making choices that reflect and promote our interests. We rationally want to be well-informed, well-prepared, and adept in our deliberations among the options that present themselves. In choice situations we often don’t immediately know what’s best to choose, which is why we have to deliberate in the first place. What we rationally don’t want is much if any causal slack – indeterminacy, randomness, chance, probabilistic relations – in our perceptual processes or in the deliberations that produce the choice. The good determinist won’t suppose that all this is anything more (or less) than the brain in action: assessing the situation, simulating possibilities, estimating their probabilities, weighing their pros and cons, and eventually arriving at a decision. What we rationally want is a causally reliable set of neural operations that does the job, even if sometimes it delivers conclusions we later regret, and thus might learn from. What isn’t rational is to want the capacity to somehow step outside those operations – those that constitute you at the moment of choice – and control them from a causally privileged vantage point such that you might have chosen otherwise; such control wouldn’t be explicable as a function of who you actually are. You don’t rationally want the ability to choose other than what your best shot at making a good decision determines. So, when thinking of yourself as an effective agent, be content not to suppose you could have done otherwise in an actual situation, given who you were and what you wanted. Of course, as noted above, you might do otherwise in future similar situations given your capacity to learn from experience. So it isn’t as if your hands are tied by determinism.
As convincing as I find this account of agency, many philosophers (thankfully not a majority) and many if not most lay folk don’t buy it, saying that unless we could have done otherwise in actual situations, with all our physical and psychological parameters just as they were, we don’t really make choices and aren’t responsible agents. The way they see it, determinism, even the limited, pragmatic determinism I espouse, obviates the agent: we become merely passive passthroughs of impersonal causation. But how precisely our being exceptions to causal regularities helps to enhance agency, whether in perception, forming beliefs, deliberation, and executing our intentions, remains obscure. There’s no obvious place in the brain where a causally uninfluenced decider resides: it’s a seamless network of vastly complex interactions, the organ of memory, imagination, and decision-making that works 24/7 on your behalf. And it’s crucial to keep the following in mind: the fact that you, the embodied possessor of such an amazing organ, are fully a function of antecedent conditions doesn’t subtract from your own very potent causal powers. As we’ve seen above, to whatever extent causal slack or indeterminism plays a role in the exercise of those powers, for instance in the way neurotransmitters and electrical potentials mediate your neurally-instantiated deliberative machinery, it can’t make the exercise more your doing since they’re not under your control – hence the disutility of indeterminism. But equally, determinism, construed as reliable causal connections between who you are, what you want, and what you do, doesn’t make it not your doing, rather it explains precisely why it’s yours and no one else’s. Since the causal connections pretty much constitute you and your behavior, don’t think of the causality involved as coercive, but rather as enabling.
Even if you accept this picture of agency, misconceptions abound about what pragmatic determinism entails about such things as responsibility, rationality, control, creativity, authenticity, and other central human capacities and characteristics. Those who sign on to determinism sometimes suppose it subverts our causal powers, rendering agency illusory. This can lead to harmful and disempowering conclusions, including skepticism about our abilities to effect change and a passive fatalism about life. Some suppose that unless we could have done otherwise in an actual situation, we can’t be held responsible for what we did, so determinism amounts to a get out of jail free card. Not so: you will be held responsible! Correcting such misconceptions is thus an essential first step in making the case for pragmatic determinism and in transforming misguided determinists into good determinists. Beyond that, however, lie what I think are the manifest positives of taking a consistently causal view of who we are and what we do: increased control conferred by understanding the determinants of human development and behavior, and greater compassion and forbearance generated by the insight that no one could have become other than they are given the determinants that actually explain their character and values. We’ll get to these after our error correction chapter, which is itself prefaced by a short explanation of why it’s rational to stick with science in thinking about all this. Why would anyone believe there’s a causally privileged chooser in the first place?
But before wrapping up this first installment, let’s take another look at the question posed by its title, just to clear up any ambiguities. Could you have done otherwise in an actual situation, for example where you ordered the vanilla, not the sherbet? Obviously you had the capacity or ability to order the sherbet, so you could and likely would have ordered it had you preferred it. You could have and might have done otherwise in this counterfactual sense (see note 1 below). But, as I hope you agree, you don’t have the capacity to decide and act independently of your preferences and decision-making processes. Given the actual situation in which you deliberated, there’s no reason to suppose a different decision would have arisen. You couldn’t have done other than what your preferences and deliberations determined since you don’t have the capacity to act independently of them, which is a good thing. It’s in this sense – the actual, not counterfactual sense – that you couldn’t have done otherwise.[1] True, had there been some randomness or probabilistic relations involved in your deliberations, a different decision might have arisen, but as we’ve seen, neither chance nor probability can make a decision more up to you, that is, more (and not less) a function of what you want and your deliberations. The point being that adding indeterministic factors can’t increase your responsibility for a choice, even if they allow that choice to have been otherwise.
Having thus ruled out indeterminism as an enhancement to agency and responsibility, for simplicity’s sake I’ll leave it aside in what’s to come about the causal story of human development and behavior. That the actual story might involve some indeterminism won’t help in understanding the reasons why people end up as they do, or act as they do. Whereas understanding the causality is essential; knowing the determinants of character and action is the key to increased compassion and control. But please remember: that you don’t have the capacity to transcend the physical and psychological determinants of your behavior doesn’t rob you of causal power. After all, those determinants are you in action, they are your powers expressing themselves as you confront the exigencies and opportunities that life presents. What more could you want in the way of agency?
[1] What I’m getting at here is the the distinction between what philosophers call the unconditional vs. conditional senses of could have done otherwise, see here.
Randomness within probabilistic distributions may have more value for agency than you allow. Recognizing randomness in response, still constrained by probability, turns “I could not have done otherwise” into “My response was within a range of possibilities.” This doesn’t undermine determinism, but it does, perhaps, provide an opening, from a psychological perspective, to see one’s self as a more flexible, open, and dynamic pattern. Preserving a place for legitimate spontaneity and surprise may lessen the resistance to considering determinism for someone starting from a libertarian free-will perspective.
Furthermore, reflecting on the observer effect in the double-slit experiments may also help point the way towards how to widen or narrow the distribution of possible responses through the application of attention.
In writing abiut Jean-Paul Sartre’s attempt at reconciling Marxism with his own existentialism (https://substack.com/home/post/p-153506274), I noted:
——————————————————————————————————-
Sartre viewed orthodox Marxism as wrongheaded because of its determinism. In that regards, while Sartre was very much an atheist, he was a believer in what my friend Tom Clark would call the “little gods” associated with contra- causal free will, or as Clark would describe it:
“The naturalist view is therefore directly at odds with the widespread culturally- transmitted assumption in the West that human agents have supernatural souls with contra-causal free will. Souls are causally privileged over their surroundings, little first causes, little gods: each of us has the power to have done otherwise in the exact situation in which we didn’t do otherwise. Since this assumption expresses itself in our concepts of blame, credit, responsibility, self-worth and deservingness, to challenge it has all sorts of ramifications, personal, social and political.” (https://naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will).
While Tom Clark is not a Marxist, his naturalistic views concerning determinism and human agency are close to the views accepted by most orthodox Marxists.