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Power, Scepticism and Ethical Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2015
Abstract
It is often thought that as human agents we have a power to determine our actions for ourselves. And a natural conception of this power is as freedom – a power over alternatives so that we can determine for ourselves which of a variety of possible actions we perform. But what is the real content of this conception of freedom, and need self-determination take this particular form? I examine the possible forms self-determination might take, and the various ways freedom as a power over alternatives might be constituted. I argue that though ordinary ethical thought, and especially moral blame, may be committed to our possession of some capacity for self-determination, the precise nature of this power is probably ethically underdetermined – though conceptions of the nature of the power that come from outside ethics may then have important implications for ethics.
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- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 76: Mind, Self and Person , May 2015 , pp. 225 - 251
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2015
References
1 ‘Freedom’ is very much a philosopher's term, and the origins of its use to pick out a form of power seem to lie in the transference to metaphysics of what was an initially political and ethical term. I discuss elsewhere the connexions between metaphysical, ethical and political uses of the term ‘freedom’ – see ‘Thomas Hobbes and the ethics of freedom’, Inquiry, 54 (2011) 541–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Strawson, Galen, Freedom and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1986), 110–111 (my emphases)Google Scholar
3 See ‘Saint-Just's illusion’, in his Making Sense of Humanity, (Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 136.
4 Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief, 113
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8 See Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P.H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Book 2, chapter 21 ‘Of power’, §10, 234
9 See The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, clearly stated between Dr Bramhall Bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1656). An edition by me of the Questions is forthcoming for the Clarendon edition of the works of Thomas Hobbes.
10 Hobbes, Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 40
11 Ibid., 185
12 Ibid., 285
13 See Francisco Suarez, Metaphysical Disputations, disputation 19: On causes that act necessarily and causes that act freely or contingently; also, on fate, fortune, and chance in Francisco Suarez S.J. on Efficient Causality, (ed.) Alfred Freddoso, (Yale University Press, 1994).
14 Hobbes in Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 184
15 This important distinction between freedom and ordinary causation, and the problem it poses for a view of freedom as a straighforwardly agent-causal power, was discussed earlier in my Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004), 114–15.
16 Hobbes in Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 26 (my emphasis)
17 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978)Google Scholar book 2, part 3, section 1, ‘Of liberty and necessity’, 407
18 See Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (ed.) Nidditch, P.H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Book 2, chapter 21 ‘Of power’, §10, 238
19 Harry Frankfurt, ‘Some thoughts concerning the principle of alternate possibilities’ in Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, (eds) David Widerker and Michael McKenna (Ashgate, 2003), 340
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21 Harry Frankfurt, ‘Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility’, 7
22 Robert Kane endorses what he calls ‘a powerful intuition’: ‘we feel that if a Frankfurt-controller [such as Black] never actually intervened throughout an agent's entire lifetime, so that the agent always acted on his or her own, then the mere presence of the controller should not make any difference to the agent's ultimate responsibility.’ Kane, Robert, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 143.
But what is crucial is the implications of that presence for the agent's power. If Black is not only intent on preventing the agent from acting otherwise, but is fully able to prevent him from so acting, and if (as is supposed) Black's presence equipped with such an intention and such a power over the agent is enough to imply the agent lacks all power to act otherwise, then that may be very relevant to the agent's ultimate responsibility. It will be relevant if the agent can determine his actions for himself only through exercising an inherently multi-way power to act otherwise.
23 How extensive these demands may be is not entirely obvious. Frankfurt's arguments oppose a dependence of self-determination, and so of moral responsibility, on the freedom to act otherwise, that is on the availability of alternatives in respect of what that power determines – actions and their outcomes. But does the very possibility of self-determination depend on freedom at a more primitive level – freedom in relation to the very exercise of power? That may depend on whether the idea of the agent's power to determine outcomes for himself – the idea to which Hobbes took such exception – needs to be unpacked in terms of freedom at least in relation to the power.
24 This topic, and the general argument of this paper, is taken further in my The Ethics of Action, volume 1 Self-Determination (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)