More on Free Will and Economic Outcomes

A Codicil to my Essay on Deserving to be Rich Without Free Will

The Principle of Alternate Possibilities states that someone is only blameworthy for what they do if they could have done otherwise. Versions of the PAP are used by certain people (called “leeway incompatibilists”) to argue that determinism and free will are incompatible. In my last essay, I ported over that logic to issues of distributive justice, and I outlined the following PAP-style argument to illustrate the tension between free will skepticism and the idea that people deserve their economic outcomes:

1. In a deterministic world, no one could have avoided their current economic circumstances.

2. If someone could not have avoided their current economic circumstances, they cannot be blamed for their current economic circumstances.

3. Thus, no one can be blamed for their current economic circumstances.

I took a shortcut here, and a reader correctly pointed out that the conclusion doesn’t actually follow from the premises unless it’s implied that our world is deterministic. Again, PAP-style arguments are arguments for incompatibilism, so the conclusion should really read as follows:

3. (revised) Thus, no one can be blamed for their current economic circumstances in a deterministic world.

What I Really Should Have Written

But my post was about whether the ability to do otherwise is required to justify economic deserts, not about trying to prove that determinism precludes both, so my analysis still holds—if economic desert does require the ability to do otherwise, then either (a) there’s no economic desert or (b) people have libertarian free will. And the only plausible way that economic desert doesn’t require freedom to do otherwise is (I maintain) via Susan Wolf’s argument that praiseworthiness (and maybe by extension deservedly being rich) can survive without it. That’s the key idea, and here’s an argument that better captures it than the sour-note aperitif that I provided originally:

1. If no one can do otherwise, then no one could have avoided their current economic circumstances.

2. If someone could not have avoided their current economic circumstances, they cannot be blamed for their current economic circumstances.

3. Thus, no one can be blamed for their current economic circumstances unless they have the ability to do otherwise.

Even here, I want to substitute “libertarian free will” in the conclusion for “the ability to do otherwise,” because it better reflects what’s at issue—the other way of having the ability to do otherwise (primarily classical compatibilism) isn’t really plausible.¹ Thus, you really need can-do-otherwise free will to properly underwrite economic blameworthiness. Also, recall that under Wolf’s theory, (2) is true, but only for blameworthiness—someone could possibly still deserve their positive economic circumstances. Maybe I should have just stuck with that. But, in for a penny...

Unadvisedly Overstating Incompatibilist Arguments

The revised version of (3) isolated above, which includes the “in a deterministic world” language in the conclusion, is correct in that it cures the defect of the initial argument and better parallels the leeway incompatiblist arguments I was imitating, but also it’s a little bit dishonest and too weak, I think—as are other incompatibilist arguments—truthfully, I still don’t mind the initial argument much, warts and all.

Someone might read the amended argument ending with “in a deterministic world” and think, “Well, maybe the world isn’t totally deterministic, so this probably doesn’t matter.” But suppose, for example, that it’s unclear whether the world is deterministic, but that you also believe that indeterminacy is incompatible with free will. Or, suppose the world is deterministic except for one region of the Horsehead Nebula or for one moment every five hundred years, or what if indeterminism exists in many places but doesn’t materially feature in human decision-making? In these cases, PAP-style arguments (and other incompatibilist arguments) are still live wires, regardless of whether the world turns out to be fully deterministic. You can’t just ignore incompatibilist arguments because they’re contingent on determinism and, you know, quantum mechanics or whatever: you better have a specific and plausible theory of how that potential indeterminacy can be parlayed into free will. Here’s a nice passage from McKenna and Pereboom about just how narrow the window of relevance is for indeterminism:

[F]or those who contend that indeterminism is required for free will, it is not enough that determinism is false. The indeterministic breaks must be suitably located in the unfolding history of the world in a way that corresponds with potential moments for free action. Moreover, not only must actions have indeterministic causes suitably located, the indeterminism must be of a certain sort. This point is often expressed in connection with claims about indeterminism that some think may occur at the quantum level. On this suggestion, our universe is not deterministic. . . Nevertheless, so the worry goes, the indeterminacy does not allow for macro-level variation of the sort that would involve, say, a person standing up rather than remaining seated. . . For the most part, the thought is, the micro-indeterminacies “cancel each other out,” and we get macro-level determinism. Hence, what physics may suggest is something like “near-determinism” or “almost-determinism.”²

Moreover, even if the universe’s indeterminism were robust, amplified, and strategically positioned to generate unpredictable behavior, it’s dubious whether agents beholden to god’s dice (rather than a clockwork physics) can more fittingly be regarded as exercising free will or warrant ascribing moral responsibility to them.³

So, if you think the duality of determinism and unwieldy randomness is inescapable, you might also think that compatibilism is the whole ballgame when it comes to free will, even though quantum mechanics suggested decades ago that the world might be immune from the errorless forecasts of a Laplacian demon, because you think either that indeterminacy is de minimis or that it’s even more clearly incompatible with free will than determinism is. The prolonged and intense debates about compatibilism wouldn’t make much sense if physics had really neutered the threat of determinism extinguishing freedom, and controversies about compatibilism were really solely about compatibilism.

So, if we wanted to precisify the initial argument, maybe it should look something more like this:

1. Given determinism, no one could have avoided their current economic circumstances.

2. If someone could not have avoided their current economic circumstances, they cannot be blamed for their current economic circumstances.

3. Thus, no one can be blamed for their current economic circumstances so long as they live in a deterministic world, or if it’s unclear whether the world is fully deterministic but indeterminism is also incompatible with economic desert anyway, or if the world isn’t indeterministic enough or in the right ways/places, etc.

You get the point. It’s not as slick as the original.

Something Else to Think About

I’ve mentioned before that I think PAP-style arguments are legit, even though most others don’t. Instead, most philosophers are compatibilists, and many of them believe that Frankfurt counterexamples have disproved the PAP. The corollary to the PAP (which again, claims that someone is morally responsible for something only if they could have done otherwise) in my economic-desert variations is this claim:

2. If someone could not have avoided their current economic circumstances, they cannot be blamed for their current economic circumstances.

I’d guess (pretty confidently) that most of those compatibilist philosophers are bleeding hearts who would struggle to reject this proposition, even though they reject the PAP.

1. But see Kadri Vihvelin’s work on Dispositional Compatibilism or New Dispositionalism for an attempt to overhaul and revive Classical Compatiblism.

2. McKenna, Michael & Pereboom, Derk., Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction, Routledge (2016): 23. For a more detailed neuroscientic analysis of whether quantum indeterminism could be meaningfully involved in human decision-making, consult Chapter 10 of Sapolsky, Robert M., Determined: Life Without Free Will, Random House (2023).

3. See McKenna & Pereboom, supra note 1, at 55. Also, I’m glossing over whether indeterministic mechanisms necessarily amount to uncontrollable randomness; See id. at 55-56 for some discussion of that.