Letter to a Calvinist

[psimmond]

CThomas, it sounds to me like you are talking about the Arminian position rather than the reformed position. You say God doesn't use coercive causation (type 1), and you say type 2 causation (what God decrees or ordains) is nothing more than an explanation for how man will act of his own free will.

I know there are different flavors in the reformed camp, but I've never heard any of them describe God's foreordination in such a weak way.

If i'm stating your position correctly, and if some or many in the reformed camp would agree with you, then what difference is there between their view of free will and that of Arminians?

I know you said...

I write this not as an expression of any sort of Calvinist orthodoxy, but rather simply as a matter of my own common sense opinion on the matter.

but you also said...

And on that view, against which your letter offers no argument, there is no contradiction in the Calvinist view.

I can see how your view could reconcile these matters, but I still see contradiction in what I've always heard to be the Calvinist view.

[Timm001]

Hi everyone,

I am glad to see that we are discussing compatibilism, as I think that the truth of compatibilism is relevant to truth of Calvinism--or at least the varieties of it that I know anything about. I will start by saying that I myself am not a compatibilist nor a Calvinist, and that I believe that libertarian free will is the only sort that does proper justice to the notion that we are genuinely free. However, I'd like to keep the discussion going about compatibilism.

It seems that if we are to decide whether free will is "compatible" with some kind of determinism (whether theological as in God, or perhaps mechanistic or "natural" determinism as in a materialistic conception of human beings), then it would help to state at least some of the assumptions about free will that are non-negotiable, and to explain why they are. That is, I would begin by offering a partial definition of free will (stating some of the necessary conditions for an act to be free), along with the claim that an act is not free if it cannot ground moral responsibility. So I cannot be "free" if it seems like I cannot be held morally responsible for what I did.

There are many thought experiments which attempt to demonstrate that moral responsibility only goes along with genuinely free decisions. For example, if someone holds a gun to your head and tells you that they will pull the trigger if you don't authorize the transfer of funds from another bank account to their own, then you cannot be accused of "stealing" if you follow orders. If you transfer the money to your own bank account under no threat of danger, then you are stealing. I won't attempt an explanation of why our moral intuitions support these conclusions (at least not until it is relevant), but I hope that this example is fairly uncontroversial, at least to the extent that an act which someone performs at gun point is not genuinely free versus one they do in the absence of any such exterior influences. The conclusion then, for our purposes, is as follows: If our account of compatibilist free will does not seem sufficient to ground moral responsibility, then it is an inadequate account.

With this in mind, I would stipulate that a decision/act is not free unless the decision/act is not necessitated by any external or internal influences. Alternatively put, a decision/act is free only if it is devoid of necessitating influences. Note that this is not sufficient for an act to be free--it is only necessary. There are other conditions that must be met in order for the act to be free, but we are not examining those conditions at the moment. Instead, I want to focus on this notion of necessitation, which we can take to include the idea that the decision/act is uncaused by anything other than the agent himself/herself. Also, we can speak of decisions, rather than "acts," in the future because the ability of an agent to act depends upon their external circumstances more than does the ability of the agent to freely decide.

I thus believe that compatibilism is false because it entails determinism, in one form or another, of our decisions. Further, it is not sufficient for free will to say that a decision is free if it is the result of process that is internal to the agent. Such a process may be internal while also being the result of a deterministic process in which each step necessitates its successor. If steps A, B, and C happen in a row, and A necessitates B, and B necessitates C, then it is clear that C is not free even if C is an event that happens "inside" me. C must simply come about out because of my innate and sui generis (unique or of its own kind) ability to bring about events like C. Alternatively put, nothing inside or outside of me required that C occur.

Internal/external determinism cannot ground moral responsibility because the agent does not have control over his decisions due to the fact that they are necessitated by conditions over which he has no control. Therefore, compatibilism is insufficient to ground moral responsibility.

[thrombomodulin]

... at least not until it is relevant

It is relevant now.

It seems to me that:

• There are no human decisions at all which are unencumbered. All decisions are influenced by the anticipated benefits and costs, which are subjective to the individual.
• Every human actions are always the result of each individual decisions (with exception granted for involuntary reflexes).

In your example, the person coerced into stealing made a decision to participate in the theft because he valued his life more than abstaining from participating in a crime. He was certainly influenced, but the power of choice to go one way or the other still remained with him. Consider the parallel situation of Daniel where Nebuchadnezzar threatened his life by means of a fiery furnace. We do not read that Daniel obeyed man rather than God because it was "necessary". Daniel retained decision making abilities. These were not lost when the price of obedience for him was high. He chose to obey God, because he valued this more than obeying men.

I don't think a non-Calvinist has any need of affirming an "unencumbered" decision making ability, rather he simply needs to affirm that humans retain the ability to make decisions.

[psimmond]

thrombomodulin makes a good point. If coercion is resistable, then we are still accountable for our actions, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. If, however, coercion strips us of the ability to freely choose, then we cannot be held responsible.

[Timm001]

It seems to me that:

• There are no human decisions at all which are unencumbered. All decisions are influenced by the anticipated benefits and costs, which are subjective to the individual.
• Every human actions are always the result of each individual decisions (with exception granted for involuntary reflexes).

In your example, the person coerced into stealing made a decision to participate in the theft because he valued his life more than abstaining from participating in a crime. He was certainly influenced, but the power of choice to go one way or the other still remained with him. Consider the parallel situation of Daniel where Nebuchadnezzar threatened his life by means of a fiery furnace. We do not read that Daniel obeyed man rather than God because it was "necessary". Daniel retained decision making abilities. These were not lost when the price of obedience for him was high. He chose to obey God, because he valued this more than obeying men.

I don't think a non-Calvinist has any need of affirming an "unencumbered" decision making ability, rather he simply needs to affirm that humans retain the ability to make decisions.

Some of your language here makes it sound like you are trying to disagree with me, but I actually can't find an area of dispute. I am not a compatibilist and I am not a determinist, therefore I believe that human beings have libertarian free will. Further, without such freedom we cannot be held morally responsible for our actions. Try as they might, I do not think that compatibilists can provide an adequate account of freedom (one that grounds moral responsibility). It is not enough, as some compatibilists have said, that a decision accord with the strongest desires that we possess, or reasons which we find motivating. There must be something over which we have control (a willing, a decision to act, an choosing of alternatives, etc., depending upon how one wishes to cache out their view) in the sense of our being able to do/act/will in an uncaused manner. To act/will in an uncaused manner means that your acting/willing was not necessitated by influences that were "internal" (e.g. brain states, desires, reasons, etc.) or "external" (sensory inputs, external stimuli).


We do have desires and reasons on the basis of which we make decisions, but none of these need necessitate that a particular decision take place (unless they are controlling desires, as in the case of an addiction). As you said, they can incline us towards one option or another, but they must not cause us to will/act in a certain way, otherwise we are puppets of our desires. Or, alternatively, if we say that we are slaves to our desires, then we must be able to choose our desires if we are to be truly free. While this may seem like a plausible solution to some, I take it that most will find it unconvincing because experience tells us otherwise. We do not decide what kinds of flavors and tastes, colors, sights, textures, etc., are enjoyable to us and therefore cannot always control the desires they produce in us to experience them. Rather, we must govern our responses to our desires, which requires that we not be caused to do/will/act by them.

[steve]

It seems to me the matter of contradiction comes down to this. If God's sovereign decree guarantees certain choices will be made, so that the person must inevitably do the action, then the person could not choose otherwise. If God's decree prevented him from choosing otherwise—then he did not choose freely. Any culpability attaching to the action, then, does not seem to be his own, but God's.

[Timm001]

Hi Steve,

I agree with you that there is a contradiction lurking in those assertions. The question is how one might make such a contradiction explicit. CThomas stated that one can only do so by assuming incompatibilism--that free will is not consistent with determinism. We can see that here:

I think that you can only get some sort of contradiction if you assume incompatibilism -- that an action cannot be freely chosen (and hence give rise to moral culpability) if that action is ultimately caused by things extrinsic to the deciding agent. Some people just assume this without realizing that it is a very highly contested claim.
CThomas

Now, I personally am going to try to avoid agreeing or disagreeing with this specific claim, because the very terms which CThomas used are susceptible of varying definitions. Therefore, whether one is assuming or not assuming incompatibilism depends upon what one takes to be at the core of the incompatibilist view (e.g. what free will is, and what determinism is). Rather than get caught up in this dispute, I'm going to use CThomas' own view of what counts as a sufficient condition for a free action, which we can find here:

As language is ordinarily used in everyday conversation, the key criterion for determining whether a choice was freely made by a person is simply whether the person's actions are determined by the person's decisionmaking processes. Nothing turns on the further question whether those decisionmaking processes themselves turn out ultimately to be physically determined events of a mechanistic brain physiology or, correspondingly, whether they conform to an external decree of God. Rather, a decision is freely chosen, if the person could have chosen otherwise, which means, just so long as the decision was not compelled or coerced by forces outside the person's own decisionmaking processes. It seems to me that what sometimes gets presupposed without argument is the further point -- essential to disproving compatibilism -- that the foregoing is not the ordinary or appropriate means of specifying what it means to make a free decision. It certainly seems to conform to ordinary usage.

CThomas

Thus it is sufficient for an action to be free if the agent had the ability to act otherwise than he did. Without delving into what it means to be able "to act otherwise," we can nonetheless construct an argument that God's decreeing of all of our actions (or even a subset of them) makes us un-free:

1. If I am morally responsible for doing X, then I must be able to refrain from doing X.
2. If God decrees that I do X, then I am not capable of refraining from doing X.
3. Therefore, if I do X, then I am not morally responsible for doing X.

Now, this is an argument that God's decreeing that I do X means that I am not morally responsible for doing X. We are assuming that God's decreeing is an inviolable sort of thing, which may or may not be an accurate representation of Scripture (I happen to think that God does not decree each one of our actions in this sense, even if he can in fact make such declarations about other things). It seems that that only questionable premise for CThomas, then, is premise 2, which says that we cannot act contrary to God's decrees. This is not something, however, which either the Calvinist or the non-Calvinist would be likely to give up. Both would agree that God can decree things which we cannot go against. However, the disagreement lies in the fact that the non-Calvinist does not believe that God has decreed all of our actions, whereas some Calvinists believe that he has.

But we actually have still not given CThomas what he wanted, which was a contradiction between God's "ordaining" or "decreeing" all of our actions and the notion that we are morally responsible for our actions. Well, if premise 3 follows from premises 1 and 2, then this should be sufficient to give him what he wants as it clearly contradicts the notion that we are morally responsible for our actions. However, I can go one step further and make this statement a further premise in the argument:

1. If I am morally responsible for doing X, then I must be able to refrain from doing X. (stipulation granted by CThomas)
2. I am morally responsible for doing X. (stipulation)
3. Therefore, I can refrain from doing X. (follows from 1 and 2)
4. God decrees that I do X. (stipulation)
5. If God decrees that I do X, then I cannot refrain from doing X. (definition of "decree")
6. Therefore, I cannot refrain from doing X. (follows from 5)
7. Therefore, I can refrain from doing X and I cannot refrain from doing X. (follows from 3 and 6)

And the further contradiction about moral responsibility is as such:

8. I am morally responsible for doing X and I am not morally responsible for doing X (follows from 7)

Thus, I am both able and not able to refrain from doing X, which makes me both morally responsible and not morally responsible for doing X. We can see, then, that the notion of moral responsibility as the ability to act otherwise leads to a direct contradiction when paired with a view of God's decreeing as not leaving the option of acting otherwise.

Now it is up to CThomas to show that "the ability to do otherwise" is strictly a part of the incompatibilist view, so that we must be assuming incompatibilism in order to run this argument. Or, alternatively, to show that it is only the incompatibilist who assumes that God's "decreeing" an action means that I am unable to act against God's decrees. If CThomas is unable to do this, then we have shown that we can argue that God's decreeing of all that we do is contradictory to our being morally responsible agents without assuming incompatibilism.

I hope this was clear.

[J9]

It seems to me the matter of contradiction comes down to this. If God's sovereign decree guarantees certain choices will be made, so that the person must inevitably do the action, then the person could not choose otherwise. If God's decree prevented him from choosing otherwise—then he did not choose freely. Any culpability attaching to the action, then, does not seem to be his own, but God's.

Yes. Further, the very first words uttered by God to Adam were a COMMAND, "... you are free to eat...".

And, the decree to not eat was also a command, which Adam was free to disobey.

On the other hand, the result of eating the forbidden fruit was absolute.

That is, until the Son appeared and restored freedom, at least to His people.

All this occurred long before Calvin or Arminius were even born.

[thrombomodulin]

Timm001,

I was writing to express disagreement with one point which you made. However, in reading your latest response I must say that I am not sure what your opinion is.

I had understood that you were affirming that an act performed at gun point is a decision which is "not free". You seemed to be concluding that because acting in a certain way was "necessary", that such a person is not responsible for actions demanded by the one holding the gun. (e.g. your comment "[he is not responsible] under our moral institutions").

Since a person under gun point retains the ability to obey the one pointing the gun or to disobey him, I was calling into question whether those affirmations were valid.

Your last reply was sufficiently strong in affirming libertarian free will to give me some doubts as to whether my understanding was correct. Are you affirming or denying that a person at gun point is capable of choosing one way or the other, and does he have responsibility before God for a sinful decision made in such circumstances (e.g. to steal)?

[Timm001]

Thrombomodulin,

You are correct that I am a libertarian about free will. The example of the person at gunpoint is only intended to illustrate the fact that there is a sense of "the ability to do otherwise" which must be present in order for an agent to be morally responsible for his actions. In this specific scenario, while it is true that the agent's actions are not necessitated by any exterior/interior influences, he nonetheless does not possess the ability to act otherwise to a sufficient degree that he would be morally responsible for his actions (under most circumstances). With a gun to your head, there are a good many actions that are morally permissible which otherwise would not be. Other examples which ought to seem trivially obvious would be that if instead of stealing you were commanded to swear (if you think swearing is wrong), or to call up your wife and lie to her about what you had for breakfast (if you think lying is almost always wrong, perhaps you would agree that this lie is not wrong when someone commands you to do so at gunpoint).

Thus, while you would be "able to do otherwise" under penalty of death, this is not a sufficient sense of the notion to ground moral responsibility--again, in most circumstances depending upon the command (perhaps you would be responsible if you were ordered to press a button that launched a nuclear strike against a populated area).

The reason that I brought up the issue of necessitating influences is that I believe that moral responsibility requires not only the ability to do otherwise, but also genuine freedom in the sense of being able to act in an uncaused manner. Being able to act in an uncaused manner is not quite the same thing as the ability to do otherwise, though they may seem to be so at first blush.