Freedom and Belief Book

This book explores whether people are free agents, which Strawson defines thus: "To be a free agent is to be capable of being truly or ultimately responsible for one's actions." What does that mean? "To be capable of being truly or ultimately responsible for one's actions is to be capable of being truly and ultimately deserving of praise and blame for them." Okay, but what are the words "truly and ultimately" doing here? What would it mean for someone to deserve praise or blame for their actions, but not truly and ultimately? The author actually never answers this question.

I started getting a hint in Chapter 2, where Strawson lays out a simple argument that we are never truly and ultimately responsible for our actions. In short: If a person takes some action, they took it because of how they were at that time, i.e. their beliefs, dispositions, etc. Maybe they are responsible for some of those beliefs and dispositions, having chosen them at an earlier time. If so, they chose them because of how there were at the earlier time. This causes an infinite regress, making it impossible that anyone is ultimately responsible for their action, since they cannot be ultimately responsible for the characteristics that led them to take the action. In other words, no one can be causa sui (self-caused), which means no one is ultimately responsible for their actions. Therefore, no one is ultimately deserving of praise or blame for their actions.

There is a very straightforward sense here in which people are not ultimately responsible for their actions. No one is the ultimate cause of their actions - they are the proximate cause, but something else caused them to be such as to cause their actions. (Or, if determinism is false, perhaps there was no cause, but they had those characteristics by chance.) But why is this interesting? In this sense we cannot be said to ultimately deserve praise or blame for our actions, but surely we do deserve praise and blame, just not ultimate praise or ultimate blame. So why should be disturbed that we lack this ultimate responsibility? And why should we use the word "truly" as well as "ultimately"? The author does not address this. Perhaps he finds it obvious, but I do not.

Since this argument was laid out in Chapter 2, I thought Strawson might elaborate on the issue later in the book, but he went in a completely different direction. He argued that, if true freedom were possible, any being that was (truly) free would necessarily believe that it was (truly) free. He didn't really have any argument in favor of this. He just said that it seemed to be true. He gave a bunch of examples of weird beings that have a lot of relevant properties, like being self-consciously aware of their ability to choose, without believing or experiencing themselves to have true freedom of choice. He always concluded that those beings seemed not truly free to him, specifically because they did not believe they were. This intuition was not at all compelling to me, and I'm not sure why it was for Strawson. At the very end, he says, "I am not sure what to say if you disagree." Same, buddy.

I did still enjoy the book for two reasons. First, I think the argument from Chapter 2 showed clearly that determinism does not pose unique problems for free will. If determinism is true, the main problem therein is that no one is the ultimate cause of their own actions. However, if determinism is false, this is still the case, the actions instead being ultimately causeless or random. This makes it easier for me to think about free will since I can set the issue of determinism aside.

Second, I enjoyed the list of traits that (perhaps) necessarily require you to believe that you have them, and Strawson's discussion of whether this is problematic. One example was that perhaps in order to enter a contract, a person needs to believe that they are doing so. After all, if someone travels to another culture and takes actions that would ordinarily cause them to enter a contract, but without being aware that this is how contracts are formed in this culture, we might say that they have not truly entered a contract. Strawson says that entering a contract is a "conventional" property, meaning it as a matter of convention whether you enter a contract or not. He finds this lack of independence between properties and belief in those properties unproblematic for conventional properties. Strawson sees this discussion as integral to free will, since he thinks free will is another property that requires one to believe one has it. I saw it as more of a digression, but an interesting one.