I depart from Spinoza in that I do not believe in his strict brand of determinism. But I also do not think that the philosophical problem about human freedom arises only for those committed to (or afraid of) strict determinism. Instead, on my view the problem arises simply from a naturalistic account of human beings, according to which our capacities and values have their ultimate sources outside of us.[Note 1] But this adjustment preserves the essence of Spinoza's vision: that a philosophical problem about human freedom arises because people attribute the wrong status to themselves, thinking of themselves as somehow transcending nature rather than being natural creatures. This way of thinking is sufficiently widespread that it has shaped many of our practices and emotions; it is sufficiently deep that some philosophers generally impressed by naturalistic explanation nevertheless use all their ingenuity to exempt some human actions from such explanation; but it is false.
To spell out the issues more systematically, the view I want to sketch and defend involves these claims: (1) Compatibilism is typically presented as a description and defense of "the ordinary conception" of freedom. (2) But, contrary to the compatibilist's typical claims, libertarianism describes important aspects of this ordinary conception. (3) There are both historical and psychological explanations for the evolution and attractiveness of the libertarian conception. (4) Libertarianism is not incoherent. (5) Libertarianism (construed not just as a description of our ordinary conception of freedom, but as a substantive account of freedom and of the status and nature of human beings) is false. (6) "The ordinary conception of freedom" is a motley creature; it involves many aspects, many different sorts of connections with metaphysical beliefs, moral beliefs, practices, and emotions. (7) Sophisticated compatibilism promises to rescue something worth calling "human freedom"; but, in order to be persuasive, the sophisticated compatibilist must admit that on her scheme we must excise deep and important aspects of our concept of freedom. That is, the compatibilist must admit that she engages in substantial conceptual revision; her account of freedom does not capture everything that ordinary people mean by "freedom," it does not capture everything that our culture has wanted from freedom, it does not amount to a criticism only of a few aethereal or mischief-making philosophers. (8) Finally, and most tentatively: when we realize that we are doomed to revision anyway if we want to work out a sensible and serviceable conception of freedom, we might be more open to the possibility of substantially revising some of our practices and emotions--arduous though that revision might be.
Defending all these claims and their connections to each other in a fully persuasive way is (if I may be allowed a gross understatement) a tall order. Here I will be satisfied if, by saying a few words about each claim, I can make it plausible that this view merits renewed interest and investigation.
The argument goes like this: "Some philosophers have often taken there to be some question, difficult to answer, about whether we are free. But it is obvious that we are free, at least in many of our actions; for non-philosophers are sure that they are often free, and moreover they think it lunatic to have any doubts on that score. Now perhaps philosophers could overturn the verdict of common sense by pointing out new facts about us, facts that are clearly inconsistent with our being free. But they cite no such new facts. So philosophers who deny that we are free, or who think there is some genuine general problem about whether we are free, or who think that freedom requires the possession and exercise of some mysterious capacity, go wrong in their definition of 'freedom. 'That is, they define 'freedom' in a way contrary to the definition of that term implicit in common sense. Moreover, their mistake is gross: it is not motivated by any sound considerations or by any real aspects of our ordinary talk and practices, and involves using 'free' and associated terms nonsensically."
The point is that compatibilists typically argue that libertarians have misconstrued the ordinary concept of freedom, or the way that the practices associated with "freedom" and related terms work.[Note 2] Straightforward compatibilists argue that libertarians have simply gone astray. More subtle compatibilists (among them Strawson, in his influential "Freedom and Resentment"[Note 3]) argue that libertarians correctly believe that straightforward compatibilists haven't done justice to our ordinary beliefs and practices; but they then refine compatibilism, in an effort to show both that our ordinary beliefs and practices are by and large all right as they stand, and that those beliefs and practices are compatible with determinism. The libertarian, in other words, has called attention to the crudity of some versions of compatibilism, and so has prompted salutary refinements, but is just mistaken about the metaphysical presumptions of ordinary belief.
This dissatisfaction, I believe, flows from an association between the concept of freedom and the notion of special human status and dignity. This notion can involve religious belief and the notion of a soul, but needn't. It can just be a vague sense that human beings must somehow transcend mere nature, and the causal order that governs everything else. ("Transcendence" not just by means of our actions having reasons as well as causes; instead, the thought is that we must be the uncaused sources of our actions.)
Of course, arguments from ordinary reactions to philosophical problems can cut both ways. Compatibilists have claimed that libertarians must employ a variety of tricks in order to get ordinary people to profess the right "intuitions." Moreover, if the libertarian picks out specific practices or emotions supposed to be decisively undermined if determinism is true, the compatibilist will cheerfully supply a way around the difficulty (as we should expect if our practices and emotions are connected with each other in complex ways, and liable to more than one sort of "grounding"). In a way, we are at an argumentative impasse, with compatibilists and incompatibilists simply moved by or opting for different descriptions of ordinary reactions and ordinary concepts. But it might be possible to overcome this impasse by supplying what compatibilists typically feel to be lacking in incompatibilist accounts: namely, an explanation of how one could plausibly come to hold libertarian views.[Note 5] In what follows I briefly suggest such an explanation.
I want to propose a dialectic--or, if you like, a spiral of increasing requirements on freedom. At first, we can see plainly enough that, in order to act freely, a person must be free from external forces that constrain the will. Freedom requires choice, and external constraints are inimical to choice. Then freedom is located in the will, which chooses free of constraint. Or does it? There are two grounds for suspicion here: particular and general. (1) It is easy to point to particular cases where a person does as she wills, yet where nevertheless her willing is in an important and real way out of her hands. (The standard cases: the kleptomaniac, the victim of brainwashing, and so on.) (2) More generally, we all know that our wills are shaped by forces we do not control, whether or not we can put our fingers on those forces in particular cases. Someone might say: every aspect of my will perhaps depends on some seed planted in me at first, but I have made my contribution. The obvious retort is: just as seed, soil, and climate wholly account for the growth of the plant, so inclination, circumstances, and training wholly account for the growth of the person. Whatever I make of myself, my ability to make that of myself comes from outside me.
But, the compatibilist will say, my ability constitutes me, it is not an outside force. I think that, in the end, there is something right about this line. But at this juncture it does not work, because it is not a correct description of our thoughts and practices to counter the incompatibilist's purportedly incorrect description. Instead, it is a recommendation to think in one way rather than another. It pretends to have this argumentative force against the incompatibilist: "you've got the concept wrong." But it really instead has the following force: "you'd be better off thinking of the concept in this way." The "you'd be better off" claim, when the task at hand is full and fearless and correct description of our beliefs, seems like an evasion.
So, in this constructed progression of thought, we begin with connection between freedom and choice; confront the facts about the ways in which our choices are shaped; feel dismay at the thought of constraints; and impose the requirement of choosing utterly without constraints. But what would that be like? Libertarians typically reply: "It would be like any of hundreds of actions we do every day. The question is absurd because free action is a commonplace, not a mysterious thing in need of elucidation and exemplification." This reply I take to be disingenuous; it is at any rate not helpful. The honest and helpful libertarian will bite the bullet and say: "to act freely is be a little God. It is to be an unmoved mover, the uncaused cause of one's own actions." Now of course it is hard to understand what this would be like, or why anyone might suppose it reasonable to think of human beings in this way--to think that we daily meet such a requirement; but none of that impugns the status of libertarianism as a description of our ordinary beliefs. (So much the worse, then, for our ordinary beliefs!)
How can the libertarian claim be meaningless or nonsensical or incoherent, if the compatibilist (as well as the hard determinist, that is the incompatibilist who rejects libertarian metaphysics, and who therefore denies that we are ever free) is right that we are not uncaused causes? Surely we want to say that the libertarian claim is hard to understand and false, rather than that it is nonsense. Compare libertarianism with this claim: "human beings are, essentially, immortal creatures." The claim is not meaningless or nonsensical or incoherent. But many people would say that it is hard to understand--where or what is this immortal human essence? Many people would say that we have no good grounds for believing the claim, that there is no account of how things could be as the claim envisions them to be, that we have no ordinary uncontroversial model of immortality, that the claim is likely false. Don't all these criticisms answer well to our intuitive sense of the libertarian's mistake? If so, then we have removed another obstacle to understanding libertarianism as descriptively correct; and we have correspondingly clarified the revisionary nature of the compatibilist's project.
Libertarians and hard determinists typically make the parallel mistake of denying that the compatibilists have described anything at all worth calling freedom, because they too typically believe that the term "freedom" has one central meaning, not a family of meanings (and a squabbling family at that). So all parties to the dispute about human freedom would do well to take more seriously the plurality of aspects of the ordinary conception of freedom--even if they aim at excising one or more of these aspects from the conception.
If I am right, though, both these sorts of questions force themselves on us. Reflection about the ordinary conception of freedom shows that it involves various aspects, and that the libertarian aspect involves false beliefs; how can we in good intellectual conscience refrain from revising such a conception? And if some of our practices and attitudes and emotions are bound up with false beliefs, conscience seems to require at least an rigorous effort at revision--a careful distinguishing between, say, emotions that we cannot either discard or weaken, emotions that we can at least weaken (at least some of us, at least sometimes), and finally emotions we can discard, and might be better off discarding.
What does this Spinozist suggestion amount to, when we come to cases? Just this: perhaps the typical compatibilist understanding of freedom, once we face up to its revisionary character, removes some of our usual grounds for (say) the practice of retributive punishment, or for the emotional reaction of resentment. And perhaps human nature is sufficiently malleable that, when we reflect on the lack of grounds for practices, we can replace them with other practices; or, when we reflect on the lack of grounds for an emotional reaction, we will tend to have that reaction less and less, and to replace it with a more sensible emotional reaction. (Say, sadness or resignation instead of resentment. None of us resent "Nature" for bringing us a drought; nevertheless, we are not doomed to a cold emotionless reaction. We can and do recognize and grieve over the damage a drought does. So we might recognize and grieve over the damage a morally bad person does, without feeling moral resentment toward that person.) Here I am arguing neither that this Spinozist or stoic outlook is attainable by more than a few extraordinary persons (and by them only fitfully, perhaps) nor that this outlook is desirable if attainable. I am only arguing that we ought to be very cautious in assessing what reactions are humanly impossible, and in assessing the strong and weak points of a vastly different way of life.