Overview

Bramhall is an incompatibilist, meaning he thinks that freedom of action and responsibility for actions are incompatible with the causal determination of the will. Since he believes that the will is free, he is a libertarian. That means he thinks that at least some things that happen are not causally determined, namely, the voluntary actions of rational agents, such as people and, presumably, God.

Hobbes cannot imagine anything happening without a cause. He also thinks that causes make their effects necessary. So he was a determinist. That means he believes that all events are caused and necessary.

Hobbes also denies that there is such a thing as free will. The will, like everything else, is caused, and, as we will see, the definition of “liberty” that applies to actions does not apply to the will. However he is a compatibilist about the freedom of action and responsibility for what we do. That means he thought freedom and responsibility are compatible with the causal determination of the will.

(Greene and Cohen will occupy the third position we identified: hard determinism. Hard determinists are incompatibilists who believe in the truth of determinism.)

Compatibilism

Compatibilism is the more difficult position to understand, so I’m going to spend a little time going over it.

A person’s actions are free, according to Hobbes, if she can do what she has a will to do. The “will,” for Hobbes, means the last appetite before action; it is the state of mind that leads you to act (§27). The idea is that freedom means there is nothing external blocking you from doing what you will to do (see §29). It does not matter whether your decision to do one thing rather than another was caused by factors outside of your control.

Hobbes writes that “I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say, I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech” (§3). This is what he means. Hobbes believes your actions are free if there is nothing preventing you from doing what you have a will to do. Given the definition of “will” as the last appetite before action, there cannot be a will to will; willing something is not an action. So the definition of liberty of action cannot apply to the will itself. So there is no such thing as free will. (Both the will and actions are causally determined, so neither is free in the sense that Bramhall has in mind, namely, being free from causal determination.)

I used a boring example to illustrate Hobbes’s point. No one can control whether they are are hungry; hunger is not a matter of will. Hunger also causes us to do things like eat lunch. But no one really thinks that this means we are not free when we get lunch.

Hobbes thinks that this kind of example shows that he is describing what we ordinarily call free actions. He concedes that if you asked someone an abstract question about whether freedom is compatible with causal determination, that person would say no. But, he thinks, the ordinary person’s descriptions of concrete actions as free or unfree will match his definition. And the ordinary person’s abstract philosophical opinions are just confused: no one really understands what an uncaused action would be.

Bramhall’s objections and punishment

Bramhall had two broad points.

The first was that many things that do, in fact, make sense would not make sense if determinism were true. For instance, it would not make any sense for Camilla to ask me to stop hitting her if my behavior was causally determined. If it is already determined whether I am going to hit her or not, her asking me to stop can’t make any difference to whether I stop or not.

Hobbes’s answer to this sort of point is that the request could be part of the cause. If Camilla asks me to stop and I am convinced by what she says, that will cause me to stop. So there is a point to asking me to stop, contrary to what Bramhall thinks.

Bramhall’s second point is harder for Hobbes to overcome. He said it would be unjust to punish people for what they could not help doing. Hobbes said in reply that we punish out of a kind of self-defense and in order to deter others. Neither point directly answers Bramhall.

Hobbes is a consequentialist about punishment: he thinks punishment is justified by the good consequences it brings about. This is a common combination of views. Compatibilists are usually consequentialists about punishment. Incompatibilists, by contrast, are usually retributivists.

Compatibilists think our behavior is caused, so they tend to look for causes of good behavior, like deterrent threats.

Incompatibilists think that we are responsible for our actions only if we are free from causal influence. They think responsibility for actions has to be attached solely to the person who acts. So it is natural for them to think that the point of punishment is retribution for freely chosen evil.

That said there is no logical reason why the views on free will have to line up with those views about punishment. As we will see next time, Greene and Cohen are consequentialists about punishment but incompatibilists about responsibility.

Main points

You should be familiar with these points from today’s class.

1. Compatibilism.
2. Incompatibilism.
3. Relationship with consequentialist and retributivist theories of punishment.