Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will

152 Pages·2002·8.66 MB·English

by  Timothy O'Connor

Persons and Causes
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Persons and Causes
The Metaphysics of Free Will
TIMOTHY O ' C O N N O R
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 2000 by Timothy O'Connor
First published in 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup-usa.org
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2002
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O'Connor, Timothy, 1965-
Persons and causes : the metaphysics of
free will / Timothy O'Connor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-513308-0; 0-19-515374-X (pbk.)
1. Free will and determinism. I. Title.
BJ1461.027 1999
123'.5—dc21 99-20501
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
In memory of Norman Kretzmann
—teacher, mentor, and friend
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Acknowledgments
Much of this book was composed in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1996–1997 while 1
was supported by a Gifford Research Fellowship from the University of St. An-
drews and by a fellowship from the Pew Scholars Program. I am grateful to both
these institutions for their support. I thank the members of the Departments of
Logic and Metaphysics and of Moral Philosophy in St. Andrews for their hospital-
ity and fruitful philosophical discussion—in particular, Professors Crispin Wright
and John Haldane.
I have used portions of previous articles of mine, more or less substantially
revised, in the present work: "Indeterminism and Free Agency: Three Recent
Views," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993); "Thomas Reid on
Free Agency," Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (1994); "Emergent Proper-
ties," American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1994); "Agent Causation," in Agents,
Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, ed. T. O'Connor (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and "Why Agent Causation?" Philosophical
Topics 24 (1996; published by Arkansas University Press). I thank the publishers
for permission to incorporate that material here.
I have read material ancestral to parts of this book to audiences at meetings of
the American Philosophical Association and at the following universities: Arkansas,
Brigham Young, Cornell, Edinburgh, Free (Netherlands), Glasgow, Indiana, Notre
Dame, Purdue, Seattle Pacific, and St. Andrews. Other philosophers have helped
me through private conversation or correspondence. I thank in particular the fol-
lowing: David Armstrong, Robert Audi, Roderick Chisholm, Mark Crimmins,
Daniel Dennett, Fred Dretske, Laura Ekstrom, John Martin Fischer, Stewart Goetz,
Anil Gupta, Bob Hale, William Hasker, Chris Hill, Al Howsepian, Jaegwon Kim,
Keith Lehrer, Barry Loewer, David McCarty, Brian McLaughlin, Michael Murray,
John O'Leary-Hawthorne, Alvin Plantinga, David Robb, Gregg Rosenberg, William
Rowe, Tom Senor, Sydney Shoemaker, Michael Slote, Eleonore Stump, Michael
Tye, Peter Unger, Peter van Inwagen, Rene van Woudenberg, Ted Warfield, David
Widerker, and Timothy Williamson.
VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Now for some special appreciation. I thank my wife, Gail, and our three chil-
dren, Brian, Laura, and Lindsay, for their love and joyful companionship.
I thank Jonathan Bennett and Samuel Gorovitz, whose article "Improving Aca-
demic Writing," Teaching Philosophy (June 1997), struck me to the quick at just
the right moment—shortly after I had completed a first draft of this book. The
result was a couple of weeks of revising what I had written, line by line. I am not
confident that they would be satisfied by my efforts, but what is in your hands is
a far more readable text than that which preceded it. (An anonymous reader also
deserves credit in this regard.)
For help in thinking about the problem of free will, I especially thank Ran-
dolph Clarke and Robert Kane, with whom I have corresponded over several years,
and above all Carl Ginet, who directed my original Ph.D. thesis on this topic at
Cornell University and has been a friendly and trenchant critic ever since.
Finally, I acknowledge my great debt to another former teacher, Norman
Kretzmann. He inspired in me a love of philosophy, taught me to see its problems
through its history, attended meticulously to my work, and extended love and
kindness to me in the manner of a father. Sadly, it is a debt I can no longer hope
to repay, as Norman died shortly before this book went to press.
May 1999 T. O.
Bloomington, Indiana
Contents
Introduction xi
1. Freedom and Determinism 3
1.1 An Ancient Argument 3
1.2 Some Modal Principles and the Argument for Incompatibilism 5
1.3 The Fixity of the Past and of Natural Laws 15
1.4 Freedom and Responsibility 18
2. Freedom and Indeterminism: Some Unsatisfactory Proposals 23
2.1 The Trouble with Incompatibilism 23
2.2 Simple Indeterminism: Carl Ginet on Choice and Control 24
2.3 Causal Indeterminism: The General Strategy and a Problem Posed 27
3. The Agent as Cause: Reid, Taylor, and Chisholm 43
3.1 The Agency Theory 43
3.2 Thomas Reid 43
3.3 Richard Taylor 49
3.4 Roderick Chisholm 55
3.5 Summary 60
Appendix: Chisholm's Later Writings on Agency 61
4. The Metaphysics of Free Will 67
4.1 Overview 67
4.2 Event Causation 68
4.3 Agent Causation 71
4.4 C. D. Broad's Objection to the Very Idea of Agent Causation 74
4.5 Remarks on a Contemporary Alternative Account of
Agent Causation 76
4.6 Ersatz Agent Causation? 79
4.7 Alternative Possibilities, Responsibility, and Agent Causation 81