Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism

270 Pages·2020·2.386 MB·English

by  Danny Frederick

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
SERIES EDITORS: DAVID F. HARDWICK · LESLIE MARSH
Freedom, Indeterminism,
and Fallibilism
Danny Frederick
Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism
Series Editors
David F. Hardwick
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Leslie Marsh
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presupposi-
tions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected, or
misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches.
The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the
wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations
of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondi-
tion of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by
society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the
DNA of the modern civil condition.
With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liberalism
emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral econom-
ics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors are
soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency. Sole
or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collections,
broadly theoretical or topical in nature.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15722
Danny Frederick
Freedom,
Indeterminism,
and Fallibilism
Danny Frederick
Independent Scholar
Yeovil, UK
ISSN 2662-6470 ISSN 2662-6489 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism
ISBN 978-3-030-48636-5 ISBN 978-3-030-48637-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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Acknowledgements
Chapter 2 offers a solution to the problem free will that I set forth in my
article, ‘Free Will and Probability,’ in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy
43 (1): 60–77 (2013), though the exposition has been truncated, revised,
and embedded within a wider context. I thank the editors and publisher
for permission to draw on that material in this book.
I thank Mark D. Friedman for helpful comments on the book, and
patient probing of my responses, which saved me from at least one significant
error and helped me to improve clarity and add some needed detail. I also
thank an anonymous reviewer for astute observations that prompted me
to emend, or fill some gaps in, my explanations and to make a couple of
stylistic adjustments.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Free Will and Indeterminism 7
3 Rationality and Fallibilism 43
4 Persons and Animals 109
5 Freedom and Constraint 145
6 Individual and State 195
7 Conclusion 245
Index 255
vii
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Gambling and risk; expected utility 75
Table 3.2 Trapped miners, two shafts; expected utilities 80
Table 3.3 Trapped miners, ten locations; options 83
Table 3.4 Trapped miners, ten locations; expected utilities 84
ix
1
Introduction
This book is concerned with metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and poli-
tics. That is a very large area of study for a relatively short book. The aim
is plainly not to provide comprehensive coverage. It is instead to connect
those different areas of study by solving related problems in each using
the concepts of freedom, indeterminism and fallibilism. To put the point
another way, the aim is to obtain an understanding of freedom in the
round, in its metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and political aspects.
The metaphysics of free will (Chap. 2) depends upon the idea of indeter-
minism; epistemology and rationality (Chap. 3) depend upon creativity
and criticism, which cannot be understood without the ideas of indeter-
minism and fallibility; the distinction between persons and other animals
(Chap. 4) depends upon the ideas of critical rationality and moral agency,
and thus on the ideas of freedom, indeterminism and fallibility; morality
(Chap. 5) demands both freedom and constraint, so it is also tied to the
ideas of indeterminism and fallibility; and the purpose of the state (Chap.
6) is to safeguard freedom, as far as our fallibility permits. Each Chap. of
the book gives pointers for the further study of its topic. That further
study may, given our fallibility, require some revisions to what is said in
this book. The goal here is to provide a unified and coherent account of
© The Author(s) 2020 1
D. Frederick, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, Palgrave Studies in Classical
Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2_1
2 D. Frederick
the different facets of freedom at a high level of generality. The account is
novel in its emphasis on indeterminism and fallibilism. It is a curious
irony that defences of freedom are often deterministic and dogmatic.
That irony is not investigated directly in what follows.
Chapter 2 is concerned with the metaphysical problem of free will.
There is a general, though not universal, consensus in contemporary phi-
losophy that indeterministic accounts of free will are incoherent. Some
philosophers simply deny that persons have free will, but most seek to
show how free will or, rather, some anaemic substitute for it, is compati-
ble with a deterministic account of human behaviour. I show how that
consensus is mistaken and how the mistake arises from a simple failure to
distinguish acts from other events. I criticise and reject the famous infi-
nite regress arguments of H. A. Prichard and Gilbert Ryle against acts of
will; and I expose some confusions or errors about free will to be found
in Roderick Chisholm, Donald Davidson, Laura Ekstrom, John Martin
Fischer, Harry Frankfurt, Robert Kane, Hugh McCann, Alfred Mele,
Robert Nozick, Helen Steward, Richard Taylor and many others.
The topics of Chap. 3 are epistemology and rationality. On the tradi-
tional and still current view, rationality is deterministic, either because it
compels us, so far as we are rational, to think or act in a particular way, or
because it has an authority over us to which we submit, so far as we are
rational. As a consequence, on that view, the beliefs and actions of a ratio-
nal agent are justified. I reject that approach as inconsistent with our
fallibility and I criticise the views of Aristotle, Bill Brewer, John Broome,
René Descartes, and Christine Korsgaard. Following the lead of Karl
Popper, I explain how rationality is critical and I offer an account of
deductive reasoning as a process of guessing, testing and freely deciding.
I discuss Lewis Carroll’s puzzle about deduction and criticise Ryle’s solu-
tion. I summarise Popper’s epistemology to give an account of theoretical
reasoning that contrasts with the mainstream. I offer a new account of
practical reasoning as guessing and testing and I excoriate contemporary
decision theory, particularly its treatment of risk (indeterminism) and
uncertainty (fallibilism). I criticise some recent work of Peter Graham,
Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane, and Helen Steward.
In Chap. 4 I discuss the metaphysics and epistemology of personhood.
What I say on the metaphysics is broadly in line with traditional