Hume on Liberty and Necessity
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Sunday, August 12, 2007 at 7:49 AM
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I shall here articulate Hume’s most important contributions to the problem of liberty and necessity (that is: free will and determinism).
For Hume, determinism (`the doctrine of necessity’) is the thesis that everything that happens has a necessitating antecedent cause. And Hume thinks that anyone who understands what cause and effect are should accept this thesis (or at least a formulation restricted only to events involving human action). Here’s why: to say that x necessitates y is just to say that events of the type x falls under are constantly conjoined with events of the type y falls under. And since humans are predictable creatures, these constant conjunctions obtain. That is to say, anytime someone acts, one could find an antecedent cause that in general is constantly conjoined with actions of that sort.
So, properly understood, the doctrine of necessity can't be denied.
Nonetheless, many have thought that our actions aren’t necessitated by anything. We seem to have a `false sensation or seeming experience... of liberty of indifference, in many of our actions.’ Hume has an error theory to explain this (mistaken) judgment. First, the folk are confused about causation. Since they don’t observe (in introspection) the necessary connections between causes and effects, they feel that they’re free in acting. But of course, no one could observe such necessary connections. And thinking this is what causation is betrays confusion. Second, the sense of freedom we’ve got is simply the result of ignorance. If we knew more about our own motives, desires, and inner mental workings, we’d observe constant conjunctions between these event types and the event type our action fell under.
Hume, like Moore, advances a conditional analysis of free will. Free will consists, not in the categorical ability to do otherwise, but in a hypothetical or conditional ability. So Hume might say something like this: S is free with respect to action a iff were S to want to perform a, S would perform a.
From the conditional analysis of free will drops out Hume’s classical compatibilism. For its perfectly consistent given this analysis that determinism be true and that persons are free.
Finally, Hume considers the Moral Responsibility Objection to his position. The objection says that if all actions are necessitated, then no one is morally responsible for what she does. This objection bypasses his analysis of freedom, arguing for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism regardless of whether determinism rules out freedom (it thus has affinities with Peter van Inwagen’s so-called Direct Argument).
Hume responds in two ways. First, the Moral Responsibility Objection is irrelevant. If the doctrine of necessity is true, it’s true no matter how repugnant we find the consequences. Second, moral responsibility in fact requires determinism. The degree to which we’re morally responsible varies directly with the degree to which our actions flow from antecedent character/reason/desire states. Hume offers three examples to show that we associate moral responsibility with determined action (contra the Moral Responsibility Objection). First, we aren’t blamed (or are blamed to a lesser degree) when we act in ignorance. Second, when we act impetuously or without due deliberation, we’re excused. Third, repentance absolves us of blame. The best explanation for these data, Hume says, is that there has to be a strong link between character/reason/desire states and action for moral responsibility to be assigned. And the strongest kind of connection we can posit is one of causation.
