The principle of alternative possibilities


1    Compatibilism considered

Underlying the compatibilist analysis of freedom is the  simple idea that to act freely is to act in accordance with your desires,

A person performs an act freely = the person desired to perform the act and her desires were effective.

As Ayer says, freedom is not opposed to causation it is opposed to coercion and constraint.  

Apparent Counterexamples to Compatibilism:

What we are looking for are cases of actions which satisfy the right hand side of the definition, but which most of us do not judge to be free.  Let us assume that you act freely if and only if you are responsible for what you do.  Call this principle the principle of freedom and responsibility.

A person acts freely just to the extent that she is responsible for what she does.

Then we can construct counterexamples to the first account of compatibilism:
 

a The actions of a person who is acting under the influence of very effective and compelling hypnotic suggestions may be caused by that person’s (hypnotically implanted) desires, but we are reluctant to say they are acting freely, or are responsible for what they do.
b A person who is strongly addicted to an addictive drug (like nicotin) may light up as a direct result of an overwhelming desire to do so.  But suppose the addiction is a thorough one—does the nicotine addict light up  freely.  Once addicted is she responsible for smoking each and every cigarette?  She may have been responsible for becoming addicted, but once  addicted is she responsible for being overwhelmed by the addictive desires?  Suppose, like those experimental beagles that they use (or did use) in nicotine addiction experiments.  Suppose she became addicted to nicotine because someone routinely spiked her asthma inhaler.  Now clearly she isn't responsible for being thoroughly addicted—but is she responsible for smoking each cigarette?
Problem: these people do things in accordance with their desires, and their desires are causally effective in producing their actions, but they are not clearly responsible for their actions.  Why? One possible response is the principle of alternate possibilities.
 

2    The Principle of Alternative Possibilities 

A person is (morally) responsible for what s/he did only if s/he could have done otherwise.

Note that the principle of alternate possibilities and the principle of freedom and responsibility jointly entail an idea we began with:d

A person is free only if she could have done otherwise.

                            
Maybe the addictand even the hypnotic could not have done otherwise and that is why we say they are not free.  Further, if to do otherwise the future needs to be undetermined then it is clear that our attempt to frame an adequate compatibilist notion of freedom is doomed to failure.  The principle of alternate possibilities looks like it might doom the compatibilist project.  But is the principle right?
 

A Frankfurt-style counterexample.

In a justly famous article (reprinted in your volume of Readings) Harry Frankfurt tried to refute the principle.  I will modify it slightly.

Consider the following story:  Suppose a certain President  is not very bright and not terribly good at making decisions.  Suppose his main advisor (call him “Karl Rogue”) is much better at making decisions and usually is much better at knowing what will be in the President's best interests.  He has a little chip planted in the President's brain which enables him to (i) monitor what the President is thinking and (ii) make the President's decisions for him in case he is heading in the wrong direction.  If the President is clearly going to make the right decision, the one Rogue approves, then he does nothing.  He sits back and lets the President do his own thinking and deciding.  But if he is wavering and heading in the wrong direction, Rogue intervenes and makes sure the President makes the decision which Rogue prefers.  A particularly important decision is looming up.  Rogue and the rest of the President's advisors think it is imperative that the President declare war on some country.  They are not sure whether the President will go along with this, so Rogue carefully monitors the President's thinking to see which way he is going to decide.  But fortunately he doesn't have to intervene because after thinking about it for ten seconds, the President warmly embraces the idea of declaring war. 

In this story, was the President morally responsible for his decision to declare war?  Should we, for example, hold him responsible for what happens as a result of the war?  The answer seems to be an unequivocal YES. 

But, could the President have done otherwise?  Could he have refrained from declaring war?  Clearly NO. For if he had decided not to declare war, then Rogue would have intervened, and activated the little implanted  chip in his brain which would have forced him to declare the war. 

If both these judgments are correct then the principle of Alternate Possibilities is false.

Frankfurt suggests that what is important to moral responsibility is not that the person could do otherwise, but rather that their desires are really theirs.  In the President's case, the desires he acted on were really his, even though he could not have done otherwise.

What the person acting under hypnotic suggestion, the person who is coerced, and the addict is that in some sense while they do act on their desires, their desires are not  really theirs.   The compatibilist thus needs to add a new condition to his account of freedom:

A person performs an act freely =

(1)    the person desired to perform the act, 

(2)    her desires were effective,

(3)    and the desires which moved here were really her own.


We seem to have two guiding ideas in the notion of freedom.

1    One guiding idea is that freedom involves being able to do otherwise—the principle of alternative possibilities. 

2    The other guiding idea is that freedom involves being motivated to act by one's own desires—the deep desires rather than  shallow desires (like the desires of the addict and the hypnotic).


There doesn't seem anyway to reconcile these two guiding ideas.   According to the first idea, maximal freedom would involve maximally branching possible futures, any one of which  I might end up following.  According to the second idea, maximal freedom would involve my deepest desires strongly singling out a unique path for me, which I follow as the inevitable expression of those desires.

Perhaps our everyday conception of freedom is inconsistent.  In that case we may have to decide which of these two guiding ideas we think best captures what is valuable about freedom, and run with that.