Nice quote. Present needs indeed a context. I would put though a stop at the place of the first comma. Because even context does not make the present "real". It can only provide a frame of reference, based on which we can enclose, define, limit it. And that has to be continuous. I can say, for example, that right now I'm writing a message, but I cannot locate any specific moment during this period by saying "Now!" or "This!"etc. Because until I have spelled or even thought of it, that moment would have already passed. Time is continuous and thus indivisible. Hence there cannot be a "real" present. In other words, there's no actually such a thing as a "present". — Alkis Piskas

I am rather suggesting that there often is a real thick present moment. This moment is the time during which a still ongoing process in which a rational agent or observer is involved takes place. The fact that at any time during the unfolding of such a process one can further reflect on, or attend to, the fact that some things have already become determinate and other things have not yet become determinate doesn't negate the reality of that thick present. It just shows that multiple thick present moments can overlap, sequentially follow, or be nested within one another. But everyone one of them are equally real, and wholly present (within the perspective of the agent), while they occur, on my view.

In other words you are not interested in how "change" is actually used, but instead in arbitrarily restricting that use it to suit certain philosophical pretences. — Banno

Nope. I am quite interested in how the word "change" is actually used. But I am also pointing out that one must be sensitive to the fact that not all the different contexts of use are equally suitable to buttressing the philosophical thesis that you were putting forth. (Although your thesis was negative, an amounted to the denial of a necessary connection between change and time, it was still a characteristically philosophical thesis).

The point is, we understand these locutions perfectly well, but it plays merry hell with the notion that time is required for change to occurs. — Banno

Some of the locutions you used would indeed be well understood in some ordinary life contexts. Other locutions that you made use of seemed rather strained to my ear and, as I have already pointed out, seemingly relied on equivocation for you to make a characteristically philosophical point about change and time. Against the charge of equivocation you offered no defense.

Wittgenstein's idea that meaning is use may be strained too much in saying that what change, as such, requires can be elucidated through looking at every ordinary language use of the word "change" and homing in on what is required for "change" (that is, whatever "change" refers to in those contexts) to meaningfully be said to occur in all of those uses. Using this methodology, one could claim that there is no conceptual connection between something being a rabbit and something being a mammal since there are ordinary uses of the word "rabbit" where this word refers to wooden sculptures, or images of rabbits, that aren't mammals at all. I think it is likewise mistaken to move from instances of ordinary language where the word "change" is meaningfully used in order to draw philosophical conclusion about some unique concept being referred to by that word and identify what is or isn't necessary for it to find meaningful instances. It is, it seems to me, this unwarranted move from the multifaceted uses of a word in very dissimilar contexts to philosophical conclusions about essential or inessential features of an allegedly unique concept being referred to by it that constitutes a paradigmatic example of what Wittgenstein called "language gone on holiday".

If you prefer, the colour of the image changes from left to right. There's nothing odd about such a locution. — Banno

Yes, I agree that there isn't anything odd about this locution. But what it conveys it is perfectly consistent with the claim that the image itself doesn't change. It also lends itself readily to the analysis I had suggested with my skater and frozen lake example. The locution you used earlier was "the following image changes from one colour to another, from left to right" (my emphasis). This sounds more odd, at least to my ears. Furthermore, the odd formulation isn't innocent. It's meant to buttress you initial philosophical claim that "Time and change have no special relation. Change occurs from place to place as well as from time to time". This thesis is not an expression of mere common sense and it is telling that you had to make use of an odd locution to buttress it.

What separates the present from the past? — frank

Primarily, on my view, it's the lived practical perspective of a self-conscious rational agent that separates the past from the present, at any given (thick) moment. It's this perspective that is the source of the separation. The present moment, as it occurs, from that perspective, is a moment in time when opportunities for action (or, derivatively, for observation) present themselves to the agent and are being exploited (or are being missed). The past is the time when those opportunities have been realised, in part or in whole, or have been foreclosed. What sorts of actions and opportunities are at issue furnishes the context that determines how thick this present moment is and when it is that (and to what degree) it will have already receded into the past.

When we take the present as "thick", it is inevitable that some part of "now" is future, and some part of "now" is past. I think this is what ↪Joshs refers to. If we describe this as tripartite there is two distinct ways of doing that. One would be to say that this part of past, along with this part of future, is a unity which we call now. In this case we need to determine the principle which unites into a "now", to determine how "thick" the now is. In this sense, the past and future are not actually separated from each other, as having a real difference from each other, because they are united in one "now". The other way is to assume that the unity is artificial, arbitrary, or not real, and that within the appearance of a thick "now", there is some real past, some real future, and a divisor, which is the true "now".

Which side of these two ways looks more plausible to you? Is there a real distinction between past and future, or not? — Metaphysician Undercover

On my view, the the thick present is unitary rather than its being tripartite. Furthermore, the division between the (thick) present, the past and the future is perspectival and context dependent, but it is nevertheless real since it is causally effective. It is causally effective since the way in which human beings inhabit time, and carve out a structured (thick) present out of it, which consists primarily in them doing things, individually or collectively, conditions the sort of future that takes shape as a result of this temporal process.

The reason why you can't really say that a thick present interval (or ongoing process) is, 'at any given time', composed of a past, a (thinner) present, and a future, within itself, is that in so doing you are merely shifting the context to a new one, incompatible with the first. The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould once said that he was wary of analysing his own pianistic techniques for purpose of teaching them. He alluded to the story of the centipede who knew how to walk until such a time when she was asked in what order she was moving its legs, at which point the centipede became unable to walk. It is of course actually possible to break down one's technique, for purpose of analysing it, teaching it, or rehearsing aspect of it through practice. The main point of the story, though, for present purposes, is that inhabiting thinner present moments (as happens when you break down your own skillful performances into smaller duration segments) is incompatible with the concurrent wholistic exercise of the skill.

4. Ignore me and listen to fdrake. — unenlightened

But if they do that, they'll be following your advice, right?

I'm not sure I follow. Non-presentists take the present moment to be unreal despite its perspectival (indexical) appearance. As someone with more presentist leanings, I consider our apparent aging and movement through time to be objective facts that are independent of our social practices. — Luke

Interestingly, @hypericin just started a new thread suggesting that some things, like money, might have an intermediate ontological status somewhere in between merely socially constructed concepts and objectively real things. We think of ourselves as living in time, having an autobiographical past, as well as a future, and present opportunities that we are liable to miss. This distinguishes us from non-rational animals who, although they also perceive and act on present opportunities (J.J. Gibson's affordances), don't self-consciously conceive of themselves as living in time. But what distinguishes us from them isn't merely our rich conception of time, but the impact this conception has on what we are and what we can do. In part, it enables us to live in (and build) a much thicker present, or so I would argue. So, although our biological aging processes, and our being passively subjected to environmental changes, aren't mere social constructs, much of the social stuff around us is. This includes the evolving cognitive tools that enable us not just to self-consciously live in time but, because of that, to take charge of the way our (thick) present gives shape our future on the ground of the past.

So? What's being claimed is that change can be applied place to place. Your notion of "change in image" here is a red herring. There's a change from place to place on this image that does not change. — InPitzotl

That seems to be different from what @Banno is saying. You acknowledge that the image does not change. What you qualify as "change" just is a functional dependency of the color the image has at some location as a function of this location. That is alright as far as ordinary language goes. But Banno further insists that it is "the image" that changes, which you just acknowledged it doesn't.

Twaddle. The image is white on the left, yellow on the right, and changes from one to the other, left to right. — Banno

The image being white on the left and yellow on the right are two unchanging features of the image. I know you want to say that it (the image) is unchanging with respect to time but that it (the image) is changing with respect to space. But that doesn't seem right either since this relies on an equivocation.

Getting back to your initial floor example, you suggested the "floor changes from wood to bamboo, from one room to another, at the one time." Would you be willing to say that if you consider a further spatial displacement the same distance in the same direction, you are therefore getting out the house altogether and "the floor" changes into a pine tree in the backyard? Or maybe 'it' changes from being a floor altogether to being a thin slice out of this pine tree? If that doesn't make sense it's because the pine tree isn't a part of the floor at all. But since your construction depends on us talking about separate parts of the floor, I want to remind you that the whole floor isn't numerically identical with any one of its proper material parts. So, saying that "the floor" changes from (being materially constituted of) wood to "it" (being materially constituted of) bamboo, while insisting that it's always about "the floor" (that is, the whole floor) that you are talking about, equivocates on two distinct senses of "the floor".

I referred to, and showed, the image at https://i.stack.imgur.com/5chm6.png — Banno

I know. You asserted that this image "changes from one colour to another, from left to right". But it's not the image that changes. The image is made up, at any given time, of all of its parts and this totality doesn't change just by dint of the fact that its parts are distinguishable from one another.

I look forward to it! From what I've read it is more the concern of presentism's critics who question the length of the present moment. — Luke

That's a good point. It's funny how presentists and eternalists have argued against each other while seemingly both relying on the shared assumption that time is external to the observers (and/or agents) who inhabits the world. The former view time as something that flows all by itself and takes us for the ride while the latter acknowledge the essential perspectival nature of time (that is, of McTaggart's A Series aspect of time) but thereby tend to degrade it as an illusion. What I want to argue is that the present moment is real because it is perspectival and thick in a way that is loosely similar to the way in which, say, paper money has real value because, through our social practices, we invest it with value. The analogy is quite imperfect, of course, but it is just meant to convey that something can be both essentially subjective (perspectival) and objectively real.

Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘specious present’, which I think was coined by William James? The idea, presented famously by Husserl, is that the present moment is a tripartite structure that consists of retention , primal presentation and protention (anticipation). Retention and protention don’t occupy separate temporal positions relative to the ‘now’, they all belong simultaneously to it. — Joshs

No, I wasn't familiar with this concept at all. It seems quite relevant to my topic, though. So, thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to look it up further and give it some thought.

I put it to you that the following image changes from one colour to another, from left to right; and that this change does not occur over time. — Banno

When you used the nominal phrase "the following image", did you mean to refer to a picture that is square shaped or you did you mean to refer to a thin vertical segment of the whole square area ? I ask because if you meant the former, then your statement is false. And if you meant the latter, then there are very many such images and none of them change at all.

No, it's the same floor.

I've no idea what the remainder of your post says. Can you clarify?

I think folk are trying to defend a broken notion - that change can only occur over time. Observation shows this to be false. The replies here indicate the rather than adjust their thinking about change, they would rather redefine change as that which occurs over time... — Banno

Even if it's the same floor, then it still has different parts. Would you say of a banana that it is a thing that changes from being thin to being thick and then ends up being thin again? In you floor example, you seem to be taking as the underlying substrate of the change the vantage point of a local observer who surveys it from a moving perspective. In that case, the change that is being referred to is being premised on a temporal change in the location or vantage point of the observer.

Here is another example. You want to skate on a lake and inquire if the ice is thick enough. Other skaters tell you that the ice becomes thinner towards the center of the lake. What this means is that the part of the frozen surface of the lake that is in the immediate vicinity of whoever is skating on it (and hence affords support to that person) is thinner when the skater is nearer to the center of the lake. It's not the thickness of the ice itself that changes but rather, the spatial movement of the skater brings about that, as they move towards the center of the lake, that thicker areas get replaced by (different) thinner areas. It is the tacit embedding in a determinate pragmatic context that give meaning to the phrase "the ice is becoming thinner..." since this context tells us in what order and for what purpose the different parts of the unchanging ice sheet are being surveyed.

You seem to be just looking for a particular phrasing to save a broken theory. — Banno

According to your own theory of change, would you say that natural numbers change from being even to being uneven, and back to being even again, alternatively, from one number to the next? What is it that is changing then? Or is it just pure change without any underlying substrate that persists (or endures) through change?

My floor changes from wood to bamboo, from one room to another, at the one time. — Banno

They are two different floors, or two separate parts of one floor. So the analogy with temporal change only really holds if we assume something like a perdurantist conception of persistence and identity whereby things that appear to be changing in time don't really change at all but rather merely have dissimilar temporal parts. This meshes well with a block-universe view or time but that is also, just like perdurantism, debatable.

Two places might be different at a point in time, but nothing changes at a point in time.

Time is required to get "from place to place" or to perceive (and compare) one place and then another. — Luke

Indeed that's a very important point. This also is very much the point Kant was making in the
Second Analogy of Experience (in the Critique of Pure Reason). Let me quote from this course handout.

"In the Second Analogy, Kant compares our perceptions of a concrete particular, a house, and an event, the floating of a ship down a river. In the former case, the order of the perceptions is not determined; in the latter case, the order is. In other words, in looking at a house, I can look at the chimney first, then the shingles, then the windows; or I can look at the windows first, then the chimney, etc. Nevertheless, I suppose that these perceptions refer to the same permanent object. When the boat is moving down the river, I must perceive a certain order."

Kant's Second Analogy is discussed quite enlighteningly in Sebastian Rödl's book Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect.

• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli — 180 Proof

Great, I was looking forward for this to come out in English! I will read it in short order.

If something has no effect on the universe, and then itself fades from said universe, through both memory and physical existence, then it does not exist, and it never has existed. — Bradaction

There is a logical problem with your thesis. It has the form of a counterfactual conditional statement. It could be paraphrased thus: "If an object A exists at some time but, at a later time, no longer has an effect on anything else still existing, then it never existed". But the antecedent can never be true if the consequent is true. An object can not exist and then fade from existence if it never existed.

Well, that's fine if her view is that blame and praise come with the same control and origination requirements (I am not sure if that is her view - though it has also been a while since I read anything by her, and the last thing I read was her Freedom within Reason, which is quite old so perhaps her views have changed or perhaps the view I attributed to her was not her view). But from memory her view there was that someone born evil is not morally responsible for their subsequent evil acts, whereas someone born good is morally responsible for their subsequent good acts. And if that's right, well, it seems prima facie implausible. — Bartricks

That seems to be somewhat of a distortion of Wolf's view. What might be rather more consistent with her views, I think, is the claim that someone born with (or, more plausibly, who has at a later stage of her maturation from infancy come to acquire) a rational capacity to differentiate good from evil is thereafter suited to be held responsible for her actions. The very idea of someone being born evil -- having no capacity whatsoever to be good, or to mend her ways -- may be incoherent. Someone being born innocent, and not having yet matured out of this stage of innocence, as is the case with human infants and non-human animals, rather is a condition that makes one incapable of being either good or evil, and hence also unsuited to be held personally responsible for their actions, except proleptically in the case of very young human children who we expect to be on their way towards rational autonomy, and towards whom our reactive attitudes (such as those we express with praise and blame) scaffold the growth of their capacities for rational and moral judgement.

OK, but where I have used "natural" you have substituted "physical". I'm not sure whether you draw a distinction between them, but as far as I understand, determinism is the thesis that all events are fully determined by antecedent physical events. This is often expressed in the thought experiment wherein it is claimed that if the evolution of the universe were to be played out again from the Big Bang everything would unfold again exactly as it has.

So, for me the kind of determinism which incorporates reductive physicalism is logically incompatible with the kind of freedom that could rationally be understood to justify the idea of moral responsibility.

So, I agree with what you've said above, but as I read it, what you've said does not support compatibilism, but rather rejects it. — Janus

Yes, I had purposefully replaced "natural" with "physical" because I meant to deny that human actions having natural causes must imply that they also have (fully determinative) physical causes. Endorsing naturalism without physicalism is enough to ward off implausible forms of super-naturalism, I would hope.

It seems to be assumed by many philosophers that (1) the thesis of micro-physical determinism conjoined with both (2) the thesis of the causal closure of the physical and (3) some doctrine of supervenience, imply (4) the thesis of universal determinism, such that human actions, in addition to everything else that takes place in the natural world, are fully determined by the past physical state of the universe (at some arbitrary moment in time). This would appear to follow from Jaegwon Kim's causal exclusion argument (according to which, roughly, anything that happens has a sufficient physical causes and higher level 'causes' therefore are epiphenomenal). But I think Kim's argument fails to apply to human actions (and to scores of other natural and social phenomena) because he gets the metaphysics of those higher-level phenomena (and of higher-level material agents) wrong.

As I had suggested earlier, human actions can't sensibly be construed as causal impacts that some agent exerts on the material world, at a moment in time, from outside of the world, as it were. Human beings are material beings in the world. As such, they are not divorced from their own pasts, and the material (bodily) and cognitive powers that they possess at some moment in time aren't features that merely determine them to act but rather constitute them acting in the world.

Hence, when a human being reflects on the physical determinations of her own embodied actions, some of those determinations indeed constitute external constraints on what she can do. (Someone, for instance, may be unable to deadlift 300 pounds, or mentally calculate 10 decimals of Pi). But some other among those physical determinations realize instances of that person's own abilities. They are enabling causes, rather than constraints, with respect to an agent's physical abilities and her powers of rational practical deliberation.

So, let us suppose that we grant the possibility of micro-physical determinism being true, and of the thesis of the physical-closure of the physical being true as well, but nothing more. It remains true, then, that given 'the past', as it was, there was no possibility that some agent, who actually did A, would (counterfactually) have done anything else consistently with the past having been as it was. So, indeed, if the state of the universe was 'rolled back' to some earlier state, the agent would still necessarily do A and nothing else. But that doesn't imply that this agent was constrained by the past physical state of the universe to do A. That's because the agent herself figures in that past (at least recently). And so she is (and was) an active participant in the process of determination of the future. And when we say that she could have done something differently (or refrained from doing it), we don't mean that she could have done it consistently with there being nothing about herself that would have been different (including the states of her character, her motivations, her reasons, habits and inclinations, etc.) but rather that nothing outside of herself fully determined her to act in the way she did.

Some worries that remain may stem from regress arguments against ultimate responsibility (such as Strawson's 'Basic Argument' for hard incompatibilism) or consequence arguments that set up regress of antecedent determinative physical causes reaching back to a past time before the agent existed. But I think I should address those worries in a separate post.

I am not sure I follow. If right-doing requires the ability to do the right thing, then right-doing does not require the ability to do otherwise. But if wrongdoing does require the ability to do otherwise, then wrongdoing is plausibly incompatible with determinism in a way that right doing does not appear to be. — Bartricks

The issue isn't just what the conditions are for there existing agents who have rational practical abilities, but also what the conditions are are for there being responsible agents who have those rational practical abilities. Rational agents can only be deemed praiseworthy (end hence personally responsible) for successfully exercising their rational abilities if those abilities are fallible. An ability being fallible just means that it has a liability to fail. If you hold that the fallibility of such abilities is inconsistent with the thesis of determinism (in whichever way you understand this thesis) then this would mean that indeterminism is a requirement for praiseworthiness and blameworthiness alike. That's because indeterminism, on that view, would be a requirement for the possession of the fallible abilities, the possession of which grounds both praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.

I think Wolf would rather hold the opposite thesis: that determinism and the fallibility of rational abilities are compatible. Hence she would hold indeterminism to be a requirement neither for praiseworthiness nor for blameworthiness.

It therefore seems to me that Wolf's asymmetry thesis regarding the requirement for an 'ability to have done otherwise', for holding agents responsible just in cases of a failure to act rationally (and/or ethically), and the lack of a similar requirement for deeming them praiseworthy of having done the right thing, is preserved by her compatibilist account of fallible rational abilities. The metaphysical doctrine of indeterminism, on the one hand, and the thesis that agents have, in some circumstances, an 'ability to have done otherwise' (than what they actually did), on the other hand, are consistent with one another on her compatibilist stance.

Yes, I do not deny that her view is coherent. Ought implies can, and ought not implies can not. Which seems sufficient to explain how it is that right-doing and wrong-doing might require different abilities (one to do, the other to do otherwise). — Bartricks

Actually, I was putting forth, on behalf of Wolf, the thesis that right-doing (and hence also, praiseworthiness) and wrong-doing (and hence also, blameworthiness) do not require different abilities. They both require the exact same ability, which is to deliberate correctly what it is that the agent ought to do, and to do it. It's not an asymmetry of abilities that is postulated, but rather an asymmetry in the way good and bad deeds relate to that one singular ability: as the manifestation of its proper actualization, or as a manifestation of its defective (or failure of) actualization, respectively.

But it nevertheless seems prima facie implausible. For instance, it seems implausible that if determinism is true, then we are praiseworthy for all our right deeds, but blameless for our immoral ones. Intuitively if one is one, one is the other - it's a package deal.

The way I would rather put it, again, on behalf of Wolf (although I myself agree with her), is that blameworthiness (responsibility for bad deeds) requires a rational ability to have done otherwise (namely, the right thing), whereas praiseworthiness doesn't require a rational ability to have done otherwise (since there is no such thing as a rational ability to do the wrong thing). I agree with you that the metaphysical requirements of personal responsibility (for good and bad deeds alike) all come in a single package and hence it doesn't make much sense to say that the truth of the metaphysical doctrine of determinism is a requirement for blameworthiness and not for praiseworthiness. It seems to me that Wolf's picture, correctly understood, show why that wouldn't make much sense. It's been a while since I've last read Wolf, though, so maybe she slips up somewhere. Maybe you can point out to me where exactly you think she might have advanced the implausible thesis.

Wolf, I think, holds a bizarre asymmetrical view according to which right-doing and praisewothiness are compatible with determinism whereas wrongdoing and blame worthiness are not (or at least require alternative possibilities). An unstable view. — Bartricks

I think you can make sense of her asymmetry thesis if you keep in mind that the rational practical abilities of human agents (and, even more so, their abilities to correctly evaluate ethical features of practical situations) are essentially normative. Hence, when an agent sets up to deliberate between doing A and doing B, say, and only the first option is the right thing to do, then for the agent to choose to do A (on cogent grounds) constitutes the proper actualization of her rational abilities of practical deliberation whereas for her to choose to do B constitutes a failed or defective actualization of those abilities (such as a manifestation of akrasia, of some other vice, or of some culpable ignorance, etc.).

Hence, unlike many agent-causal libertarians, Wolf deems agents to be blameworthy when they fail to actualize their ability to do the right thing, on the condition that they indeed possess such an ability, but it makes no sense to view them as praiseworthy just on the condition that they would have an ability refrain from doing the right thing. But that's not so much (or primarily) because praiseworthiness is uniquely compatible with determinism, but rather because there is no such rational ability (to chose to do the wrong thing). Failing or refraining to do the right thing just is a failure to properly exercise the ability to do the right thing.

What you seem to be missing is the realization that the idea that human decision making is determined by natural forces is a groundless assumption. How would you ever set about testing it? — Janus

I don't think human decisions are determined by physical forces but neither are they determined by psychic forces outside of nature (as they seemingly would need to be for the sort of 'rollback' libertarianism under discussion to be cogent). I rather think that human decisions are determined by human beings. The sort of causation at issue is a sort of agent causation, which is an exemplification both of substance causation and of rational causation, on my view. Embodied and encultured rational human beings can determine things to happen on rational (and ethical) grounds.

It sounds like you are separating the human agent from nature, i.e. assuming a non-physicalist philosophy of mind. — Pfhorrest

Indeed. It seems like this is what tends to happen when libertarians hold that the 'circumstances' in which an agent acts must be taken to include the immediate 'past' of the agent herself, including the state of her own body and of her cognitive apparatus (brain, habits, character, etc.). In that case, libertarians who insist on an indeterminist requirement, treat this requirement as the provision of alternative physical possibilities when the universe has been 'rolled back', as it were, in the same exact state just before the agent deliberated or acted. While this libertarian requirement brings along troublesome consequences about luck and the intelligibility of actions that are now severed from their intelligible cognitive sources, it's not so much indeterminism that is at fault, on my view(*), but rather the disembodied conception of agency that is carried into the picture by a flawed conception of the 'circumstances' of human actions. Someone's character, just before she acts, isn't an external constraint on what she can do. It's rather part of what she is at that time, and what her intentional action will therefore reveal her to have been.

(*) ...although your point about too much indeterminism actually undermining free agency is well taken.

Ordinarily we would say no. So why does it matter if there's a fact about what I will do in the future, any more than it matters there's a fact about what I did in the past? It has no bearing on whether the thing I do is chosen freely or not. — Pfhorrest

That's a very nice multi-part OP! I just finished reading the whole thing. I had copy-pasted all parts in a unique documents and saved it as a pdf in order to be able to highlight and annotate.

It looks like I will have many quibbles on a background of broad agreement about some of the core issues. My positive characterisation of the power of the will is quite similar to yours although I stress social aspects of the constitutive role of the 'reactive attitudes' a little more. I also deal somewhat differently with the thesis of 'leeway incompatibilism', which relates imperfectly to what you call 'metaphysical will'. I had very much enjoyed Susan Wolf's Freedom Within Reason, and read it two or three times. You seem to also have gained much from it, or, at least, to find common ground with her.

I'll be back with more comments. I just wanted to congratulate you for the very well crafted OP!

He doesn't express the view I attributed to him in that piece. But it is attributed to him by John Martin Fischer in his article "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility" (Ethics 1999, fn. 67). — Bartricks

Oh, I see. Thanks. I'll probably have a look at that too, as well as Lewis's Are we free to break the laws?

What I do share with Van Inwagen is a belief that it is more plausible that we have free will and are morally responsible than that free will requires indeterminism. As I understand him, he has argued that if determinism could somehow be established to be true, then he would simply conclude that compatibilism is true, rather than abandon belief in free will. That is, he would give up his incompatibilism over the reality of moral responsibility. He believes the reality of moral responsibility is more clear and distinct than any theory about what moral responsibility requires. — Bartricks

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to read his 2008 paper How to Think about the Problem of Free Will in order to better understand his conception of the most plausible compatibilist account that he'd be willing to endorse if determinism were established to be true. I'll then come back to you to address the remainder of your post.

I mean maybe I will have to admit it exists — ToothyMaw

That's cool. In care you're interested, the published positive account that has seemed the most convincing to me so far, is Victoria McGeer's, in her recent paper Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes

I mean if character is defined in that way I think it accounts for (1) and (2), but the ramifications it has for agency are pretty implausible, yes. — ToothyMaw

Yup!

I'm thinking if it's to be a general rule it's the first one. — ToothyMaw

I'm not sure I understand the second one. Since p and q are propositional variables, they can represent the conjunction of all the statements of 'fact' that are true at a time -- what is also called 'a past' or 'a future'. (or also, of course 'a past in conjunction with the laws of nature')

I have a reply to this, but first I'll fix my argument.

1. No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
2. No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
3. Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

This is valid because of the following rule:

N(p)

N(p entails q)

N(q)

Where the operator N means "no one has any power over over"
p is the facts of the past and the laws of nature
q is the facts of the future

@Pierre-Normand Is this valid? — ToothyMaw

Yes, thank you. Now it is valid. It's a good starting point. It now remains to be elucidated what "having the power over..." means exactly in such a way that the two premises are true and this operator represents a plausible conception of the power of human agency. One question that can be asked is how very much your "power over" something is restricted when those past facts about yourself that you presently lack "power over" are both (1) partially constitutive of who you are and (2) contribute to the determination of the future. In other words, the argument may be trading on a equivocation between your "present self" (who allegedly lacks power over facts of the past) and yourself as an embodied animal characterised as having temporally protracted dispositions (and therefore whose very existence reaches into the past). Put yet in another way, even though the argument is sound in yielding the conclusion that your "present self" can't change the actual future into some alternative future, how does that imply anything about someone (i.e. an embodied agent who didn't exist exclusively in an instantaneous present moment) lacking the ability to set this future in accordance with her will?

Yes, but what it takes to be autonomous is what's at issue. My argument appears to demonstrate that it requires aseity and thus that one cannot 'become' autonomous. For to be autonomous in the way presupposed by moral responsibility requires that one's actions 'not' be the product of external causes (not wholly, anyway). Which they will be, of course, if one has come into being. So by suggesting that though one is not responsible for the way that one is, one can nevertheless 'become' autonomous is already to have begged the question. If there is no false premise in my argument, then the very idea of 'becoming' autonomous is confused. — Bartricks

Your argument, so far as I had understood it, basically amounts to a combination of van Inwagen's argument for incompatibilism and Galen Strawson's 'Basic Argument' (a regress argument) for the impossibility moral responsibility. You accept the validity of both (while qualifying the first) but deny the soundness of the second. You assert the existence of human responsibility (and hence also of free will) as a premise and then turn Strawson's modus ponens into your own modus tollens. Strawson's argument tacitly assumes the lack of aseity (since his regress stops at a time before the agent was morally autonomous) and concludes to the lack of moral responsibility. While you are accepting the validity of this argument, your are postulating the negation of his conclusion (to a lack of responsibility) to infer the falsity of his tacit premise (the lack of aseity). That is fine, as far as the logic of your argumentation goes. However, if we deny the implausibly thin conception of agency that both van Inwagen's and Strawson's arguments seem to be relying on, then you can't rely on their modus ponens to ground your modus tollens. If Q does not logically follow from P, then not(P) does not logically follow from not(Q) either. Aseity might still be able to ground free will and moral responsibility (although I'm still rather unclear how it does so) but it's not logically required to do so even on the assumption of physical determinism.

I actually make use of that argument. Check out one of my earlier posts. The argument I gave depends on the one in the SEP article. — ToothyMaw

Yes, I had read most of the post in this and in the previous thread. But in that case, if you rely on the idea of the fixity of the past to infer that agents lack power over present and future facts, you also have to justify some analogue to van Inwagen's Beta Rule in order that your argument not exemplify the modal (or fatalist) fallacy. When it is made explicit that you are reliant on such a rule, and you've explained the nature of the N operator that you are making use of, it may become apparent that you are tacitly assuming an implausibly thin conception of the power of human agency in the way @khaled had suggested.

But I don't see how my argument (...) is an instance of the modal fallacy, even if my serial killer example might not be absolute proof that we cannot choose to do otherwise if we have no power over the facts of the future. — ToothyMaw

I wonder why you are favoring this form of the argument for incompatibilism, starting with a premise denying control over facts of the future, over the more commonly encountered versions of van Inwagen's consequence argument, which rather start with the much more uncontroversial premise that no one has power over facts of the past. Van Inwagen then has to make use of the so called Rule Beta in order for his argument to carry through without relying on a modal fallacy (also called the fatalist fallacy, in this context: asserting that whatever was the case in the past necessarily was the case).

Rule Beta asserts that from N(p) and N(p implies q), we may infer N(q),

where the operator N signifies 'No one ever has any power over...'

You can refer to Kadri Vihvelin's SEP article for a detailed statement and discussion of van Inwagen's argument.

The manner in which you formulate your own argument appears to straddle the compatibilist with the burden of demonstrating not only that agents can have power over their own choices, and hence also over the future consequences of their choices, but that, in addition, they must demonstrate that such a power must somehow consist in an ability to make the future different than what it actually is. But that's not what (most) compatibilist ever have set out to demonstrate. They rather want to say that although what the future facts actually are may be fully determined by the actual past (and the laws of nature), this determination is mediated in part by the choices agents make unconstrained (or not fully constrained) by facts external to their own power agency. Furthermore, on a conditional reading of the principle of alternative possibilities, it remains true that if the agents had made different choices (counterfactually) then the future (and the past!) would have been different (still counterfactually).

It seems undeniable to me then that our own actions are facts of the future that we must not have control over unless we could could have acted differently then we did due to a factor that is not external. To presume that one could have acted differently due to a difference in character that is not external to the will, however, is to assume that determinism is false.

I think this misconstrues the compatibilist claim regarding PAP. When the compatibilist claims that, on her conditional reading of it, the PAP is satisfied by her (compatibilist) conception of free agency, she isn't claiming that the agent had the power to change her own character from what it actually was, at the time when she deliberated or acted. This would indeed involve a denial of determinism. The compatibilist rather is claiming that although facts of the actual past entail the actual facts about the character of an agent, and also entail that her power of agency was actualized in the specific way that is actually was, nevertheless, counterfactually, the agent's character could have been different and hence her power of agency could have been actualised differently. That may seem to be a distinction without a difference for an incompatibilist who assumes that agents have no power over 'the past' (and hence over the characters that they actually have when they start deliberating practically). But the incompatibilist conception of 'the past', and of the past 'circumstances' of an agent, violate the compatibilist conception of embodied agency. It seems to be relying on construing our own bodily and cognitive features and abilities as 'circumstances' externally constraining our actions, whereas the compatibilist insists that they are part of us. In other words, they aren't determining us to act in specific ways, they rather are us determining (not in an instantaneous present instant but in the fullness of time) how to act.

I do not follow you on this at all. If someone comes into existence, it really doesn't matter at all whether they came into existence gradually or all of a sudden, the fact will remain that they are the product of external causes. And that's sufficient to establish that they are not morally responsible for how they are. — Bartricks

Yes, I was not making anything hinge on the possibility of rational agency being gradually rather than suddenly acquired. My concern rather is about the way embodied rational agents relate themselves to time, in practical deliberation, after they have acquired rational autonomy. I am perfectly happy to grant you that they aren't responsible at all for the happy circumstance of their having been brought (either gradually or suddenly) into a state where they were first endowed with powers of rational deliberation. Only after they have become autonomous (to some degree) can they be held responsible for their actions. I may bring a caveat, though, since it also can be warranted to hold responsible children, who are not yet autonomous, as a matter of proleptic attitude, in order to help shape their behavioral dispositions in a way that favors their acquisition of rational autonomy.

If we have come into being, then there's a real question about exactly when 'we' come on the scene. But this doesn't in any way allow you to escape confronting the issue: which is that we will nevertheless have come into being as a product of causes for which we are in no way morally responsible.

Yes, this is granted. But when we blame people, we are blaming them for their choices, and for the characters that they have displayed through making those choices, when they already were in possession of some powers of rational agency. We are not blaming them for their having had flawed characters when they first became rational agents. I would also grant that we can sometimes be warranted in evoking unhappy initial character shaping circumstances as excuses, or partial excuses (and hence attenuation of personal responsibility), for subsequent unhappy life turns; but only in some cases, and to limited degrees.

It seems there is a confusion of "physical facts" and just "facts". A fact could entail that an action was performed, whereas a physical fact could be gravity's existence or a brain state.

What if a serial killer reflects upon his despicable acts and thus chooses to work towards redeeming himself? He is playing an ineliminable role in a causal chain in the act of reflecting on intelligible previous actions, but these actions are still fixed - as facts that he now has no power over - directly affecting a new, intelligible action (that is the result of an intent derived from previous facts). In this example his deliberation supervenes on previous facts; he is acting with the intent to redeem himself, but it doesn't change the facts of the past, which do not themselves change because of his deliberation. Thus his current intent, which results in an action, is resulting from a fact of the past that he cannot control. That seems to me to be external causation without any disembodiment.

Even if we must be the judges of what an intelligible action is, that doesn't mean that what we are judging to be an action isn't a small portion of a universe subject to the laws of cause and effect. — ToothyMaw

I was distinguishing facts from laws because of the way deterministic systems usually are defined. I took 'facts about the past' to include all the physical states of matter that, in conjunction with the laws of physics, would uniquely determine a future course of events. It's because higher level facts, or states, (such as biological, psychological or social facts) are taken to supervene on physical states that physical determinism is taken to entail universal determinism. (Facts about some level B are said to supervene on facts about some level A if there can't be any B-level difference without there also being some A-level difference. Furthermore, physicalists usually hold that all high level empirical domains supervene on the physical domain.)

Back to the serial killer: I am happy to grant you that, on the assumption that determinism is true, the serial killer couldn't possibly have done something different than what she actually did without there being something in her past (either in her environment or about herself) that would have been different. It doesn't logically follow from this statement that, therefore, she could not have done something different. Concluding this would be an instance of the modal fallacy. The modal fallacy takes the form:

1) necessarily(P implies Q)
2) P
3) therefore, necessarily(Q)

The conclusion (3) would logically follow if the second premise were replaced by (2b) "necessarily P".

So, is there something about the killer's rational or moral character, at the time when she readies herself to act, that in conjunction with the laws of nature, determine that she will kill someone and that is necessarily a feature of her character? Only on that condition is it possible to logically infer that she could not possibly have done otherwise than what she actually did.

I don't see how this would be different from some sort of indeterminism, which would have you going against the PAP. And even if you claim that that is question begging and that compatibilist ideas of free will sidestep the PAP, you have to come up with a positive account of agency compatible with determinism that gives us moral responsibility, not just a new definition for "free will". This seems impossible to me unless you can address the following two arguments:

1. No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
2. No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
3. Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

1. We have free will only if we have power over the facts of the future.
2. No one has power over the facts of the future.
3. Therefore, we do not have free will. — ToothyMaw

The idea of "having power over the facts of the future" seems a little obscure to me. I would rather rely on the more straightforward definition that you gave in the opening post of your previous thread:

"Free will: the ability to both choose between different alternative courses of actions and to act free of external causes."

I think a thick embodied view of human agency doesn't comport well with the idea that past facts about you, your own body, character, cognitive abilities and dispositions, etc., all constitute 'external causes' of your actions just because they lay in your past. On closer analysis, the idea seems nonsensical. This was the thrust of @khaled's post and I quite agree with him. For an embodied human agent to act in the world doesn't consist in the agent stepping outside of her own embodiment, as it were, and for her to control the role her own body (and brain) plays in the causal chain of physical events. Acts of agency rather consist for an embodied person to play such an ineliminable causal role in the chain of intelligible events (i.e. intentional actions and their intended or foreseeable consequences).

So, it may be the case that past physical facts, and the laws of physics, determine all the future physical facts (let us suppose). That would not imply that the conjunction of those facts and those deterministic laws determine what intelligible human actions those future physical facts materially realize. If the human agent acts in the light of reasons that she has (or takes herself to have) for doing what she does, then the past facts that were obtaining before she deliberated what to do may have been constraining what the range of her opportunities were, and also constraining the limits of her deliberative abilities (as well as enabling them). But what determines what she intentionally does is her own act of practical deliberation. The specific nature of this action, described in high-level intentional terms, may supervene on some set of physical facts about her bodily movements and brain activity. But the higher level intentional action (which may or may not be praiseworthy or blameworthy) that those lower level physical facts happen to materialy realize isn't set by the laws of physics. That's because the laws of physics are silent regarding what bodily motions constitute intelligible actions, and what good or bad reasons for acting are.