Freedom and Responsibility

By Hilary Bok

Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. Hilary Bok takes a fresh approach here, as she seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.

Bok argues that when we engage in practical reasoning--the kind that involves asking "what should I do?" and sifting through alternatives to find the most justifiable course of action--we have reason to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. But when we engage in theoretical reasoning--searching for causal explanations of events--we have no reason to apply concepts like freedom and responsibility. Bok contends that libertarians' arguments against "compatibilist" justifications of moral responsibility fail because they describe human actions only from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning. To establish this claim, she examines which conceptions of freedom of the will and moral responsibility are relevant to practical reasoning and shows that these conceptions are not vulnerable to many objections that libertarians have directed against compatibilists. Bok concludes that the truth or falsity of the claim that we are free and responsible agents in the sense those conceptions spell out is ultimately independent of deterministic accounts of the causes of human actions.

Clearly written and powerfully argued, Freedom and Responsibility is a major addition to current debate about some of philosophy's oldest and deepest questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781400822737

Book preview

Introduction

MECHANISM is the view that human actions can be explained as the result of natural processes alone; that the mechanistic style of explanation, which works so well for electrons, motors, and galaxies,¹ also works for us. If mechanism is true, then just as our explanations of the motions of planets no longer require the existence of prime movers to supplement natural processes, so our actions could in principle be explained by a complex neurophysiological theory, without reference to a nonnatural self that causes them.

All libertarians in the free will debate believe that one form of mechanism—determinism—is incompatible with freedom. If determinism is true, then any action can in principle be explained as the necessary result of the state of the universe at any previous time—say, at some moment in the Cretaceous period—together with the natural laws that show why those conditions had, eventually, to produce that action. Since neither the state of the world at a time preceding her existence nor the nature of the physical laws that govern it is the agent’s doing, and since, given those conditions and those laws, she could not have performed at that time any act other than the one she actually performed, it is hard to see why we should say that she performed it freely.

Some libertarians believe that freedom might be compatible with indeterministic mechanism, which holds that our actions might be explained not only by prior conditions and natural laws but also by the occurrence of various indeterministic natural events—for instance, by the fact that a uranium atom emitted a particular particle at a particular time. In this work I will assume that they are wrong: that the central issue between libertarians and compatibilists is the compatibility of freedom not with determinism but with mechanism; that determinism threatens freedom because it is a version of mechanism; and that libertarians should take no comfort from the idea that our actions might be caused by indeterministic natural events.² Libertarians want to show not only that antecedent events do not determine our conduct but that we do; that our choices are not just indeterministic but self-determined. The claim that our choices reflect indeterministic natural events in our brain does not help us to see what this self-determination might amount to or how we might exercise it. And, as Gary Watson has argued,³ to the extent that libertarians try to answer these questions by invoking, for instance, our ability to act for reasons, they make it unclear why self-determination requires that our choices be causally undetermined.

Libertarians who regard freedom and mechanism as incompatible also believe that we are free and therefore that mechanism is false. In the words of Roderick Chisholm: We have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing—or no one—causes us to cause those events to happen.⁴ This view is remarkable in that it is supported neither by evidence nor by apparent plausibility. It is impossible, for obvious practical reasons, to see whether or not two people in exactly the same physical state will always perform the same actions unless some indeterministic event causes them to behave differently; barring the discovery that they will not, it is hard to imagine what evidence could support the libertarian position.⁵ Nor is it plausible to claim that we, alone among natural beings, have this sort of power; and no libertarian, to the best of my knowledge, has given a clear account of what it is, or of how, exactly, we use it.

That libertarianism is implausible is, I take it, hardly news to libertarians. It is not credible that someone could maintain, as Chisholm does, that we are prime movers unmoved⁶ who cause our actions by an unanalyzable faculty of immanent causation,⁷ without being aware of the oddness of her position. Libertarians, I assume, are not drawn to their position by its theoretical elegance and explanatory power but driven to it, despite its implausibility, because they believe that mechanism implies conclusions so deeply unacceptable that any alternative that allows us to avoid those conclusions is preferable, however obscure and panicky⁸ its metaphysics might be.

My purpose in this book is to persuade libertarians to abandon their position. If my account of their motivation is correct, there are three ways of doing this. First, one could attack the libertarian position directly. Second, one could try to show that libertarianism does not allow us to avoid the unacceptable implications of mechanism. Finally, one could try to argue that mechanism does not imply those conclusions.

The first two tactics might persuade libertarians. If they were convinced that libertarianism was untenable, libertarians would have to accept mechanism in the interests of intellectual honesty, unacceptable implications and all. If they were convinced that libertarianism did not allow them to escape those implications, then the salient difference between libertarianism and mechanism would be the implausibility of libertarianism, the reasons not to be a libertarian would leap to the foreground, and libertarians would probably abandon their position of their own accord. However, both of these tactics would succeed not by helping libertarians out of their predicament but by closing off the one route by which they had thought they might escape it.

What one makes of this fact will depend on what one thinks of that predicament. If one believes that the supposedly unacceptable implications of mechanism are in fact quite harmless, or that they obviously do not follow from mechanism, then one will not be particularly disturbed by this—although in either case it would be an act of kindness to show libertarians the error of their ways. In either case, one’s interest in the problem of freedom of the will would presumably be an interest in clearing up unfortunate misunderstandings in the name of mental hygiene.

On the other hand, one might feel that libertarians’ concerns are in fact serious and legitimate—that the conclusions the libertarian fears are as unacceptable as she thinks they are, and that she has some reason to think that mechanism might actually imply them. In this case, one would share libertarians’ dismay at the outcome of the first two tactics. One would think that, whatever the merits of their position, libertarians have noticed a gap in our thought that needs to be filled. And one would be driven to investigate the third option, not solely as an act of kindness to the distressed, but because that distress is one’s own: to answer the libertarian in oneself.

Libertarians are afraid that, if mechanism were true, the claim that we are autonomous persons, morally responsible for our characters and our actions, would no longer be justifiable. This claim seems to rest on the idea that we are the authors of our lives, free to invent for ourselves, through our choices, as splendid or tawdry a character as we please, and that those choices are made freely, among alternatives that are truly open to us, by a self whose will is not determined by anything outside it. But if mechanism were true, we would instead have to view ourselves as beings whose entire lives have in a sense simply unrolled in accordance with natural laws. Our moral struggles, our hardest-won victories and our slow, deadening slides into vice, our strangest idiosyncrasies, our moments of illumination and our failure to live by them, our terrors and shames, our loves and our hatreds—all would turn out to be the result of factors beyond our control. It would therefore seem that nothing about our characters, our choices, or our actions could be attributed solely to us; that we would have to view ourselves not as the originators of our choices but as the scene on which events that occur elsewhere work out their consequences. And it is not clear why, if we view our actions and our choices thus, we should hold ourselves morally responsible for choosing well or badly; why we should see our good and bad choices as displaying our virtue or vice, not just our good or bad luck.

Various authors have tried to explain how, if mechanism is true, we can nonetheless be said to be morally responsible for our actions. However, I do not think that they have fully answered the libertarians’ concerns on this score. In saying this, I do not mean to deny all that they have done. Their work is interesting and very suggestive; in particular, some of their accounts of when we should say that someone has chosen freely, or that she is morally responsible for her conduct, seem to me substantially correct. On this score I make no claims to originality: my accounts of these issues do not differ greatly from standard compatibilist accounts, and I will draw on existing compatibilist literature at many points in this book.

But I do not think that compatibilists have succeeded in showing libertarians that their theories allow us to justify the claim that we are morally responsible for our conduct. Libertarians have an argument that seems to show that no compatibilist account of freedom could allow us to justify that claim; and I do not think that compatibilists have shown, in a way that ought to satisfy libertarians, that their theories can meet that objection. Until they do so, libertarians will continue to feel that compatibilist accounts of freedom have failed to register the seriousness of mechanism’s threat to our moral responsibility, and they will—quite reasonably—remain unconvinced that that threat can be parried. They will therefore feel that compatibilist theories do not describe true freedom and genuine responsibility at all, but cheap facsimiles which they are asked to accept as the real thing.

The claim that compatibilists have not fully addressed libertarians’ concerns about moral responsibility is not a criticism of their work, unless the failure explicitly to defuse any concern that someone might have about one’s view is taken to be a fault. But my purposes in writing this book require that I go further than (I think) they have gone. The point of this project is to remove one of libertarians’ main motives for adopting their position, on the assumption that until this obstacle is removed, mechanism will seem to them to be at best an awful conclusion forced on them by theoretical consistency and compatibilism a shallow attempt to duck its consequences. In order to accomplish this, I must not simply provide a good account of freedom and moral responsibility.

I must also try to determine, as clearly and sympathetically as possible, why this account might nonetheless fail to satisfy libertarians, and to provide as complete and meticulous a response to their concerns as I can.

I should note at the outset several limitations on the topics I will discuss. First of all, while the view I develop in this book is a Kantian one, I have not presented it as an interpretation of Kant’s work. I am less interested in presenting Kant’s views accurately than in putting (what I take to be) his ideas to use. For this reason I do not engage with the massive exegetical literature. Moreover, I have for the most part avoided using Kant’s terminology.⁹ Since I understand noumenal causes, transcendental freedom, and the like differently from many authors on this topic, invoking them in the course of my arguments would, I thought, only court needless confusion. I have cited relevant passages from Kant’s works at various points in my argument. But these citations can only begin to suggest the extent of my indebtedness to Kant’s work, which I here acknowledge.

Second, my aim in this book is to show that the fact that our actions and choices can be explained mechanistically does not imply that we are not free; and therefore that the claim that we are free and morally responsible does not presuppose a libertarian account of human agency. To establish this conclusion I must show that some compatibilist account of freedom and moral responsibility is correct: that we are free whenever our actions are in some sense up to us. But I do not need to determine precisely when we should say that our actions are up to us in the relevant sense or to answer such questions as: Should we hold addicts morally responsible for continuing to abuse their drug of choice? At what point should we begin to hold children morally responsible for what they do? Can a person legitimately be held to act freely when she engages in compulsive behavior or acts under the influence of some powerful unconscious motive?

I would have to answer these questions if I wanted to provide a comprehensive and detailed account of freedom and moral responsibility. But my purpose in this book is not to provide such an account of human freedom and responsibility but simply to show that mechanism in particular does not threaten them. To do this, I need only show that some persons can be free and responsible moral agents even if mechanism is true. Since, presumably, sane adults in normal circumstances are free if anyone is, I will concentrate in this book on showing that they are free and responsible moral agents and leave aside the question when exactly we should hold that a person is not, or has ceased to be, morally responsible for her conduct.¹⁰

Third, I will not discuss a whole range of issues that might be thought to be an integral part of any work on this more limited topic. Among them are various issues an investigation of which might provide a solution of the problem I seek to address: for instance, the nature of the conception of causality employed in mechanistic explanations, the type of necessity, if any, enjoyed by natural laws, or the kinds of causal connections that might exist between physical and mental events. My silence on these issues does not imply that I do not think that they might profitably be examined. I can see no reason, in principle, why the problem of freedom of the will should not have more than one solution, and, for all I can see, it might be possible to resolve it by considering topics that I will not discuss.

Fourth, its threat to our freedom and moral responsibility is, presumably, not the only troubling implication of mechanism. Some writers on this subject seem to be concerned by the thought that all our behavior might in principle be predictable; others by the possibility that human actions, for all their occasional grandeur, sublimity, poignance, or tragedy, might have such mundane causes; still others by the very idea that we might be no more than parts of the messy tangle we call nature. In this book I will not be concerned with these problems directly (although I may touch on some in the course of arguments directed at other targets). This is partly because it seems foolish to try to address all of mechanism’s potentially troubling features at once; and partly because, since I do not myself find these possibilities troubling, whatever I might say about them would probably not satisfy anyone who did.

Finally, I will say nothing about the issue of punishment, with which moral responsibility is often supposed to be intimately connected. Those who think that to hold someone morally responsible for an action is just to claim that they should be punished or rewarded for it will find my discussion of this topic almost wholly unenlightening. To them I can only say that since I do not regard ascriptions of moral responsibility primarily as forms of punishment and reward, this problem has never presented itself to me in that light. My account will also fail to satisfy those who seek a justification of a conception of moral responsibility strong enough to justify eternal damnation or beatitude. This requirement cannot, I think, be met by any coherent conception of freedom of the will and of moral responsibility; and therefore I will not try to meet it.

¹ Daniel Dennett, Mechanism and Responsibility, in Dennett, Brainstorms, 1981, p. 233.

² I could not make this assumption if my purpose in this book were to argue directly that libertarianism is false, since in that case my arguments would be directed only against a view that some libertarians do not hold. But this is not my aim. As I explain in what follows, my purpose in this book is to provide a compatibilist account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility that meets libertarians’ concerns. In assuming that those concerns attend any account of freedom that is compatible with any form of mechanism, whether deterministic or indeterministic, and therefore that they cannot be met simply by supposing that our choices might involve indeterministic natural events, I make my task more difficult, not less. If I succeed in showing that libertarians’ concerns can be met if any plausible form of mechanism is true, I will a fortiori have shown that they can be met if determinism is true; in so doing I will have addressed the concerns of all libertarians, whether they believe that freedom is incompatible with any version of mechanism or only with determinism.

³ Gary Watson, Free Action and Free Will, pp. 164–5.

⁴ Roderick Chisholm, Human Freedom and the Self, p. 32.

⁵ Daniel Dennett makes this argument in Elbow Room, pp. 135–6. Of course, by the same token we cannot have any evidence against the libertarian position. But this fact cannot be used in support of libertarianism in the absence of some other reason—theoretical simplicity, explanatory power, or another of the considerations which I have lumped together under the name of ‘plausibility’—to believe that libertarianism is true. We also have no evidence for or against the hypothesis that subatomic particles are actually conscious beings whose regular behavior should be described not as obedience to natural laws but as joyful participation in the cosmic dance. But the absence of evidence against this idea is not enough to make it a reasonable one.

⁶ Chisholm, Human Freedom and the Self, p. 32.

⁷ Ibid., p. 28.

⁸ P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, p. 80.

⁹ Many of my arguments in this book might, I think, have been stated in Kantian terms. Thus, the argument in the penultimate section of chapter 2 could be described as working out some implications of the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal selves, and this book as a whole could be seen as a diagnostic exercise one of whose (ancillary) purposes is to see how much mileage one can get out of ‘acting under the idea of freedom’ alone, to see whether, at what point, and for what purposes, ‘transcendental freedom’ must be invoked, and thus, perhaps, to help us to see what it might be. (My answers to these questions are contained in the concluding chapter of this book.)

¹⁰ Of course, my account will have some implications about the kinds of considerations that should lead us to conclude that an agent does not act freely or that she is not morally responsible for her conduct. But I will not try to develop these considerations into a comprehensive account of these issues. I avoid doing so not only because my present project does not require that I develop such an account but because I am not confident that I understand the nature of conditions like insanity, compulsion, and brainwashing well enough to settle questions about the moral responsibility of agents who suffer from them. Certainly the role of the agent’s will in, for instance, compulsive behavior is more complicated than it is made out to be by those writers who describe compulsive persons as the hapless victims of irresistible desires. And compulsive behavior seems almost straightforward by comparison to phenomena like dissociation and severe depression, which are much easier to describe from the outside than to make sense of from the point of view of those who suffer them; that is, to understand as conditions that beset persons.

1

The Problem

THE PURPOSE of this chapter is to set out what I take to be the central problem of freedom of the will. This chapter has three sections. In the first I describe a prereflective view of freedom of the will—the view which, I believe, most people start out with and from which my discussion of this topic will therefore begin. I try to show that this view breaks down under the pressure of questions which mechanism forces it to address and that some standard compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will likewise fail to address these questions satisfactorily. In considering these compatibilist accounts, I hope both to block some apparent solutions to the problem of freedom of the will and, by explaining why they are not solutions, to bring the problems they do not resolve into clearer focus.

In the second section, I provide a more general account of the difficulties faced by compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will and try to show what any such account must do if it is to satisfy libertarians. I do not try to provide an airtight argument for the libertarian claim that no compatibilist account of freedom of the will can satisfactorily resolve these problems; if such an argument existed, my task in this book would be an impossible one. I do, however, try to explain why libertarians doubt that any satisfactory compatibilist solution to these problems exists and to make their doubts as plausible as I can.

Finally, I argue that libertarianism itself cannot satisfactorily resolve the problem of freedom of the will. Libertarian accounts of freedom of the will are designed to avoid the particular problems that beset compatibilist accounts, and in this they succeed. But they do so only at the cost of incurring a different set of problems for themselves, problems which I argue that they cannot escape. I argue in the first section of this chapter that the prereflective view of freedom of the will breaks down when confronted by questions that mechanism forces it to address; libertarians’ mistake, I believe, is to assume that they can avoid confronting these questions by simply denying mechanism. I argue instead that the truth or falsity of mechanism does not affect the legitimacy of these questions; that while they may originally have been suggested to us by mechanism, they remain to haunt any account of freedom of the will, whether or not that account assumes that mechanism is true. And I argue that no libertarian account of freedom of the will can resolve these questions satisfactorily.

The problem of freedom of the will is, I think, insoluble once one adopts a libertarian characterization of that problem and of the issues on which its resolution depends. If I am right, then any successful justification of the claim that we are free must show that characterization to be mistaken. But it is not obvious that it is mistaken. The libertarian characterization of the problem of freedom of the will is in many ways a natural refinement of our prereflective view of that problem. Its roots in our ordinary understanding are the source of its power and attraction, which must be matched by any alternative characterization of that problem that libertarians will not rightly dismiss. It is not obvious that an alternative characterization that is as natural an extension of our ordinary view of freedom exists or that it could be defended against the libertarian characterization of that problem. But unless such an alternative can be found, I argue, the situation is worse than even libertarians suspect, since not even their position allows us to defend the claim that we are free and responsible beings.

The Prereflective View and Its Demise

I usually think of myself as having a character that I have constructed through innumerable choices. Each of my thoughts and actions changes me slightly, tracing, like a tiny stylus, grooves in the surface of my character. By now my character has many such paths, some deep and others barely traced, some freshly worn and others long neglected. Each is a way of responding to some type of situation; their broader patterns make up character traits, ways of thinking and acting that come naturally to me. They offer me, in virtually any situation I might encounter, a path of least resistance: some way of seeing that situation and of responding to it.

But I also think that I can choose whether or not to take that path; that I can, at any point, step back from my character, ask whether the response it offers me is the best one, and, if I wish, choose another. I think that I make the choices that form my character, and that I can choose to oppose my strength to the habits I have created. There may come a point when I will no longer be able to prevail against them, either because my habits have worn too deep, or because I have allowed my self to atrophy so far that I no longer have the strength to choose a different path. But until that point, I think, it is always open to me to look beyond my character, to see how it might be improved, and to begin the long, slow process of changing it.

If I did not have this capacity, I would be bound by my character, which would itself be created not deliberately but by something like a process of erosion. The stylus that carves out my character, once set in motion, would wander over its surface, impelled by external forces and by its own inertia, taking whatever course offered it least resistance. Since I could not choose its path, I would not be morally responsible for my character or my actions; there would, in a sense, be no me to whom moral responsibility could be attributed. But because I choose my actions freely, I can see my character as something that I have created and for which I am morally responsible. I may not always exercise this responsibility wisely, or at all; I may act haphazardly or thoughtlessly, thereby creating a character I will later regret. But because I could have chosen to do otherwise, the failure in such cases is mine alone.

This intuitive view is silent on the issues with which the literature on freedom of the will is concerned. It is a prereflective view: one to which no difficult questions have yet been addressed. It is committed neither to a detailed conception of my capacity to reject the courses of action suggested by my character, on which so much seems to turn, nor to any account of the sense in which I could have chosen to do otherwise than I did. Most important, it takes no position on the question: what, if anything, causes me to choose as I do?

This last question is forced on us by the success of modern science, and by the mechanistic worldview that modern science presupposes. Mechanism was of course conceivable—and conceived—in earlier eras. But in those eras, the idea that the behavior of any living creatures, let alone of human beings, could be explained in the same way as the motions of rocks or planets would have been easy to dismiss; if anything, it might have suggested the possibility of explaining the motions of inanimate objects by invoking a directing intelligence. There was too great a gap between the kinds of motions that could be explained mechanistically and our own behavior for a thoroughgoing mechanism to be plausible on any grounds other than antecedent ideas about the structure of the world.

Nowadays, however, mechanism does not seem so far-fetched. Science has turned out to be able to explain much more than the average Renaissance scholar, thinking of pendulums and projectiles and planets, would have thought possible. It has complicated the distinction between the organic and the inorganic beyond recognition, allowing us to explain the behavior of living organisms without reference to the vital principles once thought necessary for that purpose. And its explanations have begun to reach into the human mind, thereby raising the possibility that our own behavior is, in principle, explicable in the same terms.

Mechanism is compatible with a rather flat and literal reading of the intuitive view outlined above. It is true that each of us does have a character in the sense in which I have used that term: a collection of habits and character traits that result, in large part, from the choices we have made. It is also true that, unless we allow this capacity to atrophy completely, each of us can step back from that character, ask ourselves whether the course of action that it suggests is really what we want to do, and decide to accept or reject it. Those who claim that freedom of the will is compatible with mechanism usually argue that it is because we have this capacity that we can claim to be free and morally responsible.

However, mechanists also insist that the self is a part of the natural world and that its activities are caused in accordance with natural laws. Though I can step back from my character and evaluate it, whether or not I do so at a given time depends on my physical state at that time, the stimuli I encounter, and any indeterministic natural events that affect me. These causes also determine the course of my deliberations and their outcome. Given sufficient knowledge, a scientist could predict the course of my deliberations in a given situation: which considerations I would take to be particularly relevant, with what force a given reason would strike me, the significance of which facts I would overlook, to which temptations I would be susceptible, how much resistance I would offer, and what, as a result, I would do. If mechanism is true, then, given that the world was as it was and that the indeterministic natural events that affected my choice occurred as they did, I could not have done anything but what I actually did; I could not even have thought anything but what I actually thought.

To accept the literal reading of the prereflective view and conclude from it that mechanism does not call our freedom into question, one must believe that these implications of mechanism are not relevant to the question whether or not we are free; that since the prereflective view holds that we are free if we have the capacity to step back from our characters, and since mechanism does not imply that we do not have this capacity, it follows straightforwardly that mechanism does not affect our freedom. To accept this conclusion on these grounds, however, is to overlook the possibility that mechanism might call into question not our ability to meet our prereflective criteria for freedom but our reasons for thinking that those criteria can be used to decide whether or not we are free. Mechanism clearly alters our view of the self that can step back from its character, the character it steps back from, and the relations and differences between the two. In so doing, it raises the question whether our capacity to step back from our characters, as newly understood, suffices to show that we are free. To answer this question, one would have to determine what it was about the self that originally led us to claim that those who are not bound by their characters are free, and whether or not we can still claim that we have this feature if we accept the truth of mechanism.

Libertarians contend that once we confront this question, we cannot maintain that mechanism and human freedom are compatible. The prereflective view must rely on the assumption that there is some crucial difference between those beings that are bound by their characters and those that are not, a difference that allows us to claim that only the latter are free. Mechanism obliterates many of the differences that one might have thought distinguish the two. On a libertarian reading of the prereflective view, among the distinctions that mechanism denies are those that underlie the prereflective claim that beings who can step back from their characters and evaluate the courses of action that their characters would lead them to perform are free. Libertarians might support this claim in a variety of ways; what follows is a reconstruction of one possible line of reasoning.

As long as mechanistic explanations of human behavior could be rejected as obviously implausible, we could simply assume that there is some radical difference in kind between the ways in which humans and animals cause their behavior and the ways in which inanimate objects are caused to move. Inanimate objects are entirely passive, acted upon rather than acting. A car’s brake lever, for example, does not in any sense initiate that car’s stopping: when the brake pedal is depressed, the brake lever must engage the brake. It might be said to contribute to that car’s stopping simply by existing in the form it does: if the lever were not there, or were not connected to the brake, or were made not of metal but of elastic bands, depressing the brake pedal would not stop the car. But the lever did not cause itself to exist in this form: it did not choose to manifest itself as just this brake lever or cause itself to have just these properties. Its existence, properties, and subsequent motions are all wholly determined by events that occur elsewhere, and to whose eventual effects it makes no independent contribution.

Mechanism, as I have said, is the view that the same principles that we use to explain the movements of such objects can be used to explain human behavior. To reject mechanism as obviously implausible is, therefore, to assume that human behavior is in some sense quite unlike the movements of a brake lever; that however our actions are to be explained, we will not turn out to be simply the media in which the effects of previous events reveal themselves. We must, instead, be in some sense active and spontaneous, contributing to our behavior not simply by existing in a particular form at a particular place and time but by initiating courses of action.

What this spontaneity comes to is, as I have said, left obscure by the prereflective view. But our prereflective vagueness on this point is understandable, since a precise account of spontaneity is not essential to the argument. If, prereflectively, we were truly in doubt as to whether we had the capacity spontaneously to initiate courses of action, then we would have to clarify exactly what this capacity involved in order to determine whether or not we possess it. If our freedom required that we possess some particular form of spontaneity, then we would have to determine more precisely the sense in which we can act spontaneously in order to determine whether we are spontaneous in the right way. But if, prereflectively, we assume that mechanism is false, then any plausible explanation of our actions must hold that we have the capacity spontaneously to initiate courses of action and that this capacity marks a difference in kind between our actions and the motions of inanimate objects. And if human freedom requires only that some account that meets these conditions be true, then determining precisely what form of spontaneity we actually possess would not be a matter of great urgency.

If we assume that mechanism is obviously false, then the dominant issue that an account of freedom of the will must address will concern the differences between the behavior of humans and that of animals, who would seem to possess something like our capacity for