A Negative Definition of Truth

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A Negative Definition of Truth

 

 

Consider a tribe that speaks a language containing no truth predicate. They do, however, have a falsity predicate, which they put to good and frequent use, for this is an argumentative tribe. They are forever telling each other that what they are saying is false—false! Their philosophers have naturally given some thought to the meaning of the falsity predicate and they have a theory: they think that “false” expresses negation. When a speaker asserts that pand her interlocutor objects, “That’s false” this is equivalent to asserting that not-p. Thus: it is false that p if and only if not-p. They call this the “negation theory” of falsity. The reason members of the tribe don’t just assert the negation of what someone else has asserted is simply that it is quicker to say, “That’s false”, because then you don’t have to repeat what the speaker said. For a general statement like, “Everything the tribal leader says is false” they offer the paraphrase, “For any proposition p, if the leader says that p, then not-p”.

            But being an argumentative tribe they don’t let it rest there: they often respond to an allegation of falsity by denying the allegation—“It’s not false!” they exclaim. In this way they reject an imputation of falsity—they deny a denial. The correct analysis of “p is not false” is “It is not the case that not-p”: a negation of a claim of falsity is equivalent to a double negation. At this point our tribe introduces an abbreviation for “not false” in the form of the word “true”, though somewhat reluctantly given their argumentative ways—they are uncomfortable with a word that expresses commendation. Still, no one ever ascribes “true” outright to another’s assertion: the word “true” is only used in rebuttal of someone else’s imputation of falsity. Someone asserts that p and receives the usual caustic response, “That’s false”. He hotly replies, “No, it’s true” meaning simply “It’s not false”. In the language of the tribe “true” means “not false” and “not false” means double negation, so “true” means double negation in that language.

            This suggests a possible theory of the meaning of our word “true”: it means double negation. According to this way of looking at things, falsity comes first, being analyzed as negation, and then truth is the negation of falsity, i.e. of negation. It isn’t that “false” is a mere device of disquotation, since we can’t say, “’Snow is black’ is false if and only if snow is black”—we have to insert a negation sign before “snow is black”. The falsity predicate does not simply disappear on the right hand side; it is replaced with a negation sign. This is a substantive piece of analysis: “p is false” means “not-p’. It is not like the claim that “p is true” means “p”, where “p” contains nothing corresponding to the word “true”: negation is what falsity consists in, its proper analysis. But now “not false” surely means the same as “true” (assuming bivalence), so truth is double negation. We can say: “’Snow is white’ is not false if and only if snow is white”. The difference is purely rhetorical–a matter of sounding more positive.  Truth is basically the absence of falsity—the opposite of error. Just as we can think of falsity as the absence of truth, so we can think of truth as the absence of falsity. First we had negation, used to deny what someone else says; then we abbreviated to “false” in order to avoid repetition; then we had negation of falsity; then we arrived at truth. Truth is a logical construction out of negation. The predicate “true” just means “not-not”.

            At this point an objection is likely: double negation is simply equivalent to the proposition doubly negated, so if truth is double negation, then it is nothing—it is just the proposition being doubly negated. The double negation theory collapses into the redundancy theory, since doubly negating a proposition just gives the original proposition—formally it is just like disquotation. But this objection conflates logical equivalence with propositional identity: propositions can be logically equivalent without being the same proposition. Clearly adding negation to a proposition changes the proposition (it will go from one truth-value to the other), so it is hard to see how adding an extra negation will return us to the original proposition. We have enriched or extended the proposition when we doubly negate it; we have not left it exactly where it was. That is why it is harder cognitively to process “not-not-p” than “p”: there are more propositional components to go through. All we really have is a mutual logical entailment between the two propositions, but this is a far cry from strict propositional identity. Doubly negating a proposition is adding an extra negation operation to the singly negated proposition, not subtracting the first negation. We generate new propositions every time we add a negation sign, and of course we can do this arbitrarily many times; we do not thereby stand in one place, simply reiterating the original proposition. Very soon the sentences become impossible to process, which they shouldn’t be if we are not moving anywhere in propositional space. Sentences and their double negations are not merely stylistic variations.

            The idea, then, is that truth can be analyzed as an operation of double negation without a collapse into a redundancy theory, or equivalently negation plus the falsity predicate. It may seem redundant or merely disquotational because of the logical equivalence of “p” and “not-not-p”, but it is not really so; it is an amalgam of specific conceptual elements—falsity and negation, with falsity itself resolving into negation. The best way to understand truth, therefore, is to begin with falsity, because truth itself gives an illusion of redundancy or vacuity, which falsity does not. Then we construct truth from falsity. It turns out that negation is the underlying logical reality in the analysis of truth. In the beginning was negation, and negation begot falsity, which in turn begot truth. The correct analysis of “p is true” is thus, “It is not the case that not-p”, not simply “p”. If I say, “Everything the pope says is true”, my meaning is best expressed by, “For any proposition p, if the pope says that p, then not-not-p”. When Frege remarked that “it is true that p” and “p” express the same thought, he was strictly speaking wrong, though close to being right; rather, “it is true that p” expresses the same thought as “it is not the case that not-p”. Thus truth is not strictly speaking disquotational, since the double negation of a sentence is not identical to that sentence, i.e. not the result of removing the quotation marks.

            It is true that the double negation theory is in roughly the same spirit as the classic redundancy theory, in contrast to the other standard definitions of truth in terms of coherence or correspondence; but it is importantly different, since it gives a real analysis of the concept of truth. The theory allows us to see what is right in the old redundancy theories (as found in Frege, Wittgenstein, Strawson, Tarski, Ramsey, et al) but also to see where it overstates the matter by claiming that “true” is empty of content. Truth does have an analysis (in terms of negation), but it also generates sentences that are logically equivalent to sentences not containing it (nor the concepts used to analyze it), since “not-not-p” entails “p”. The theory also suggests that “true” is not logically a predicate since it reduces to an operator, as “false” reduces to an operator (the same one, but a single application). The reason the theory has not been recognized and favored is that people have tended to investigate truth without investigating falsity, where the role of negation is quite obvious. No doubt there are many things that can be meant by a “definition of truth”, and each may have its value, but the double negation theory is one sort of definition—and quite satisfactory as far as it goes.  [1] It “catches the actual meaning of the word ‘true’”, to borrow Tarski’s phrase. Negation turns out to be integral to its meaning. It should be added to the other standard theories of truth.

            One final point: the double negation theory imposes a condition on the possible bearers of truth, namely that they should be logically subject to negation. Any sentence that can be negated is a potential bearer of truth, and none that cannot be negated can be true (or false). Thus moral sentences are capable of truth, given that they can be doubly negated, which they clearly can. But imperative sentences, say, can’t be true if the theory is correct, since you can’t say, “It is not the case that shut the door!” The theory indeed explains how truth distributes over sentences, because it provides a necessary and sufficient condition for sentences to be capable of truth-value: viz. can the sentence be coherently negated.

 

 

  [1] The concept of truth can be approached from different directions and different aspects of its significance explored; these different approaches need not be incompatible. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if truth turns out to be multi-dimensional, given its many liaisons.

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A Causal Theory of Truth

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A Causal Theory of Truth

We have been inundated with causal theories: of perception, knowledge, memory, and reference. But no one (to my knowledge) has proposed a causal theory of truth. On the face of it this is surprising, since truth is so closely bound up with reference. If reference to both objects and properties is subject to a causal theory, why isn’t truth? I will explore a causal theory of truth that seems rather natural, indeed a natural extension of the causal theory of reference. Put simply, the theory says that a belief or statement is true if and only if it is caused by the facts. Some beliefs or statements are caused by the facts and some are not, being caused instead by desires or errors or fictions or fantasies. That is the difference between a true belief and a false belief: its causal relation to the facts. Some beliefs are brought about by objective reality and some are otherwise brought about (say, by subjective factors): to be true is to be caused in the former kind of way. Where the correspondence theory says that truth is correspondence to the facts, the causal theory says that truth is causation by the facts.  [1]

The theory assumes that the world consists of facts (objects having properties) and that these facts causally shape beliefs, making them true. If it is a fact that p, then it is true that p, so there can be no problem with the theory as far as sufficiency is concerned. But then couldn’t the theory dispense with the causal element and simply equate truth with fact? No: because truth is a property of representations (beliefs or statements or sentences or propositions), so we need something to connect facts with truth. Traditionally that has been a correspondence relation; according to the causal theory, it is a causal relation. For a belief to be true is for it to be caused by a fact, not just for the fact to be a fact: the belief that snow is white is true in virtue of its being caused by the fact that snow is white—that is, the belief is caused by what it represents (what is believed to obtain). In the most straightforward case a person is in perceptual contact with a fact and he or she forms the belief that it is a fact, thus forming a true belief: you see that it’s raining and this fact causes you to believe that it’s raining—so you have a true belief. If you were to be hallucinating rain because of a drug, you might form the same belief but it would be false, since your belief would not be caused by the fact that it’s raining but by the drug. If you dream that p and form the belief that p, then your belief is not true, since it was not caused by the fact that p. If I tell you a lie, my statement is false because it was not caused by the fact I purport to state but by my desire to deceive you; while in the case of a truthful statement a fact causes my true belief and my statement transmits the causal relation to you—you have a true belief because your belief was (indirectly) caused by the fact that I stated to obtain.  [2] When the facts shape belief we have truth, but when illusion, error, deception, and fantasy shape belief we have falsehood. Truth depends on the causal antecedents of belief: do they stem from objective reality or from other factors (often internal to the subject)? Is belief caused by the factual or the fictional?

That is the simple way to put the theory, but of course it needs to be refined and complicated. Still I wish to emphasize its intuitive starting point: true belief is the kind brought about by the facts; false belief is the kind brought about by things other than the facts. Compare: veridical perception is the kind brought about by external objects; illusory perception is the kind brought about by other factors, such as intoxication or defects of the perceptual system. You believe truly if the facts impress themselves on your belief system; you believe falsely if your beliefs arise from some source other than the facts, such as biases or blind spots. Of course, all factors that influence belief are trivially facts, but truth is having your belief caused by the fact represented by the belief in question. If the fact that p causes you to believe that p, then you have a true belief.

We can compare this account to causal theories of reference.  A speaker refers to an object x with a name “a” if and only if there exists a (suitable) causal connection between x and “a”—say, a chain of causal links leading back to an initial baptism. A speaker refers to a property P with a predicate “F” if and only if instances of P regularly elicit utterances of “F” (or some such). In the case of whole sentences we are dealing with fact-like entities (states of affairs, situations, ways things are) not objects and properties, so these are the appropriate entities to stand in causal relations to sentences.  [3] We simply extend the causal theory from names and predicates to sentences: reference to an object is being caused by that object to utter its name, reference to a property is being regularly caused by instances of that property to utter a predicate, making a true statement is making an utterance caused by an appropriate fact. We thus use the word “true” to distinguish this kind of causation from other kinds—the kinds that produce false statements. To say that a belief or statement is true is to say that it is a consequence of the facts; to say that a belief or statement is false is to say that it is not a consequence of the facts, but of fictions, fantasies, errors, etc. In its strongest form the theory says that the property of truth is that property a belief has when it is caused by a fact (the fact represented). Instead of saying, “Your belief is true” we could equally say, “Your belief is factually caused”.

At this point a swarm of questions assails the causal theorist; they are for the most part quite familiar. Are the causal conditions necessary and sufficient for truth? How do we handle truths about non-causal facts? What about deviant causal chains? Do facts really cause anything? To spare the reader (and myself) tedium, I will be as speedy as possible with these well-worn issues. Are the conditions necessary? Couldn’t we have true beliefs and yet there be no causal links between belief and fact (pre-established harmony)? What about the truths of mathematics, modality, and morality? Here we can reply by amending the theory from its simple causal formulation: we can invoke the concepts of reason or explanation or counterfactual dependence. Thus: the reason (but not the cause) for forming the belief that p is the fact that p; the explanation for believing that p is the fact that p (where this is not causal explanation); a person would not believe that p were it not for the fact that p. We just weaken the causal relation to accommodate the awkward cases—just as we have to for causal theories of reference and knowledge. The causal theory of truth is thus no worse off than these causal theories (no better either). We can also remark, with a knowing wink, that this is actually a desirable result for the theory, since these non-causal cases are precisely those in which the concept of truth carries dubious credentials. Causal dependence is what truth basically consists in, so anything non-causal will struggle to qualify as true—except perhaps by extension or metaphorically or fictitiously. In the clearest cases truth amounts to causation by fact–we needn’t get too worked up about peripheral cases. Or we could simply stipulate that there are two kinds of truth requiring two kinds of theory: causal theory for one kind and correspondence theory for the other (or coherence or deflationary theory). It depends on the type of subject matter involved (and we already know there is a distinction between analytic truth and synthetic truth).

As to deviant causal chains: there are none–so long as a fact causes a belief in that fact we will have truth. As to facts as causes: we should be liberal with the notion of cause, but if we decline so to be, we can always choose another kind of cause (say, event causation), and let that be the cause of belief. If you don’t think beliefs have any causes at all, I invite you to substitute whatever else you think is responsible for beliefs; and if you think nothing is responsible, you are beyond help. We can thus make the standard dialectical moves in response to the standard objections. At worst we concede that no causal analysis of the concept of truth is possible but suggest instead that we are offering a better picture of truth, one that sees truth as a passive effect of reality not as an active mapping onto reality (as with the correspondence theory). The world gives us truth by acting on us; we don’t achieve truth by contriving to depict it. This is a theory that works nicely for animal truth: animals have true beliefs because the world acts on them to install beliefs (or some more primitive representational state); they have no need to strive for truth. When facts cause beliefs they automatically produce truth, whether in mouse or man.

Here is a more difficult counterexample: the case of random truth. Suppose I am making random statements about the color of things in some unknown part of the world, most of which are false, but by chance I hit on a true statement about the color of a flower there—I have said something true but the fact in question was not the cause of my saying it. The case must be admitted: there is such a thing as an accidentally true statement (similarly for a case of wishful thinking that just happens to produce a true belief). But surely the case is exceptional: the vast majority of cases are those in which the belief’s truth results from the fact in question—where we can know the belief is true just by knowing the person’s causal history. In the random truth case we can’t infer truth from knowledge of the person’s causal history. It’s a bit like introducing by stipulation a name for an unknown soldier and succeeding thereby in referring to a certain individual long dead: you do name a person without there existing any causal link to that person, but the case is quite unlike standard cases of naming. Truth is rooted in causation by facts though it can break free of these confines in unusual circumstances; we shouldn’t give up the basic insight in order to accommodate exceptional cases.  [4] Hard cases make bad law and all that. At a pinch we can retreat to a genealogical theory: this is how the concept of truth started out, but it might develop new forms alien to its origins. We must cling to the initial insight derived from perceptual beliefs: their truth consists in the fact that they are caused in a certain way, i.e. by the very fact they represent. The fact by itself will guarantee truth; we just need to add the relational conditions that enable beliefs to be true—that they exist and are externally caused. Once all this has been stated there is nothing further for talk of truth to add: the distinction between truth and falsity emerges from the distinction between fact-caused belief and fantasy-caused belief (to put it simply). What does an ascription of truth add to the assertion that a person’s belief that p was caused by the fact that p? It is quite redundant.

            The causal theory of truth, like other causal theories, can lay claim to the honorific label “naturalistic”: truth is primarily a property of empirical particulars (beliefs, statements) not abstract propositions, and it consists in a causal relation between agent and world. It is not conceived as a mysterious mapping or isomorphism or picturing; nor is it declared an irreducible primitive. It is a relation between the mind and the world that consists in a kind of causal connection, particularly via the senses. We observe that people’s beliefs are shaped by the world of fact and we call those beliefs true because of it; we also observe that sometimes people’s beliefs result from other factors (bias, illusion, wishful thinking) and these beliefs we call false (though they might in odd cases be true by chance).

  [1] One version of the correspondence theory (there are many) equates truth with “designating an existing state of affairs”: the causal theory replaces the designation relation with a causal relation but retains the general form of the correspondence theory. We could view it as proposing a causal theory of the designation relation between beliefs (or statements) and states of affairs. It thus “naturalizes” such designation—as a causal theory of names “naturalizes” the naming relation.

  [2] Note the analogy to causal theories of names: there is a social dimension to the causal relations involved, as well as experts and deference. Thus some beliefs are directly caused by facts while some are caused via chains of communication radiating out from an original encounter. Testimony exploits causality to transmit truth—as chains of communication can transmit reference.

  [3] An attractive feature of the causal theory is that it explains the referential transparency of truth: if “Hesperus is a planet” is true, so is “Phosphorous is a planet”. This is explained by the fact that causal statements are themselves transparent. The transparency feature is not captured by disquotational theories, since the disquoted statement is just the original statement. But causation is indifferent to mode of presentation or verbal formulation.

  [4] One thing we can say is that in standard cases true statements about color are caused by the facts. So the theory can be reformulated to assert that a given belief is true if and only if it is in standard cases caused by the facts

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A Difficulty with Utilitarianism

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Utilitarianism maintains that the value of a state of affairs depends solely on its level of utility. For a state of affairs to be good (desirable, valuable) it is necessary and sufficient that it contains the best possible level of wellbeing (pleasure, happiness, preference satisfaction). So if two situations contain the same level of utility they must be indistinguishable morally: value supervenes on good feelings (roughly). But consider the following possible states of affairs: (a) people enjoy a level l of happiness and know that l is their level of happiness; (b) people enjoy level lof happiness but don’t know that l is their level. In condition (b) they have false beliefs about how happy they are, either underestimating it or overestimating it; while in condition (a) their beliefs are just right. The level of utility is the same in both cases but the epistemic facts are quite different. Are these situations indistinguishable from the point of view of value? It might well be supposed that they are not: (a) is a better situation than (b). If so, utilitarianism cannot be a complete account of value. Knowledge of utility adds value to utility itself. The utilitarian typically assumes that knowledge of utility tracks utility, so there is no gap of the kind exploited by cases (a) and (b); but we can pull these apart in conceivable cases, and then the insufficiency of utility reveals itself.

            A number of responses may be made to this simple argument. One response is that the case I described is not logically possible: people can’t be wrong about their level of happiness, since happiness is a mental state and people can’t be wrong about their mental states. However, whatever may be true about mental states in general, it is clearly possible to wrongly estimate one’s state of happiness. A change for the worse may make you realize how happy you used to be (“I didn’t know how lucky I was”), and you might think yourself happier than you really are because you have been so deprived for so long. People are not infallible about their level of wellbeing, though they may be generally reliable. What if you have been brainwashed into believing yourself brimming with joy when in fact you are only moderately content? Don’t people habitually underestimate their level of wellbeing until things turn nasty for them? Happiness is more elusive to knowledge than sensations of pain or experiences of red. If someone asks how happy you are, you might have to pause and reflect before giving an answer.

            Second, it may be claimed that the cases don’t actually differ in value: if the utility level is the same, the value is the same. But this is so much biting of the bullet: surely it is better to know than not to know, especially when it comes to one’s own happiness. Isn’t this a rather vital piece of knowledge? A person who went through life believing himself a miserable wretch when in fact he was quite happy would not be living as good a life as one who gets it right; and similarly for someone who regards himself as unusually happy but in fact has a rotten time of it. There is positive value in knowing where you stand happiness-wise.

            Third, it might be maintained that the knowledge in question contributes to the level of happiness, and that’s why we judge (a) and (b) differently. That is, knowing your correct level of happiness is a form of happiness: the person who gets it right will therefore be a happier person. If so, we can subsume the value of knowledge under the heading of utility. But this is not plausible: judging your degree of utility correctly does not add to your utility count, any more than other knowledge does. These are two separate things: utility on the one hand, knowledge of utility on the other. Belief isn’t a feeling, so it can’t contribute to the good feelings a person has. Knowledge isn’t a form of pleasure.  [1] Whether someone’s beliefs about their own happiness are true or false doesn’t affect how happy they are.

            So we are compelled to accept that happiness plus true belief about happiness is better than happiness alone, which means that happiness is not the only valuable thing. Of course, it has been held that knowledge is a value separate from utility, but what the cases of (a) and (b) show is that knowledge of happiness has intrinsic value. The utilitarian failed to see this because of the assumption of transparency—that happiness will necessarily communicate itself to belief. But once we recognize that that is false we have to accept that knowledge carries its own value, even when (especially when) it is knowledge concerning happiness.  [2] Nor can we suppose that such knowledge has merely instrumental value in producing further happiness, because we can stipulate a case in which no such variation in happiness is present—the two people converge exactly and for all time in their utilities while differing in their utility knowledge. Not only is happiness a good thing, but knowledge of happiness is also a good thing—though a good thing of a different type. In a sense, then, utilitarianism is self-refuting, because it presupposes a value it refuses to acknowledge. It assumes that knowledge tracks happiness, thus avoiding acceptance of the separate value of knowledge, but pulling the two apart shows that utility is not enough. The good life is not just the happy life; it is a life in which one is also properly apprised of one’s happiness.

 

Colin McGinn           

 

 

  [1] We don’t analyze knowledge by saying: “x knows that p if and only if x believes that p, x feels good about believing that p, etc.”.

  [2] Once it is accepted that utility and knowledge constitute separate values, the question of priority arises: which value is more important? Granted limited resources, we have to assign them to promoting our accepted values, so we have to decide how much to allocate to utility and how much to knowledge of utility. This means that we will have to allocate less to utility than we would under the pure utilitarian doctrine, since we have to allocate resources for the production of knowledge of utility too. So the extended utilitarian doctrine will contradict the recommendations of the simple utilitarian doctrine. And there will always be difficult questions about which value to promote in a given situation. The dent in utilitarianism is therefore not trivial.  

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Archive

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I am planning to put my unpublished papers on this blog so as to have a publicly available record of them. So expect to see quite a lot of stuff appear in the forthcoming weeks.

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Two Concepts of Freedom

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Two Concepts of Freedom

 

It is hard not to feel the pull of both of the standard positions on free will. On the one hand, it seems right to say that a free action is one that is in accordance with the agent’s desires, as opposed to one that is forced on the agent in some way (the OED defines “free” as simply “not under the control or in the power of another”). This is quite compatible with determinism–physical, psychological, or divine. On the other hand, it seems right to insist that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise, which is ruled out by determinism. If an agent has no alternative to acting as he did, how can his act be free? But surely the future course of nature is always necessitated by antecedent conditions, so there are no alternative actions the agent could have performed. Thus the will is both free and not free, a contradiction. Depending upon what conception of freedom we choose to adopt, we get different answers to the question of whether free will exists. But it is assumed that there is a single thing (denoted by “free will”) over which the combatants are contending.

            I want to suggest that this debate is afflicted by a methodological problem, and once this problem is fixed the solution drops out quite naturally. The problem consists in extracting the word “free” from its normal linguistic context and trying to analyze it in isolation. In fact, there are two very different notions expressed by standard locutions, which generate different answers to the question whether free will exists. Both answers are correct, so that one type of locution has application while the other does not. The locutions are “free from” and “free to”. We say that an agent is free from constraints or influences that potentially limit his range of actions: illnesses, obligations, engagements, coercion, upbringing, genes, or divine interference. In this vein we can sensibly ask if the agent is free from his desires and free from his physical condition (including his brain states): here the answer appears to be universally in the negative. I am not free from my own psychology or my own physiology—though I may be free from external coercion or prior obligations or God’s dominion. The determinist adds up all the antecedent states of the world and declares that we are not free from this totality. Again, this seems logically permissible: we simply ask whether my freedom-from extends to all of the factors bearing down on me, specifically my mental and physical states. And the answer is clear: I am not free from all of that. I don’t have that kind of freedom. In the relevant sense, I could not have acted otherwise (though there are perhaps other senses in which I could have acted otherwise, e.g. I could logically have had a different psychology). Put simply, we don’t have freedom from the past—the locution “free from” does not apply to the totality of past facts (though it applies to various subsets of these facts). It is quite true that we are free from X for many values of X, so we are free relative to these values, but we are not free from all values of X. We don’t have complete freedom-from. So we can forget having that kind of freedom. Determinism rules out freedom-from.

            But it doesn’t follow that we don’t have freedom-to. I have freedom to do Y if I can act on my desire to do Y. The locution “free to” allows application in conditions in which I do as I please, as opposed to acting against my desires because of external (or internal) coercion. That is what “free to” means (as the OED records): I have a set of desires (wishes, inclinations, commitments, etc.) and I can either act in accordance with them or against them, thus acting freely or not.  [1] This has nothing to do with being free from all prevailing conditions: indeed I am not free from my desires (which may causally determine me to act as I do), but that doesn’t mean that I can’t act in accordance with them! I am free to follow my desires, because not prevented from doing so, even though I am not free from them. I may sometimes not be free to follow my desires, if I am imprisoned or shackled or subject to physiological upsurges that prevent me from acting as I wish; but much of the time I am free to do pretty much as I please (but see below). Quite often I am free to do exactly as I please, with no impediment at all to my freedom to do as I please. This is in no way compromised by my lack of freedom from antecedent conditions. Freedom-to is just a different concept from freedom-from; the locutions have quite different meanings and conditions of application. The compatibilist is thus right to insist that freedom-to is consistent with determinism, while the incompatibilist is right to maintain that freedom-from is inconsistent with the facts of historical determination. But the two theorists are not disagreeing with each other, once we distinguish between the two sorts of locution with their different meanings. The reason we feel the pull of each position is that both positions are perfectly correct so far as they go; we only get confused because we conflate the two concepts. And the reason we do that is that we yank the word “free” from its normal linguistic context and ask questions like “Does free will exist?” or “Is free will compatible with determinism?” Strictly speaking, these questions are ill formed, because they try to sever the concept of freedom from its surrounding grammatical context, which alone gives the word sense. We violate Frege’s context principle, or we fail to heed Wittgenstein’s warning about the perils of taking language on holiday. We are like someone who perplexes herself about freedom by trying to integrate the meaning of the locution “free with” (“John is rather free with his money”) with “free from” and “free to”. Is it that a free agent is one who is free with his actions? Can we be free with our past? Are our desires free with us? None of these sentences makes sense and can only generate pseudo-problems. Likewise, we should not try to shuttle between “free from” and “free to”, as if asking whether we are free to change our past or free from the future. In fact “free from” is a backwards-looking locution while “free to” is a forwards-looking locution: one connotes independence from the past; the other connotes dependence on desire in relation to the future. Am I free to act as my desires prompt me to? That is the question of freedom-to. Am I free from everything that has led up to this moment? That is the question of absolute freedom-from. And the answers are respectively: yes, I am free to act on my desires as opposed to being made to go against them; but no, I am not free from the conditions leading up to and surrounding my action, including my desires. I have freedom-to but I don’t have freedom-from. That is all that needs to be said, or can be said; there is no further question expressible as “Am I free?” or “Do I have free will?” It is not that I both have free will and don’t have it, or that I have to reject the plausible things said by the compatibilist and the incompatibilist; rather, I just have to return the word “free” to its natural environment tightly coupled with the prepositions “from” and “to”. Then (and only then) I will understand the import of our talk of freedom. The correct assessment of the philosophical upshot of this examination is thus twofold: (a) we are not free from our past, since our actions are determined by it; but (b) this does not rule out a robust sense in which we are free to act on our desires (the only kind of freedom-to there is). As a matter of fact, if we were free from our past, that would not provide an acceptable notion of freedom, since it would amount merely to randomness; and if we had the ability to act otherwise than our desires indicate (including our moral and prudential desires), that would not be a form of freedom-to. No occurrence in nature is free from the past, including human action; and nothing but acting on desire can add up to freedom-to. Nor is there any notion of freedom that is purer or better than freely acting on one’s desires—as if we are only really free when discarding our desires and acting in a vacuum.  [2] For instance, a person who acts on his desire to save the world (perhaps putting aside his other selfish desires) is the paradigm of a free agent—and it is no impediment to this that his desire follows strictly from his genes and his upbringing. He couldn’t have acted otherwise, but so what—he was free to act on his most cherished desire. He was free to act on his altruistic desire despite attempts by others to thwart him, though his action wasn’t miraculously free from his mind and nervous system. The former freedom is not undermined by lack of the latter freedom.  [3]

            The difference between the two concepts is illustrated by a difference in their logic. An action is either free from a factor X or not; in particular, either actions are determined by antecedent conditions or they are not. It is an all-or-nothing matter. But forward-looking freedom-to is not so simple: a good case can be made that we are partially free in this way but not completely free. Am I really free to do exactly what I please, even in the most favorable conditions? Don’t I have all sorts of unrealistic desires that I can never act on? I would dearly love to fly like a bird, but I am not free to do so—the laws of nature prevent me from so acting. Don’t I also have a lot of conflicting desires that keep me from fulfilling all of them? Realistically, we can’t always do exactly what we please—we are not completely free. We are pretty free most of the time (if we are lucky), or more free than our neighbor, but we are not totally free. Freedom-to is not an all-or-nothing matter, unlike freedom-from. It operates in different conceptual terrain. It doesn’t breathe the same air. The logical behavior of “free to” is not the same as that of “free from”. This is why the compatibilist and the incompatibilist often seem like they are talking past each other: for they are talking about different things. The word “free” crops up in their discourse about these things but not because they have an identical subject matter—any more than its occurrence in “free with” discourse (compare also “tax-free”, “free as a bird”, “free society”, “free radicals”, “degrees of freedom”, “stimulus-free”, etc.) We mustn’t mix language games; we mustn’t tear “free” free of its linguistic auxiliaries. We mustn’t confuse one concept with another. Then we can accept that we have plenty of “free to” freedom but zero “free from” freedom—though remaining wary of that dangling use of “freedom”. Both are legitimate uses of the word “free”, but the constructions in which they occur have quite different import.

            The intuitive idea of determinism is that the future is bound by the past, not able to escape its clutches, its shackles. This conflicts with the idea that we are free from the past and hence have alternative courses of action open to us. Thus we don’t have this kind of freedom. The intuitive idea of voluntary action is that we are often able to act without constraint or interference from sources external to our own desires, wishes, inclinations, preferences, values, and so on. This in no way precludes our actions from being genuinely free: to do what you want because of what you want is the very essence of freedom. Not indeed freedom-from, since we are not in so acting free from our desires (values etc.), but freedom to follow these desires without external impediment. Both lines of thought are perfectly sound: but, contrary to traditional thinking, they are not in conflict with each other. The plain fact is that we are free (to) but we are not free (from). I would recommend never using the word “free” in philosophical discourse without its attached preposition. That will make us free from confusion and free to stop worrying about the problem of freedom.  [4]

 

  [1] The fundamental idea of free action is surely freedom from other people: it is doing what you want irrespective of the wishes and actions of others. Internal factors can operate like other people, but the basic idea is that of interpersonal constraint or restraint. This has nothing to do with determinism; it is purely a matter of being free to act on one’s desires independently of others. So the notion of freedom is a social notion at root: if there are no other people, the question of freedom cannot arise. It is other people who put one’s freedom in jeopardy, not the past or one’s internal physiology or the laws of nature or one’s own desires. Have philosophers and others succumbed to a kind of anthropomorphism about such factors, modeling them on interfering human agents? That would explain a lot. 

  [2] It is sometimes said, quite correctly, that we are not compelled to act on our desires—we can resist their urgings and refuse to act on them. However, this is so only because we have other mental states that countermand these desires, typically commitments to values that conflict with the desire in question. These may take the form of second-order desires to the effect that the first-order desire ought to be resisted. The fact that a certain desire may incline us to action without compelling us should not be converted into an argument against psychological determinism, let alone physical determinism; for the reason for resistance will itself be another desire, possibly a value judgment, or some other psychological factor.  

  [3] It is instructive to consider free animal action. We recognize the difference between a caged or bound animal and a free-ranging one: the difference is the difference between the animal acting as it desires and being prevented from so acting. To be sure, its actions are determined by its genes, upbringing, and impinging stimuli, but that has nothing to do with the distinction between being caged and being free-ranging. Animals can be free to act on their desires or not so free, but they are certainly not free from the antecedent state of the world—they must act as they do. Still, there is all the difference in the world between being free to act on their desires and being coerced in various ways. The case is precisely analogous in the case of humans.

  [4] I have been fretting about freedom for over fifty years and have wavered between different positions, most recently favoring the compatibilist position. This is my attempt to lay the subject to rest, at least so far as I am concerned.

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Freedom As Determination

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                                                Freedom As Determination

 

 

John goes into a café for lunch. He looks over the menu, carefully considering each option (John is a fastidious eater): he reviews the possible alternatives and weighs up which will please him the most, the price of each, what is most healthy, and what sort of figure he will cutting eating it. After assiduous deliberation he makes his selection, feeling happy that he has made the best choice in the circumstances. He places his order, waits in anticipation, and then proceeds to consume the dish he ordered. He is pleased with the outcome.

            This would appear to be a paradigm case of a free decision: John has considered a range of possible alternatives, reviewed them for desirability, and then selected according to his deepest culinary wishes. It was entirely up to him what he chose; there was no compulsion or coercion from without or within. And yet it has seemed to many philosophers that there is a deep problem here: John’s action was not free, contrary to appearances. For his action was determined—by the laws of physics and the initial conditions and by his overall psychological state. Given this determination John could not have acted otherwise—he would have done the same thing in identical circumstances. Thus human action is not free, and paradigm cases of freedom are no more genuinely free than any other occurrence of nature.

            Some respond by denying determinism, hoping thereby to make room for freedom: either there is indeterminism in physical nature or in the mind. Others contend that on closer examination freedom and determinism are not incompatible, once we understand what freedom actually involves (lack of constraint from outside or inside). But it is agreed on all hands that freedom and determinism are prima facie at odds with each other; it takes work to reconcile them, often ingenious work. The compatibilist is under suspicion of changing the subject in order to save the phenomenon. What I intend argue is that freedom actually entails determinism—that free will makes no sense without determinism. The two are not just compatible but deeply connected: it is a conceptual truth that freedom requires determinism of the most robust kind. Only in a deterministic world is freedom possible. To put it differently, freedom of choice logically requires causal and nomological necessitation by antecedent states of the universe. Specifically, freedom requires strong psychological necessitation: we can be free only if we are bound in our choices by our prior psychological states. In Hume’s terminology, liberty logically depends upon necessity.  [1] This is not merely compatibilism but what I will call determinationism—the “determinationist theory” of free will (it could equally be called necessitationism).  [2]

            Before I lay out this theory I want to consider how freedom might be abrogated in a case like John’s. It is certainly abrogated if someone puts a gun to John’s head and orders him to choose (sic) the salami sandwich: that would be a clear case of external constraint, preventing him from ordering what he most desires (fish and chips). But there are other ways in which his ability to act freely might be thwarted: for instance, he might suffer from a brain complaint that prevents him from envisaging the range of alternatives—he suffers a kind of modal blindness. Whenever he tries to review the available alternatives he finds that nothing comes to mind; he cannot mentally scan through the possibilities, finding himself stuck on a single option. He has lost his sense of alternative futures. Or it may be that he can envisage a range of alternatives but has lost the ability to select one—he suffers from selection impotence. Whenever he tries to select a particular option his mind goes haywire, either selecting none or weirdly skipping to another option than the one he deems best. Or he can select among envisaged alternatives but his action is wildly out of sync with his selection: whenever he tries to order the fish and chips the words “Can I have a salami sandwich?” pop out of his mouth. In all these cases he has lost his ability to act freely, or it has been drastically depleted. We might think of these aberrations as internal constraints interfering with the normal deliberative process; they are freedom-destroyers. They destroy John’s ability to choose and obtain what he most desires from an array of alternatives.

            Let me now state my thesis as baldly as possible. Freedom entails that the agent falls under the law: “People act in accordance with their wishes, unless prevented from doing so”. I intend this law to be analogous to the law of inertia: “Bodies maintain their state of motion, unless imposed upon by an outside force”. That is, it is a law of nature—deterministic and nomologically necessary–that governs how choices are made. I will call this law the “Law of Strongest Desire”, or “LSD”.  [3] The thesis, then, is that free will entails LSD: it is not possible to be free unless you fall under LSD– that is, unless your actions are necessitated by your wishes (desires, inclinations, likes, whims, practical judgments, pro-attitudes, or whatever motivates). That is what freedom is—determination by what motivates. Choice is “wish-fulfillment”. This kind of determinism is not just compatible with freedom; it is what freedom requires and consists in. Free choice just is selecting from among a range of alternatives in accordance with natural law. It is a law of nature that people act according to their strongest desire, and free will depends on the obtaining of that law.

            There are two questions about this thesis: is LSD necessary for freedom, and is it sufficient for freedom? The reason it is necessary is that in cases where it breaks down the agent is not free. Suppose John plumps for his fish and chips after prolonged and careful reflection, coming to the conclusion that this would be the best possible lunch in the circumstances; but then a sudden brain spasm leads him to choose the salami sandwich, which ranks low on his preference list. He may or may not notice the switch, depending on the nature of the brain spasm; but in any case he chooses what he does not most desire. Surely this is not a case of free choice: it is like the gun to the head scenario. He most wants fish and chips but he doesn’t choose in accordance with that wish; he has been subjected to a freedom-destroyer, pushing him in the direction of the unwanted salami sandwich. Or suppose he suffers from a strange psychological quirk whereby his judgments of desirability are regularly subverted according to the rule, “Choose your third-ranked option every time”. He always chooses the third item on his list of desirables without changing his evaluations. He thus acts against his wishes in a predictable way, violating LSD. Again, he is not acting freely: he lacks what an ordinary free agent possesses, viz. the ability to act in accordance with what one most strongly desires. Imagine if his pathology consists in choosing the opposite of what he most desires—choosing, say, discomfort over comfort, and suffering the consequences. We would rightly regard this as a strange compulsion, inimical to freedom, and suggest that John consult a freedom doctor. Therefore falling under LSD is a necessary condition for freedom.

            Is it sufficient? Intuitively, it is—any normal person would agree that this is what freedom comes down to. But the fretting philosopher is apt to sense difficulty: he will ask how LSD is compatible with the principle that a free agent could always have acted otherwise. And it is true that on this view the agent cannot act otherwise given that she is subject to the law of strongest desire—she will always of necessity act in the way that fits what is most strongly desired. She has no alternative given her motivational structure: her desires (etc) determine (uniquely so) her actions. But does the ability to act otherwise really contradict that kind of determinism? No, because it can simply mean, “She could have acted differently had she had different desires (or a different ranking of desires)”. Of course she could have acted otherwise—just as John went into the café the day before and in fact ordered a salami sandwich, because that’s what he felt like having then. There is no logical requirement that agents can act otherwise given their total psychological state—whoever said that that is what freedom involves? It is a bizarre scenario that is being imagined: an agent has exactly the same psychological makeup at two different times but acts differently, intentionally so. What reason could there be for acting thus differently? What went through the agent’s mind that justified the difference of action (and choice)? How would the agent explain herself?

            At this point Buridan’s ass is likely to make an entrance: suspended between two piles of equally delicious hay, it nevertheless picks one pile over the other. But surely that could happen only if the animal had a sudden, if subtle, hankering after (say) the pile on the left—the way it reflected the light at that moment, a general tendency to favor the left, etc. If the two alternatives really were exactly psychologically equivalent, the animal would not be able to make a choice: it would have to manufacture a distinction in order to be triggered into action. But this is not the kind of situation in which we find ourselves when deliberating; we generally find it easy to appreciate distinctions among the options before us, even if it is just a matter of momentarily fancying one thing over another.

            So it is not required for freedom that one be free of one’s own mind, i.e. free to act independently of what is desired (valued, judged best all things considered). Freedom is freedom to act dependently on one’s desires. Thus LSD is sufficient for freedom: there is not some further ingredient to the concept that requires a free action to be one that transcends desire. Suppose an agent regularly flouted his own strongest desires: does that make him or her freer than an agent who always acts in accordance with his desires? Hardly. Freedom does not involve the ability to act against what one desires—except in the trivial and irrelevant sense that freedom often involves the ability to resist certain of one’s desires. If a person judges it morally best to do such and such, contrary to what he desires prudentially, he is not violating LSD, since in this case his moral wishes outweigh his prudential wishes. People do indeed sometimes act from their moral wishes, but that is just one more example of the desire-choice hook-up. What doesn’t happen is that people act from no wish at all, or quite contrary to their wishes–to do so would be to cease to act freely, as in cases of brain spasm. There is no merit in that, and little sense: what would it be, from the inside, knowingly to choose according to what one does not most desire? Does one say to oneself, “I know that I don’t really want to do A all things considered, but would much rather do B, and yet I will deliberately and self-consciously do A”? Even supposing such a state of mind to be possible, why would having it make one freer than someone who simply acted in accordance with what he most desired (or judged best)? Why should ignoring one’s deepest desires enhance one’s freedom, even if it were possible?

            We can all agree that freedom requires the ability to ignore or suppress or regulate some desires, so that we are not pressed into action by our appetitive promptings or baser inclinations; but that is a far cry from the idea that freedom requires total liberation from all desire, even the most elevated, rational, and refined. Does God’s freedom require him to act independently of what he judges best, as if to prove that he is really free? No, God always acts according to LSD: he makes his actions conform to his divine wishes; he doesn’t disconnect the two. Could God have acted otherwise? Well, he could have had different plans for the universe and hence different wishes, but it is absurd to suppose that he could have done differently given his plans and wishes (despite his omnipotence). Are we to think that his actions sometimes mysteriously detach themselves from his omnisciently considered judgments about what he most wishes for his creation?  Could it be, for example, that what he wants from us is virtue but that he sometimes acts so as to promote vice, even though he has no desire that we be vicious?

            Thus LSD is necessary and sufficient for freedom, which means that freedom entails determinism (psychological determinism). It doesn’t entail determinism all the way down—it would be odd if freedom proved that the quantum world is deterministic. What it entails is that desire necessitates choice—to act freely is to act in accordance with one’s desires (considered judgments of desirability). And there is a further point: we know that this is so when we act. That is, we rely on an assumption of determinism when we deliberate—we rely on lawful psychological connections. Most obviously, we are aware of the lawful connection between desires, choices, and actions: we know that desires produce choices that produce actions. If these causal connections were to break down, we would lose the ability to act freely, because there would be no point in deliberating if we could not depend on such lawful causal connections. What point is there in deciding what to do if your decisions are powerless to lead to action of the desired type? What point would there be in deliberating if a review of alternatives could not lead to a mental act of selection? No, we assume that there is a lawful causal web here that justifies predicting what will happen when we deliberate; if that web became fragmented and dissolved, we would be bereft of the ability to act freely, i.e. in accordance with our wishes. There would be no point in John deliberating about his precious lunch if nothing he did mentally reliably led to certain outcomes, ultimately eating what he wants most. Reading the menu has to lead reliably to having an array of options in mind, which has to lead reliably to a considered survey of these options and their pros and cons, which has to lead reliably to a justified selection, which has to lead reliably to placing the right order, which has to lead reliably to getting the lunch he most desires. All this is lawful and causal, so deliberation presupposes determinism at this level; introducing a random and unpredictable element into the process would only destroy or diminish freedom, not generate it.

            This is what I meant by saying that freedom and determinism are not only compatible but conceptually connected. The concept of freedom analytically entails determinism of the kind enshrined in LSD, which is no less deterministic than other laws of nature, such as the law of inertia–hence the determinationist theory of freedom. Our free actions are governed by a law of nature that is as rigid as any law. It is the same with animals: they too obey the law of strongest desire—they act in accordance with what they desire most at the moment of action. They do not demonstrate their freedom by mysteriously flouting their desires, detaching their actions from what they want; they simply follow nature in acting according to their wishes. They could not act otherwise given their wishes, though they could act otherwise with different wishes; but that in no whit detracts from their freedom. Their will is entirely free, as is our will and the will of God—free to enact what they most desire (unless interfered with). Determination by desire does not rob us of free will; it constitutes free will. We should count ourselves lucky that our actions are determined by our desires, or else we would flail in a sea of randomness, or languish in a prison of external constraint. Our desires don’t confine us in determining our actions; they allow us to be free agents constrained by nothing alien and undesired.

            There may be a residual anxiety: if desires necessitate and cause actions, don’t they compel us to act, and isn’t that contrary to the sense we have of our freedom? We don’t feel compulsion from desire, but shouldn’t we if determinism holds? First, we should not model the causality here on clinical cases of compulsion, such as drug addiction or OCD, which are (to some degree) freedom-destroyers. Second, we could follow Hume in claiming that this kind of causation, like all causation, is not perceptible by the mind, so the fact that we don’t feel it doesn’t show it isn’t there. Third, we don’t feel compulsion in other cases of mental causation either, though it is assuredly present, such as the causation of belief by perception, or imagination by recollection, or emotion by thought. These causal connections are lawful and involve causal power, and hence are “compelled”, but we don’t feel this compulsion, as we may feel the compulsion of drug addiction. Our desires necessitate our choices in virtue of LSD, but we don’t need to experience that necessitation—and such an experience is not possible if we follow Hume on causation. Perhaps the lack of an experience of necessity gives us an illusion of causal independence, but we must actually be subject to causality in the recesses of the mind. We are subject to necessitating psychological law even if it doesn’t strike us that we are—and we have to be if we are to function in such a way as to permit freedom. And clearly people are subject to all sorts of psychological laws that they may not suspect subsume them—as that they act from ambition or self-interest or vanity (this is a point of Hume’s). Being subject to LSD is not the same as consciously realizing that it necessarily governs one’s actions at all moments (again consider animals).

            Here is a further point (also made by Hume): we don’t tend to think our freedom is compromised by psychological laws that only hold generally and for the most part, so why should we be disturbed by laws that hold without exception? Being subject to psychological law is not ipso facto an abrogation or diminution of freedom: we don’t feel less than fully free because we are generally motivated by ambition or self-interest or vanity (or indeed by good will and public spiritedness). It is not that we would have our freedom increased by having no lawful tendencies at all, by being (unlike the rest of nature) entirely anomalous. So why should being very lawful imperil our freedom? Freedom has nothing to do with escaping natural law; but it has everything to do with obeying the right kind of law to enable freedom, i.e. the law of strongest desire. This law is what is constitutive of free will, so it can hardly be such as to undermine free will. If I rigidly obeyed the law of always acting rationally and morally, that would have no tendency to show that I was not as free as someone less unwavering. Similarly, if I rigidly obeyed LSD that would have no tendency to show that I was less free than someone who suffered intermittent breakdowns of that law (by brain spasms, etc)–quite the contrary. As Hume says, liberty is not opposed to natural necessity but to external constraint (or internal constraint). To lack freedom is to have our desires imprisoned, not for our desires to imprison us—for how could that conceivably be? Desires are not like external agents (or internal agents) dictating that we should act contrary to them. Freedom is determination by our desires (considered judgments of desirability).

            To defend free will is not to defend moral responsibility. For us to be praiseworthy or blameworthy would involve our desires arising from a process involving the exercise of our free will; but this is seldom if ever the case. Someone subject to a vicious and corrupting childhood, who forms corresponding bad desires, will naturally act in accordance with them, thus acting freely; but we cannot blame such an individual for those desires (she had no say in their formation), and hence we cannot blame her for her actions. When this person performs an immoral act she is acting freely from her own desires—she is not externally (or internally) constrained—but she is not responsible for the action in the moral sense, since she cannot be blamed for the formation of her bad desires (the same goes for good desires, of course). Freedom of action does not imply freedom of desire. Thus the person may not be free though her actions are (since they follow from her desires). The actions of a criminal may be free but not blameworthy.

            I have not said that freedom entails physical determinism, only psychological determinism. So psychological determinism is not incompatible with freedom: but what about physical determinism? There is some feeling that physical determinism is in tension with freedom, because all the movements of the body are uniquely predetermined by antecedent physical conditions, and freedom requires the ability to do otherwise. But this is confused: it doesn’t matter that all my movements are physically predetermined, so that my will has no power to change them to other types of movement; all that matters is that I have the power to move differently in the presence of different desires—which will require that the antecedent physical facts be different. Freedom does not require that someone just like me physically must be able to act differently from me—for that would imply that his action is disconnected from his desires (since he must have the same desires as me in virtue of the supervenience of the mental on the physical). The physical body is not like an outside agent interfering with my autonomy; it is simply the place where my desires naturally nestle. The fact that my body can no more depart from its causal history than a tree can is irrelevant to whether I am free: the question is whether I can act in accordance with my desires. There is an intuitive feeling that physical determinism conflicts with freedom, but there is no demonstration that the two are incompatible; and it is farfetched to suppose that our ordinary concept of freedom requires that physically identical agents should be able to act differently—that the future is not fixed by the past. That is a philosopher’s fancy not part of what our ordinary concept of freedom involves. The onus is on the philosopher to show us why there is any such entailment; and it would be strange if our ordinary concept implied such a surprising theoretical possibility. Rather, what our concept implies is something we know very well, namely that we act in accordance with our wishes; but that has nothing to do with breaches in physical determinism.

            I have argued that freedom entails necessitation and that necessitation does not undermine freedom. We thus cannot rule out freedom by establishing necessitation. Whether we are actually free is a further question, but I can see no reason why not and every reason to think we are. Freedom is acting in accordance with one’s strongest desire (all things considered), and this we do all the time; ergo we are free. My actions are free because I act as I wish to act. To be free is to be subject to law—the law of freedom.  [4]

 

Colin McGinn

  [1] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VIII, “Of Liberty and Necessity”. It was reading Hume that led me to the proposals of this paper.

  [2] Ken Levy drew my attention to an excellent article by R. E. Hobart, published in Mind in 1934, entitled, “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It”. This article is very much in the spirit of what I argue here (and others have said similar things over the years); if I add anything, it is perhaps a new way of formulating the same basic points.

  [3] There are all sorts of complexities about the notion of “strongest desire” that I don’t want to engage here. All I need for my purposes is the idea that all actions are preceded by some sort of motivational state that causes them to occur (or causes the agent to perform them) and which involves law and necessity. I am claiming that freedom implies determination by motivational states of some sort as opposed to lack of determination by anything in the agent. So, roughly: people do what they desire to do because of their desires—where these operative desires cause and determine. These desires can range from a simple desire for food to the most sophisticated moral evaluations. One’s strongest desire might fall into the latter category: one wants above all to act rightly, so one acts on that desire, thus acting freely. This is quite compatible with having strong appetitive desires that the moral desire overrides. The law of strongest desire is intended to include cases in which moral motivations outweigh other kinds. The question I am concerned with is whether necessitation by one’s motives (prudential, moral, appetitive) undermines one’s freedom.

  [4] Everything in nature is subject to law, even free decisions. So free decisions must fall under laws, and there is no reason the corresponding law should not take the form of LSD. The law of freedom is not something that detractsfrom freedom.

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Desire and Understanding

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Desire and Understanding

 

In the course of a perceptive description of a cat James Joyce writes: “She understands all she wants to” (Ulysses, p.48). The cat doesn’t try to understand what she has no wish to understand, let alone what she cannot understand; she doesn’t try to acquire knowledge that doesn’t interest her. Her desire and her understanding are in perfect harmony. Nor does anyone try to force knowledge and understanding on her. She has what might be called desire-dependent understanding. Presumably other animals are the same way: they understand what they want to understand—what they need to understand to survive, what fits their natural life-style. We could even state a law of zoology: animals understand only what they desire to understand, neither more nor less. There is synchrony, a coordination of the mental faculties. They don’t know things they are not interested in knowing, and they do know what they want to know. That seems only right and proper.

            But humans are the exception to this rule: they understand a lot they have no desire to understand. I am not thinking so much of knowledge of unwelcome facts, though this is real enough; I am thinking of the process of formal education. We are a species that sends our kids to school for many years in order to learn things they are generally resistant to learning; no other species does this. We haven’t always done it: there was a time when human children were not forced to acquire knowledge they had no desire to acquire. But for centuries we have been forcing our children to learn what they desire not to learn—what they have no wish to learn. We have been filling them with desire-denying knowledge. Imagine if the same were true of (say) lions: instead of training their cubs in hunting skills in the usual way, they pack them off to boarding school to force them into endless lessons on correct predatory behavior, keeping them stuck indoors, giving them mountains of homework, forcing them to take stressful written examinations in how to bring down an antelope. We can suppose that the cubs don’t take kindly to this, suffering from maternal deprivation, jungle homesickness, performance anxiety, insomnia, and lifelong neurosis. We can even suppose that this education, so contrary to their natural inclinations, produces serious trauma with the inevitable PTSD. As it is, however, they are not subjected to this desire-denying regimen, but simply play with their mothers and siblings and gradually acquire the necessary skills. So far as I am aware there are no instances of lion cubs refusing to be taught hunting, feigning illness to avoid it, playing truant, and resenting the whole educational process. But human cubs experience the exact opposite: they really don’t like to do what they are coerced into doing on a daily basis for years on end. Their natural desires and their imposed educational program are completely out of sync. Their inclinations are violently flouted (sometimes literally).

            You would think this state of affairs might occasion serious reflection on the part of educators. Generally speaking, to thwart an organism’s natural psychological make-up is considered unwise: this degree of desire suppression might be thought to have some untoward psychological consequences. Isn’t school really a type of prison, psychologically speaking (it has often been experienced this way)? Isn’t it possible that education is inflicting massive trauma on its victims, causing neurosis, anxiety, low self-esteem, and general emotional sickness? And this is happening at a particularly vulnerable time in a human being’s life, when he or she has little in the way of emotional defenses. Could it be that deep-seated and widespread unhappiness results from this systematic violation of human desire? Isn’t it obvious that this is mental cruelty analogous to forcing cats to learn mazes all day? The standard response to this kind of concern is that they will thank us in the long run. There will be misery now, yes, but when they grow up they will feel the benefit. Granted no one would put children through this agony just for the sake of it—they are clearly not happy with the prevailing state of affairs—but the end justifies the means.    [1] We should always be wary of this type of argument (“spare the rod spoil the child” etc.) but there is this special consideration too: the reason for adopting this painful means to eventual happiness is the economic structure of the society that we now live in. So the defense of the oppressive nature of education is that it is necessary to survive in the economic world we have created—not that it is psychologically healthy for children and the adults they will become, or even tolerable. You might as well say, “Yes, I know it’s extremely damaging psychologically, but it’s the only way to prevent people from becoming destitute given the society we have created”. The fundamental point is that we are flouting a zoological law that ensures psychological harmony throughout the animal kingdom. Of course, people do like to learn things, even at school, some people more than others, but the form this has taken under relentless economic pressure is undeniably oppressive, going completely against the grain for almost everybody. (I am no exception: I recall the dread that ”Double Maths” used to instill in me, and I was pretty good at maths.) You would think the system might try to mitigate these deleterious effects, or at least openly acknowledge them; but it is has grown up with a naïve and outdated developmental psychology that pays little attention to the possibly traumatic effects of subjugation to a deeply disliked educational regime. James Joyce’s cat would not tolerate it for a moment–there would be all manner of biting, scratching, and screeching. Really, education should be against the law! And corporal punishment for failing at your lessons or “talking in class”—a class 1 felony.    [2]

            All this combines with a curious inconsistency: children are denied knowledge of what they want to know while being force-fed what they don’t want to know. I am speaking of sexual knowledge. True, things have improved somewhat, but even now there is a reluctance to teach sex with the rigor and determination with which (say) calculus is taught. And sex is a pretty important subject about which people have a lot of natural curiosity (I am here including love, family, friendship, human decency etc.). Shouldn’t children be given a full and deep education in such matters, possibly including examinations, advanced courses, and remedial classes? You can be sure it would be well received: it fits nicely with the human desire to know what it wants to know. And subjects that appeal less naturally to young people (for that is what they are) should be framed in such a way that their epistemic desires are properly respected. Otherwise we run the risk of producing a race of psychologically damaged, thwarted, depressed, warped, anxious victims. We can all now see how awful earlier pedagogical practice was, as we can see the same with respect to earlier child labor practices; but the fundamental problem hasn’t been solved, namely that education, as we have it today, is radically contrary to people’s natural desires. It is against human nature, to put it briefly. If children could learn mathematics in the way they learn their language—quickly, naturally, painlessly—things would be different, but sadly that is not the case given the way the human mind is structured. As things stand, we simply do not desire to learn things the way they are taught to us, or even at all in some cases. Does anyone believe it would be wise to teach every child Sanskrit or metallurgy or medieval manuscript writing on pain of serious punishment—for hours a day, year after year? Does anyone think that the fact that children would hate doing this is no reason not to impose it? We should always respect innate human psychology and not assume it can be violated with impunity. The element of coercion in current educational methods is a source of real concern (or should be), as are the psychological effects of the kind of education now taken for granted. The successful boy or girl is the one who survives this regime with the least psychological damage. I recall the day when I took my very last examination (I was 24) and the intense feeling of liberation I felt after the oppression of my earlier years. The system is frankly inhuman and despotic. It took me several years before the trauma began to wear off and I could live without the nightmare of a typical English education haunting me. And I don’t mean kids shouldn’t have to work so hard (I still work hard); I mean that their wishes in the matter of learning should not be routinely disregarded. They should be treated more like James Joyce’s cat, or as the lioness treats her cubs, or as the gorilla treats its aspiring little gorillas. It works for them; it should work for us (also primates). We should take a more biologically informed view of education. It’s a good idea in education to take a close look at the mind you are trying to educate and not suppose it is like a piece of putty you can mold at will, or as consisting just of a faculty of knowing that is independent of the rest of the human psyche. Children have desires about what they know and how they come to know it, which should be taken into account. So I advocate what might be called desire-sensitive education. 

    [1] Presumably we would all agree that other things being equal it would be preferable simply to download all this stuff into children’s brains so as to avoid the years of toil and heartache associated with traditional education. But of course this is not technically feasible, so we must resort to standard techniques of arduous instruction. Let it be noted that technological efforts to ease the process of education have long been sought, most recently in the form of the computer.

    [2] What would we think if the side effects of a formal education were even more severe than they are today? What if reading, writing and arithmetic caused actual physical pain and actual mental disorder? Would we still try to justify them by the instrumental value of a sound education in the 3 R’s? What if education made people go blind on a regular basis? I hope no one would argue that this would be good for children from a character-building point of view!

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Lolita and Quilty

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Lolita and Quilty

 

It is hard to fault Lolita artistically and morally, but there is one aspect of it that troubles me artistically, and possibly also morally: Lolita’s relationship with Quilty. Dare I suggest that it is a weakness in the novel? It has not always seemed so to me, but lately I have found myself baffled and bothered by it. I will try to express my concerns, confessing that they are difficult to pin down.

            Quilty is inscrutable for most of the book, a distant hovering presence. There are no scenes in which Lolita and Quilty appear together, though Humbert and Quilty are occasionally conjoined (notably when Humbert murders him). We learn most about him from Lolita’s stray remarks, which are mainly gathered in chapter 29, that most unbearable of chapters, in which Humbert reunites with a visibly pregnant Lolita accompanied by her new husband, Richard F. Schiller, following her flight from him three years earlier. Humbert wants to know the identity of the man who (as he sees it) abducted her, but Lolita is reluctant to tell him. Eventually he understands that Quilty is the man he seeks. We read: “She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about. What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And I had never counted, of course?”

Dolores Haze was crazy about Clare Quilty (Clear Guilty?): that is a hard fact to absorb. He was an old friend of the family and had once pulled her “onto his lap in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she was ten and furious with him”. She confides to Humbert that Quilty “liked little girls, had been almost jailed once”. He also “saw…through everything and everybody, because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought so.” But that’s not all: “He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved him, and he threw her out.” Pressed for details about the things that happened at the ranch, she continues: “Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” She intimates that when she refused to perform oral sex on the boys, because she only wanted Quilty, “he kicked me out”.

            So this is the man that Lolita loved and was “crazy about”: not her husband and certainly not her stepfather-lover. The question that troubles me is why. She seems only too aware of his depravity, his absolute lack of decency, and his vile exploitations. He callously threw her out into the street for not obeying his pornographic instructions–and yet she loved him (maybe still does). He is clearly an exceptionally bad man, a villain of the first order, and she knows it. His only redeeming feature, apparently, is that he is a “genius”: but there is no evidence that he is a genius; he is just a second-rate provincial playwright. Why does Lolita think he is a genius? And even if he is, how does that excuse his beastly behavior—toward her and in general? When we meet Quilty in person, in the scene in which Humbert shoots him to death, he appears as a deranged drug addict, a rambling psychopath, and a clownish figure of fun. How can Lolita be so blind? She flees Humbert to join this odious man—not to escape the panting pedophile but to embrace a new one. Why would she do that? Humbert treated her more kindly and was less outrageous in his demands. It could not be Quilty’s confessed semi-impotence that attracted her, because she seemed more than willing to become his lover. His general awfulness was no impediment to her affections.

            This then is the puzzle: why does Lolita love the odious Quilty? We can understand why she might want to escape the clutches of a pedophile by running to an old family friend, but why must she love this despicable creep? She hates Humbert for his exploitation of her, but she seems remarkably forgiving when it comes to Quilty’s even more egregious exploitation. He is praised as “a great guy” and “full of fun”. Is this intended as ironic? It seems not to be, but if it is then the puzzle becomes even sharper: he is certainly not a great guy and full of fun, but a coldhearted manipulative pervert (for more on this theme see his interview with Humbert in chapter 35). He kicks her out on her own, a bereaved motherless teenage girl, with zero resources, totally vulnerable, simply because she refuses to participate in his filmed orgies. She evidently means nothing to him save as a pornographic prop (he expresses no affection for her when confronted by Humbert, nor the slightest concern for her welfare). You would think that Dolores Haze—generally an intelligent and perceptive girl—would hate the bastard’s guts. Yet she scarcely makes any judgment against him, noting only that he “broke my heart” (while Humbert “broke my life”). Moreover, she seems to have been infatuated with Quilty for quite some time, dating from before her ill-starred association with Humbert. Indeed, it would appear that she was in love with him during her “affair” with her stepfather (this is why she arranged for him to follow them across the country).

 What I don’t understand is why she loves him and why Nabokov chose to make her love him. Is it just to pile on the tragedy? Is it because otherwise we can’t see why she would run to him? Is it because of the pain this gives Humbert (who deserves much pain)? To me it seems gratuitous, perverse, and unintelligible—an absurdity. The other romantic relationships in the book make sense, including Charlotte’s devotion to Humbert: but not this one. It is not humanly plausible and not artistically required. Quilty could have been a villain like Humbert, his double in depravity, but he didn’t have to be a loved villain. Why did Lolita not turn from him in revulsion? I therefore find that I cannot reconcile myself to this aspect of the novel. It strikes me as an artistic misjudgment (painful as it is to say this) and it lowers my moral opinion of Lolita (also painful). Some readers may be tempted to resort to psychoanalytic explanations—the long-dead father, the overbearing mother, a masochistic personality. But none of this sort of funny business is apparent in Nabokov’s text, and he was notoriously opposed to such explanations (Freud the “Viennese quack”). Thus I remain puzzled and disturbed.

 

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