Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism [1st ed.] 9783030486365, 9783030486372

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction (Danny Frederick)....Pages 1-5
Free Will and Indeterminism (Danny Frederick)....Pages 7-41
Rationality and Fallibilism (Danny Frederick)....Pages 43-108
Persons and Animals (Danny Frederick)....Pages 109-143
Freedom and Constraint (Danny Frederick)....Pages 145-194
Individual and State (Danny Frederick)....Pages 195-243
Conclusion (Danny Frederick)....Pages 245-254
Back Matter ....Pages 255-266

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM SERIES EDITORS: DAVID F. HARDWICK · LESLIE MARSH

Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism

Danny Frederick

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism

Series Editors David F. Hardwick Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada Leslie Marsh Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presuppositions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected, or misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches. The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the DNA of the modern civil condition. With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liberalism emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral economics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors are soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency. Sole or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collections, broadly theoretical or topical in nature. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15722

Danny Frederick

Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism

Danny Frederick Independent Scholar Yeovil, UK

ISSN 2662-6470     ISSN 2662-6489 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ISBN 978-3-030-48636-5    ISBN 978-3-030-48637-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Pattadis Walarput/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Chapter 2 offers a solution to the problem free will that I set forth in my article, ‘Free Will and Probability,’ in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (1): 60–77 (2013), though the exposition has been truncated, revised, and embedded within a wider context. I thank the editors and publisher for permission to draw on that material in this book. I thank Mark D. Friedman for helpful comments on the book, and patient probing of my responses, which saved me from at least one significant error and helped me to improve clarity and add some needed detail. I also thank an anonymous reviewer for astute observations that prompted me to emend, or fill some gaps in, my explanations and to make a couple of stylistic adjustments.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Free Will and Indeterminism  7 3 Rationality and Fallibilism 43 4 Persons and Animals109 5 Freedom and Constraint145 6 Individual and State195 7 Conclusion245 Index255

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4

Gambling and risk; expected utility Trapped miners, two shafts; expected utilities Trapped miners, ten locations; options Trapped miners, ten locations; expected utilities

75 80 83 84

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1 Introduction

This book is concerned with metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. That is a very large area of study for a relatively short book. The aim is plainly not to provide comprehensive coverage. It is instead to connect those different areas of study by solving related problems in each using the concepts of freedom, indeterminism and fallibilism. To put the point another way, the aim is to obtain an understanding of freedom in the round, in its metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and political aspects. The metaphysics of free will (Chap. 2) depends upon the idea of indeterminism; epistemology and rationality (Chap. 3) depend upon creativity and criticism, which cannot be understood without the ideas of indeterminism and fallibility; the distinction between persons and other animals (Chap. 4) depends upon the ideas of critical rationality and moral agency, and thus on the ideas of freedom, indeterminism and fallibility; morality (Chap. 5) demands both freedom and constraint, so it is also tied to the ideas of indeterminism and fallibility; and the purpose of the state (Chap. 6) is to safeguard freedom, as far as our fallibility permits. Each Chap. of the book gives pointers for the further study of its topic. That further study may, given our fallibility, require some revisions to what is said in this book. The goal here is to provide a unified and coherent account of © The Author(s) 2020 D. Frederick, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2_1

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the different facets of freedom at a high level of generality. The account is novel in its emphasis on indeterminism and fallibilism. It is a curious irony that defences of freedom are often deterministic and dogmatic. That irony is not investigated directly in what follows. Chapter 2 is concerned with the metaphysical problem of free will. There is a general, though not universal, consensus in contemporary philosophy that indeterministic accounts of free will are incoherent. Some philosophers simply deny that persons have free will, but most seek to show how free will or, rather, some anaemic substitute for it, is compatible with a deterministic account of human behaviour. I show how that consensus is mistaken and how the mistake arises from a simple failure to distinguish acts from other events. I criticise and reject the famous infinite regress arguments of H. A. Prichard and Gilbert Ryle against acts of will; and I expose some confusions or errors about free will to be found in Roderick Chisholm, Donald Davidson, Laura Ekstrom, John Martin Fischer, Harry Frankfurt, Robert Kane, Hugh McCann, Alfred Mele, Robert Nozick, Helen Steward, Richard Taylor and many others. The topics of Chap. 3 are epistemology and rationality. On the traditional and still current view, rationality is deterministic, either because it compels us, so far as we are rational, to think or act in a particular way, or because it has an authority over us to which we submit, so far as we are rational. As a consequence, on that view, the beliefs and actions of a rational agent are justified. I reject that approach as inconsistent with our fallibility and I criticise the views of Aristotle, Bill Brewer, John Broome, René Descartes, and Christine Korsgaard. Following the lead of Karl Popper, I explain how rationality is critical and I offer an account of deductive reasoning as a process of guessing, testing and freely deciding. I discuss Lewis Carroll’s puzzle about deduction and criticise Ryle’s solution. I summarise Popper’s epistemology to give an account of theoretical reasoning that contrasts with the mainstream. I offer a new account of practical reasoning as guessing and testing and I excoriate contemporary decision theory, particularly its treatment of risk (indeterminism) and uncertainty (fallibilism). I criticise some recent work of Peter Graham, Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane, and Helen Steward. In Chap. 4 I discuss the metaphysics and epistemology of personhood. What I say on the metaphysics is broadly in line with traditional

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philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant, though updated with insights from Popper and evolutionary biology. Unusually for a discussion of freedom, I give prominence to an organism’s absolute needs. Against Philippa Foot I argue that an organism’s absolute needs depend upon its individual nature, not some hypothesised nature of its species. I show how a person’s possession of critical rationality entails that persons have to discover their individual natures for themselves and that, given their fallibility, they have to proceed by guessing, testing and deciding. To find fulfilment, persons need freedom and thus an open society. I criticise philosophical theories of authenticity, specifically those expounded by Michael Lynch and Charles Taylor. Chapter 5 deals with ethics. The aims of one person often conflict with the aims of other persons. Moral rules mediate that conflict by permitting individual freedom but setting limits to it. The objective, or factual, set of moral rules is that which sets constraints that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. However, I reject rule consequentialism because fallibility and indeterminism (including free will) mean that consequences cannot be known in advance and that conditions for the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment cannot ensure the best outcome. I consider the different scopes of freedom appropriate to different categories of person and restrictions on persons’ freedom for their own sakes and for the sakes of animals that are not persons, and I discuss deriving ‘ought’ propositions from ‘is’ propositions. I employ Wesley Hohfeld’s scheme to articulate persons’ entitlements to freedom into a set of rights and obligations, thereby showing how freedom requires that resources be, as far as practical, exchangeable private property. I pan James and Stuart Rachels’s denial of moral disagreement. I venture into political philosophy in Chap. 6, which concerns the obligations owed by the state to persons and vice versa. Collectivist and individualist views of the state are criticised and a third way is proposed. I argue that potential conflicts between persons’ aims and their obligations imply that morality demands a state with the rights and obligations to enforce persons’ obligations to each other, and to impose new obligations on persons for the sake of freedom. I explain briefly how the state evolves rather than being created. An account of persons’ obligations to

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the state is related to restrictions on persons’ freedom with regard to their treatment of themselves, of children, and of animals that are not persons. The importance of freedom of speech is explained and Jeremy Waldron’s recent defence of prohibitions on “hate speech” is criticised. I discuss the views of Bishop Berkeley and of Jason Brennan in connection with persons’ obligations to an unjust state and their rights to disobedience. In conclusion, the argument of the chapter is summarised, my theory is briefly compared and contrasted with moral theories of a consequentialist type, and some remarks are made about three contentious issues. In Chap. 7 I summarise the argument of the book and I briefly compare and contrast my project with a similar one carried out by Philip Pettit. The argument of this book is pitched at a high level of generality, so there is much work to do in working out the details and in applying it to the resolution of particular problems in metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and political philosophy. I end by indicating some of the problems still to be addressed. I have tried to avoid technicalities and the use of symbols as far as possible. There are a few places where I substitute variables for words simply to improve clarity by cutting back on verbiage. The discussions of logic in Sect. 3.2, philosophy of science in Sect. 3.3, and decision theory in Sect. 3.4 of Chap. 3 will be the most difficult for people without a technical background; but I have tried to present them in a way that is intelligible to non-technical readers. The discussion of Prichard’s regress argument, as well as the rest of Sect. 2.3 of Chap. 2, may need to be read carefully as it draws on some of the complexities of action theory; but I think it will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think it through. There is a ‘Technical Note’ on ‘ought’ and ‘is’ at the end of Sect. 5.2 of Chap. 5, which should be readily comprehensible to anyone who has studied formal logic but which can be skipped by others, since nothing that comes after it depends upon it. The rest of the book should be plain sailing, though I hope that all the main Chaps., 2, 3, 4, and 5, are found challenging in their questioning and criticism of commonly or deeply held assumptions. In recent years the correct use of personal pronouns has become a contentious topic. Traditionally, in English, when a pronoun was needed to refer to persons generally, the masculine form (‘he,’ ‘him,’ ‘his,’ ‘himself ’)

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was used. A concern for equality between the sexes made that seem inappropriate. However, ‘he or she’ (and the other disjunctive forms, ‘him or her,’ and so on) is cumbersome and ‘he/she’ is ugly; and ‘they’ is not only grammatically grotesque, it can also give rise to ambiguity or confusion. The convention I adopt is to alternate. In the odd-numbered chapters, I use the masculine form; in the even-numbered chapters I use the feminine form. Authors generally use footnotes to cite works where the reader will find information relevant to what is said in the main text. It is also a common practice amongst academics to include in footnotes supplementary details or explanations or qualifications, sometimes lengthy ones, so that the reader, to properly understand the author’s view, has to break off from the main thread and spend time considering some tangential point. Such failure to produce an integrated whole seems to be a deficiency of authorship. Any discussion included in footnotes is either irrelevant, in which case it should be excluded altogether, or relevant, in which case the main text ought to be re-written so that the information can be included in its proper context and its relationship to the rest of the work can be shown. There are no footnotes in this book. References to works where further information may be found are made in parentheses in the text and there is a reference list at the end of each chapter for works cited within the chapter.

2 Free Will and Indeterminism

2.1 A Brief History of the Problem People naturally think that they are in control of their actions, that whether or not they perform a familiar action is up to them, that they have it within their power either to do it or not to do it. For example, if I am considering making myself a cup of coffee, I assume that I have the ability either to make it or not to make it; whichever way I choose it is down to me. If I then get up and make the coffee, my assumption is that I am not being compelled to act in that way, that I am moving myself or acting ‘under my own steam,’ and that I could have refrained from the action, if I had so decided. In short, we naturally think that we have free will. That thought has, however, been subject to a number of different challenges. Monotheistic religions of ancient times assumed that God is, in some sense, all-knowing. Mediaeval theologians developed that idea in their conception of God as a perfect being. They attributed to God omniscience as well as omnipotence and other maximal positive properties. However, it seems that, if God knows everything, then He knows what people are going to do. But if God knows that I am going to make a cup © The Author(s) 2020 D. Frederick, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2_2

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of coffee in a few minutes from now, then it does not seem to be up to me whether I do so. If I were not to make the coffee, then God would be mistaken; but God, being omniscient, cannot be mistaken. It is therefore not open to me not to make the coffee; and, thus, whether I make the coffee is not up to me. Since many theologians adhere to the view that people have free will, they are faced with the problem of reconciling free will with God’s omniscience. That problem will not be discussed further in this book. Deterministic cosmological theories were propounded by philosophers from ancient times but they were merely metaphysical speculations that were opposed by different metaphysical speculations of other philosophers. Amongst the diversity of philosophical views that flourished in the Renaissance was a mechanical conception of the world that sought explanations of everyday phenomena in terms of the motions and impacts of physical atoms. The leading advocates of the mechanical view, such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), employed mathematics to formulate laws of mechanical motion which they then tested against the observed motions of things. This development of modern science culminated at the end of the seventeenth century in Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) laws of motion and gravity. It is disputed whether Newton’s theory entails determinism (Popper 1982, p. 38), that is, the view that every event is fully determined by prior causes. But it seems generally to have been understood to be a deterministic theory, leading the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) to claim that the present state of the universe is the effect of its prior state and the cause of its posterior state, so that someone who knew the situations of all the bodies and forces in the world at the current time would, in principle, be able to predict the entire future of the world (Laplace 1902, p. 4). However, if everything that happens in the world is the effect of earlier causes, then my getting up and making a cup of coffee was determined by a chain of events going back to a past time before I was born. In that case, it was not up to me whether I would make a cup of coffee or not: it was already settled by the state of the world before I was even here. If determinism is true, then we do not have free will. The early decades of the twentieth century saw the development of quantum theory, which concerns the behaviour of the fundamental

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constituents of matter. The interpretation of quantum theory is disputed even amongst those who are experts in the theory; but the laws of the theory are probabilistic rather than deterministic, for instance, specifying that an event of a particular type has a 0.6 (or 60%) chance of happening and a 0.4 (or 40%) chance of not happening. Many philosophers and scientists see probabilistic laws as creating space for free will within a scientific conception of the world. For, if the laws of nature are probabilistic, then the future is ‘open’ in that there are genuine alternative ways in which things may turn out. So it may actually be the case that I might make myself a cup of coffee in a few minutes and that I might not make myself a cup of coffee in a few minutes: it is not determined how I will act. Other philosophers have denied that such a situation would amount to free will. For, my making myself a cup of coffee is an act of free will only if I am in control of what I am doing. But if my making myself a cup of coffee is a matter of chance, a random event, it seems that it is outside of my control. As R. E. Hobart (1868–1963) objects: In proportion as an act of volition starts of itself without cause it is exactly, so far as the freedom of the individual is concerned, as if it had been thrown into his mind from without—‘suggested’ to him—by a freakish demon … it is just as if his legs should suddenly spring up and carry him off where he did not prefer to go. (Hobart 1934, p. 7)

If that is right, then even indeterminism is incompatible with free will.

2.2 The Simple Theory of Free Will Physical events are those that occur in some material medium. Mental events are those that occur in a mind. Perhaps it may turn out, as physicalists maintain, that every mental event is a physical event, perhaps one that takes place in a brain because the mind is the brain. Alternatively, it may be that mental events are not physical events, either because the mind is a non-physical entity or because mental properties are non-­ physical properties of a brain or other body. We can leave such questions open here. But even if every mental event is a physical event, it seems not

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to be the case that every physical event is a mental event. For example, a pot of water coming to the boil is a physical event but not a mental event. At least, that is what will be assumed here. So, even if it turns out that mental events are physical events, they are a special subclass of physical events. We should distinguish two types of mental event, namely, acts and mere events. A mental act is a kind of activity of an agent, such as deciding, paying attention, contemplating, imagining, or willing. A mental event which is not an act is a mere event, such as a headache or an intrusive thought. Thus, mental acts are a proper subclass of mental events. All action depends upon the will. An action involves a bodily motion that is brought about by an act of will. A bodily motion is a physical event. An act of will is a mental event (though an act rather than a mere event). Thus, wherever there is an action there is a physical event and a mental event. Since an event cannot bring about itself, the physical event and the mental event are different events. However, while there can be no actions without acts of will, there can be acts of will without actions. For instance, there are cases when a person discovers that she is paralysed because she tries to move her arm in the normal way but her arm does not move. A man who had lost all sensation in one arm and who had his eyes closed was still able to move that arm; but when, unknown to him, his arm was held down, he was surprised to find, upon opening his eyes, that his arm had not moved (Hornsby 1980, p. 40). In such cases, an agent fails to perform an action; but there is still something that she does. She performs an act of will, namely, the type of act of will involved when she moves her arm normally; but that mental event does not bring about the physical event of her arm moving, so she performs no action. A person’s act of will is a particular event. It is a willing to move her arm in a particular way or, as we may alternatively put it, a willing that she moves her arm in a particular way. Thus the act of will has what is known as ‘intentionality.’ That is, it has a content. The content of an act of will represents the aim that the agent has in acting. In our example, the woman aimed to move her arm in a particular way. Imagine now a man whose arm moves without him performing an act of will. In this case, there is a bodily motion, namely, the motion of the man’s arm, but that physical event is not brought about by an act of the

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man’s will. Consequently, although the man’s arm moves, he performs no action. Perhaps the motion of his arm was the result of a nervous twitch or of a falling object striking against it. When an agent performs an action, she performs an act of will that brings about a bodily motion. Thus, while an act of will is a single event, there is no action unless there are two events, both an act of will and the bodily motion that it brings about. If the act of will fails to bring about a bodily motion, as in the case of a paralytic, then the agent acts but she does not perform an action. It is important to remember that what the act of will brings about, if it brings about anything, is not an action but a bodily motion. When an act of will brings about a bodily motion, that act of will becomes an action. The action is the act of will. Thus an act of will may or may not be an action. It is an action as well as an act of will only if it brings about a bodily motion. By bringing about a bodily motion, an act of will acquires a new status: it becomes an action. Compare a couple of analogous cases. A woman becomes a mother by producing a child. The woman does not produce the mother; the woman is the mother, but only because she has produced a child. An author may or may not produce a novel. If she does, she becomes a novelist as well as an author; if she does not, she is an author but not a novelist. The author does not produce the novelist; rather, by producing the novel, she becomes a novelist. Similarly, an act of will does not produce an action; rather, by producing a bodily motion, it becomes an action. Just as an action requires an act of will, so a free action requires a free act of will. Suppose that a girl moves her arm; that is, her arm does not simply move, she moves it; moving her arm is an action of hers. Then, since an action requires not only a bodily motion but also an act of will, there must have been an act of will of hers that brought about the motion of her arm. If that act of will was not free, then it was not up to her to perform it; but since the act of will brought about the bodily motion, then it was also not up to her whether she moved her arm. Thus, free actions require free acts of will, that is, free will. A mental act of an agent is by its very nature under the control of the agent; otherwise it would be something that the agent undergoes rather than something the agent actively does. However, something that is under the control of the agent cannot be something that was determined

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to occur by prior circumstances; for, if it were so determined, it would not be under the agent’s control; it would happen independently of the agent’s will; it would happen even if the agent opposed it. So, any mental act, including an act of will, is inherently free because it is essentially under the agent’s control (compare Descartes 1931, pt. 1, article XLI, p. 350). Therefore, every act of will is undetermined by prior circumstances. This is not an attempt to prove that we have free will. What it shows is that, if we perform any action, we have free will, because an action implies an act of will, and an act of will is inherently free. Alternatively: if we do not have free will, we perform no actions. If we do not have free will, then, when we think we act, we are under an illusion. Thus, acts of will must be undetermined: it must be open to the agent to perform the act of will and it must also be open to the agent not to perform the act of will. An act of will therefore is a matter of chance in the sense that it is undetermined, that is, in the sense that there is no prior state of the world that determined it to occur. It seems that an act of will must also be a matter of chance in a further sense, namely, that it has a particular probability of occurrence. Consider what Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) says: if other people’s actions cannot be in any degree predicted, the foresight required for rational action becomes impossible … If we really believed that other people’s actions did not have causes, we could never try to influence other people’s actions; for such influence can only result if we know, more or less, what causes will produce the actions we desire. (Russell 1910, pp. 30, 38–39)

When Russell implies that actions have causes, he need not (though he probably does) mean that actions are determined by prior events. As he concedes with his qualification “more or less,” it is enough for us to manage our interpersonal relationships if people are fairly predictable. For that, their actions need only to be more or less probable given the circumstances; and we need to be able to influence their actions only to the extent that we can do something that increases the probability, in some cases substantially, of an action occurring.

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An act of will is undetermined, so its probability must have been greater than 0 but smaller than 1. If its probability had been 0, it would have been bound not to occur; and if its probability had been 1, it would have been bound to occur. Something with a probability value greater than 0 but smaller than 1 might occur or it might not. For instance, if the probability of its occurrence is 0.7, there is a seventy percent chance that it will occur and a thirty percent chance that it will not. The probability in question is an absolute probability, that is, the probability given the entire state of the universe at a given time. Further, an undetermined act has an absolute probability greater than 0 and smaller than 1  in every prior state of the entire universe. Of course, its absolute probability will increase or decrease over time as the act becomes more or less probable in the light of changing circumstances. But there will be no prior state of the entire universe at any time that gives the act a probability of either 0 or 1. The probability of which we are speaking is objective, or ontological: it does not involve a reference to, or an expression of, our incomplete knowledge; it is a probability in the world. Here is a brief indication of how probabilities of action are sufficient for us to navigate our way in the world reasonably well. Much of our behaviour is habitual or routine. A person pursuing a recurring goal in a familiar situation will often, or usually, choose familiar means. In such circumstances, there may be a high probability that she will act in her habitual way. Moreover, people generally (though not always) conform to social conventions. Consequently, much of the behaviour of the people around us, including strangers but more especially people we know, will be more or less predictable, enabling us to plan our behaviour successfully much of the time. However, it is always open to a person to act against habit or convention. We all sometimes do. As a consequence, we often have to make minor adjustments to our plans, and sometimes major adjustments, when some people do not behave in the ways that we expected. Of course, it is not the case that all of our action is of a routine sort. In unusual situations, a person will be inclined to consider options. However, in many cases the options are clear to the agent and clear to any observers; and an observer familiar with the agent’s aims, inclinations, and ways of thinking, will often be able to predict how the agent will decide, though sometimes the agent will do something unusual or act on

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a whim. Thus, most of the behaviour of most people under normal circumstances is more or less predictable for someone familiar with the circumstances. However, if we act freely, the absolute probability of any action will always be greater than 0 but smaller than 1. Such probabilities are also sufficient for the development of social science, which concerns how rational agents, on aggregate, will act in types of social situations (Frederick 2013a, pp. 70–74). In summary: action requires a bodily motion brought about by an act of will; an act of will does not always result in a bodily motion (though it normally does); when it produces a bodily motion, an act of will becomes an action (it acquires that status); an act of will, being a mental act, is inherently under the agent’s control and is thus necessarily undetermined; it also, at every time prior to its occurrence, has an absolute objective probability greater than 0 but smaller than 1; and the fact that acts of will conform to statistical laws makes human action more or less predictable and makes social science possible. However, we saw in the previous section that Hobart claims that undetermined acts would be random and outside of the agent’s control; and an action that is outside of the agent’s control cannot be a free action. Peter van Inwagen follows Hobart: “If … it is a matter of chance whether one will choose A or B, how can it be that one is able to choose A?” (van Inwagen 2002, p. 174). That question, just like Hobart’s claim, confuses an act with a mere event. Hobart spoke of “an act of volition [that] starts of itself.” But any mental event that “starts of itself ” would be something that happens to an agent rather than something that the agent actively does. It would be a mere event, albeit a mental one, rather than a mental act. An act of volition that starts of itself would therefore not be an act of volition; it is a self-contradictory notion. An undetermined act of volition is started by the agent; and, being undetermined, it is something that the agent is not compelled to do; it is a free act. A free act is “a matter of chance” in the sense that it is not determined to occur, and even in the sense that it has a more or less specific probability of occurring. But it is not a matter of chance in the sense of being a merely random event. It is not an undetermined mere event. It is an undetermined act. If free will required that a free act is a mere event that happens by chance, van Inwagen’s rhetorical

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question would be pertinent: how could an agent be able to do a mere event that happens by chance? But free will does not require that. What free will requires is that a free act is an act that is undetermined, and is thus “a matter of chance” in the sense that it is not determined to occur by any prior state of the world. There is no difficulty in the idea of an agent being able to do something when she is not determined by antecedent circumstances to do it: she merely has to do it. The failure to distinguish acts and mere events is endemic in contemporary philosophy and it accounts, in large part, for the mass of confusion in discussions of free will and in the philosophy of action generally (see Sect. 2.4, below). The objection of Hobart and van Inwagen is so often repeated and so often endorsed that it is worth spending a little more time on it. Imagine, says van Inwagen (2002, pp. 171–173), that Alice freely tells the truth when faced with a difficult choice. So, her telling the truth on that occasion was undetermined. Now imagine that, immediately afterward, God caused the universe to revert to exactly the state it was in one minute before Alice told the truth. Just like Alice’s original action, her second action is also undetermined, so she can either lie or tell the truth. If God causes this replay to occur a thousand times, given that Alice’s action is undetermined, then sometimes Alice will lie and sometimes she will tell the truth. Suppose, for simplicity, that the ratio of ‘truth’ outcomes to ‘lie’ outcomes is fifty-fifty, that is, that there is a 0.5 probability of either outcome. Then, what will happen on the next replay is a matter of chance. But what holds for the next replay holds also for the first; and it holds for the first whether or not God bothers with the replays. Therefore, an undetermined action is simply a matter of chance. But then how can Alice’s telling the truth be a free act? If it was a mere matter of chance, how could it be that she was able to tell the truth and able to tell a lie? How can anyone be able to determine the outcome of a process when it is a matter of objective chance? The answers to van Inwagen’s questions should be clear in the light of the foregoing. The process in question is not a mere event; it is a free action. It is an objective matter of chance, in the sense that it is undetermined; but it does not happen by chance. It is an action that Alice performs intentionally. The plausibility of van Inwagen’s objection derives in large part from his description of Alice from the point of view of us as

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spectators. From our point of view, Alice’s undetermined action is an event external to us, over which we have no control. But Alice is not merely a spectator of her action, waiting to see which way a random event will turn out. She is the agent. It is up to her which way she acts. Consider another of van Inwagen’s examples. You are a candidate for public office and I, your best friend, know a fact about your past which makes you unfit for office. You beg me not to disclose the information. I know, let us suppose, that there is a 0.43 probability that I will tell and a 0.57 probability that I will keep silent. Am I in a position to promise you that I will keep silent, knowing, as I do, that in a million replays of the situation I would tell in forty-three percent of cases and keep silent in fifty-seven percent? I do not see how, in good conscience, I could make this promise. I do not see how I could be in a position to make it. But if I believe that I am able to keep silent, I should, it would seem, regard myself as being in a position to make this promise. What more do I need to regard myself as being in a position to promise to do X than a belief that I am able to do X? Therefore, in this situation, I should not regard myself as being able to keep silent. (2002, p. 175)

It might be protested that, once I make the promise, I change the situation, making it more likely that I will keep silent. That may be true, but it is irrelevant. Making the promise cannot raise to 1 the probability of my keeping it. I may break the promise; indeed, given that whether I keep the promise is up to me, there will be ‘replays’ in which I do break it. But the irrelevance of that protest to van Inwagen’s difficulty does highlight the spurious nature of that difficulty. For if the difficulty were real, then no one could ever in good conscience make a promise, since we all know that we might decide not to keep a promise we have made. Even in a situation in which a promise is morally binding, it is not physically or metaphysically binding: it is always up to us whether we keep it. That is a condition of us being open to moral evaluation. Yet we all do make promises, and in good conscience, even knowing that we are able to break them and that we might in fact break them. When someone makes us a promise we know that there is a chance that she will break it, that some

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people are more likely to break a promise than others, and that there are circumstances in which promises are valuable in spite of the risk of default; and we even make plans on the basis of such insecure promises. Still, as van Inwagen presents it, the difficulty does seem real. The explanation for this speciousness is, once again, that we fall into the trap of viewing an agent’s actions as mere events that occur in her. If my keeping the promise and my breaking it are viewed simply as possible alternative events either of which may happen and over which I have no control, then I cannot in good conscience make the promise. But if keeping and breaking the promise are possible alternative actions of mine, then I am able to do either (the situation is objectively undetermined); and I am able in good conscience to make the promise, because whether or not I keep it is up to me. What is right in the objection of Hobart and van Inwagen is that they see that something that happens to, or within, an agent that is outside of the agent’s control cannot be a mental act of the agent. So, it must be borne in mind that the probability that a particular act will occur is not the probability that a mere event will occur. It is the probability that the agent will act in a particular way. Viewed from the perspective of a detached observer a free (undetermined) act may seem similar to a mere chance event because it is not up to the spectator. But from the agent’s point of view, even though the act is a matter of chance with a specific probability, so it could go either way, it is a free act under her immediate control: she can act either way. Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) famously argues against the existence of acts of will. He says that acts of will are supposed to originate bodily movements and to be what make actions voluntary; but if acts of will are not themselves voluntary, they cannot perform that function; and if they are voluntary, they must in turn depend on prior acts of will, which must again be voluntary, thus generating an infinite regress (Ryle 1970, pp. 65–66). Ryle’s argument is sloppily expressed and he quotes no source for the doctrine he criticises. I guess that by ‘voluntary’ he means free. We have seen that free actions require free acts of will. But we have also seen that acts of will are inherently free. So, Ryle’s claim that free acts of will depend on prior free acts of will is simply false.

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Talk of an agent performing an act of will which brings about a bodily motion may suggest a misleading picture of the bodily motion occurring after the act of will has completed. However, when I will my arm to move and thereby bring about the motion of my arm, I do not perform an act of will and then do nothing while my arm moves. My act of willing my arm to move, so long as it does bring about the motion of my arm, is my action of controlling, monitoring and guiding, the motion my arm, and it persists as long as the motion persists. When the willing causes the motion, it is not the case that the motion begins when the willing ends; it is rather the case that the willing and the motion occur together, so that my willing is my moving my arm. Compare the case of the action of a flame causing the water in a pot to heat up. The water heats up continuously as the flame acts continuously upon it. If the flame is taken away, the water stops heating; just as, if I stop willing my arm to move, the motion of my arm ceases. Further, I can stop willing my arm to move at any time. Thus, an act of will is undetermined by every state of the entire universe prior to its commencement; and every temporal segment of the act of will is undetermined by every state of the entire universe prior to its commencement. It follows that there can be no contrastive explanation for an act of will. That is, it is not possible to say why the agent acted as she did rather than in one of the other ways that was open to her. Even if it was highly probable that she would act as she did, she might have acted in some other way. In that sense, free will is a mystery and always will be. That is simply a consequence of the act of will being free. An act for which there is no contrastive explanation is to that extent arbitrary: before it occurs, there is nothing that determines its occurrence. But such acts need not be impulsive. Even a dull habitual act is arbitrary in the sense that there is no contrastive explanation for it, since the agent might have acted otherwise. And even in impulsive acts the agent could have done otherwise. If what a person did on some occasion was determined by a prior impulse, then she did not act: she did something only in the sense in which a machine does something. She did not, in Helen Steward’s phrase, make herself move (Steward 2012, p. 15).

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2.3 Some Complexities of Action The theory of action makes essential use of the distinction between individuals and types. Consider the following: A A A. How many letters are printed there? Three individual letters of one type. Peter, Paul and Mary are three individuals of the type, human. Peter and Paul are two individuals of the type, man. Mary is not an individual of that type. Instead she is an individual of the types, woman and not-man (and innumerable others). When an agent wills that she moves her arm, what she wills is that she perform an action type. If her willing brings about the motion of her arm in the way that she aimed to move it, then her individual willing becomes an action of the type that she willed to perform, that is, her willing becomes her moving her arm. So, there is a single event that instantiates both the act type of being her willing to move her arm and the action type of being her moving her arm. If, ten minutes later, she again wills to move her arm in the same way, then she wills to perform the same action type as before. If her willing brings about the intended motion of her arm, then, just as in the earlier case, it becomes an action of the type of her moving her arm; but it is a different individual instantiation of the same action type. Thus, we have two individual actions, ten minutes apart, of the same action type: two individual willings that are arm-movings of the agent. Each of the individual actions is a particular event; the action type is a universal that may be instantiated by a large number of individual actions. Similarly, her two individual acts of will that exemplify the action type of being her moving her arm, each also exemplify the act type of being her willing to move her arm. Our actions are usually more complex affairs than simply movings of an arm. For instance, I might move my arm to flip the switch to turn on the light to brighten the room. In that case, the motion of my arm brought about the flipping of the switch, which brought about the light coming on, which brought about the room brightening. There were five different individual events in a causal chain that began with the mental act of my willing my arm to move and ended with the room brightening (there were, of course, further effects, but we can ignore them for the moment). Related to each of the five individual events is an act type or

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action type. The first event instantiated the act type of my willing my arm to move. The other four events corresponded to the four action types: my moving my arm, my flipping the switch, my turning on the light, and my brightening the room. But the four events did not instantiate those action types because the events were mere events, not actions. It is the first event, my willing my arm to move that instantiated the four action types because it brought about the four events. By bringing about those events, my willing to move my arm became my moving my arm, my flipping of the switch, my turning on of the light and my brightening of the room. I intended to brighten the room by moving my arm to flip the switch to turn on the light, so my individual action was intentional as each of those action types. But suppose that by moving my arm I accidentally knocked a vase off its perch and the vase fell to the floor and smashed. I did not intend that. Still, breaking the vase was an action of mine. It was one that I did unintentionally by moving my arm. So, my one individual act of will instantiates not only the previous four action types but also the action type of my breaking the vase. My single action is intentional as each of the first four of those types and unintentional as the last of the types. It is quite common for a single thing to be appraised in contrary ways with regard to different aspects of itself. For instance, a person may be highly skilled as a surgeon but poorly skilled as a guitarist; a woman may be good as a manager but bad as a wife; a man may be entertaining as a singer but dull as a conversationalist; and so on. My moving my arm was intentional as my flipping the switch but unintentional as my breaking the vase. The action types that I intended to perform are represented in the content of my act of will. My act of will was a willing that I brighten the room by turning on the light by flipping the switch by moving my arm. My act of will was not a willing that I break the vase by moving my arm. The vase breaking was an unintended consequence of my individual action. Thus, my individual action of breaking the vase is identical to my individual act of willing that I brighten the room by turning on the light by flipping the switch by moving my arm. It is that act of willing that instantiated the action type of breaking the vase. But there was no act of willing that I break the vase, even though my action of breaking the vase

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was identical to an act of will, because I broke the vase unintentionally. Schematically we have: (a) the individual act of my willing to brighten the room by turning on the light by, etc. = the individual action of my brightening the room; (b) the individual act of my willing to brighten the room by turning on the light by, etc. = the individual action of my breaking the vase; therefore, (c) the individual action of my brightening the room = the individual action of my breaking the vase. But we do not have: (d) the individual act of my willing to brighten the room by turning on the light by, etc. = the individual act of my willing to break the vase. The reason we do not have (d) is that there was no individual act of my willing to break the vase, because I did not will to break the vase. I broke the vase unintentionally, by willing something else. An individual act of will, then, typically instantiates numerous action types. It also instantiates numerous willing types. In the example just discussed, my individual willing exemplified the type of being a willing to brighten the room by turning on the light by flipping the switch by moving my arm. It also exemplified the type of being a willing to move my arm. It might also have exemplified the type of being a willing to move my arm that coincided with the president of the USA dancing. Let ‘e’ stand in for a designation of any arbitrary event that happened at the same time that I moved my arm. Then my willing to move my arm exemplified every willing type of the form ‘my willing to move my arm at the same time that e occurred.’ The absolute probability, at some prior time, of my act of will occurring varies according to which willing type it exemplifies, since the events specified by the different designations substituted for ‘e’ will generally have different absolute probabilities at that prior time. Talk of the absolute probability of an act of will occurring must

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therefore be construed as talk of the absolute probability of a standard individuating willing type being exemplified. A standard individuating willing type is one that specifies a time of occurrence, an agent who performs the act of will and its complete representational content. No two individual acts of will can exemplify the same standard individuating type. We have seen that the words ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ apply to actions as instantiating specific action types. If an action is intentional as a specific action type, then it is identical to an act of will the content of which includes that action type, and therefore it is an action of a type that the agent aimed, or intended, to perform; otherwise the action is unintentional as that action type. The words ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ are a contrasting pair that apply to actions as action types and they therefore apply to an act of will only considered as a specific action type and thus only in so far as the act of will brings about a bodily motion. Considered as a purely mental act, an act of will is, normally, neither intentional nor unintentional: it is non-intentional. It is therefore important not to confuse two senses of the word ‘intentional.’ It was explained in Sect. 2.2 that an act of will has a content which represents the agent’s aim in acting. That is to say that an act of will has intentionality or intentional content. But, except in special cases, an act of will is not intentional in the sense of being done intentionally. Normally, when we perform an act of will our intention is to perform an action. When an act of will is performed and it brings about an event that corresponds to its content, it becomes an action which is intentional as the action type that is represented in its content. But that does not mean that the act of will was done intentionally. Hugh McCann (1942–2016) maintains that acts of will are “intrinsically intentional,” by which he seems to mean both that acts of will by their nature have intentional content, and that acts of will are by their nature intended by the agent (McCann 1998, pp.  9, 141–142). But only the former is true. What seems to lie behind McCann’s second claim is that acts of will are by their nature mental acts, something that the agent actively does. There are, however, some odd situations in which we do intend to perform an act of will and in which we may therefore say that the willing was intentional, even though it could not have been unintentional. For example, someone who knows or suspects that she is paralysed may intend

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to will that she moves her arm without intending to move her arm, in which case we may say that she intentionally wills to move her arm (Hornsby 1980, p. 43, footnote 3, pp. 64–65, footnote 4). She intends to will to move her arm because she has that intention; but she does not will to move her arm as a consequence of performing a different act of will with the content of willing to move her arm. We can now consider the argument of H. A. Prichard (1871–1947) that attributes a regress to the concept of willing: ( 1) an action is identical to an act of willing an action; (2) that act of willing is itself an action; therefore, (3) there must be a willing of that willing, and so on, ad infinitum (Prichard 2002, p. 276). The argument is invalid. The two premises are true but no conclusion about willings of willings follows. What does follow from (1) and (2) is that the act of willing an action, being itself an action (as (2) says), is identical to an act of willing an action (as (1) says). But it is trivially true that an act of willing an action is an act of willing an action. Prichard might have intended the following: (1’)  an action is identical to an act of willing that action; (2’)  that act of willing is itself an action; therefore, (3’)  there must be an act of willing that act of willing, and so on, ad infinitum. That may look valid; but premise (1’) is false. It is true that, my brightening the room (which was intentional) is identical to my act of willing that I brighten the room. But, as we saw a short while ago, it is false that my breaking the vase (which was unintentional) is identical to my act of

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willing that I break the vase. So we must construe (1’) as referring to intentional actions; and, if it is to link up with (2’) to give us (3’), then (2’) must also be construed as referring to intentional actions. We should, to avoid confusion, distinguish individual actions or acts and types of action or willing. That gives us: (1”)  an individual action which is intentional as the action type, T, is identical to an individual act of willing of the type, willing an action of type T; (2”)  an individual act of willing of the type, willing an action of type T, is identical to an individual action which is intentional as the type, willing an action of type T; therefore, (3”)  an individual act of willing which is identical to an individual action that is intentional as the type, willing an action of type T, is identical to an individual act of willing of the type willing an action of willing an action of type T; and so on, ad infinitum. If that argument were sound, it would not show that an intentional action involves an infinity of individual acts of willing. There is just one individual action which is identical to an individual act of willing (in (1”)) which is identical to an individual action (in (2”)) which is identical to an individual act of willing (in (3”)). What the argument would show, if it were sound, is that there is an individual act of willing, the content of which involves an infinite regress of willing types. It does seem impossible that anyone could will to will to will … ad infinitum. However, while (1”) is true, (2”) is false, for two reasons. First, as recently noted, it seems that acts of will are intentional only in special cases. So, (2”) is false as a general claim: it would be true only of the special cases of acts of willing that are intentional, if it were true at all. Second, (2”) is not even true of such special cases. An act of will is a mental event; the act becomes an action only if it brings about a different event which is a bodily motion; and it becomes an intentional action only if the bodily motion corresponds with the content of the act of will. So,

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an intentional action requires an action which is identical to an act of will with corresponding content. But an intentional act of will requires only that the act of will is done with the intention to do it. It requires no act of will with the content of willing to will. Thus, (2”) is false because an act of will need not be an individual action and need not be intentional; and, even if it is both, there need be no act of will with a content of willing to will. When I turned on the light to brighten the room, I did it intentionally. It was not an accident that I brightened the room; it was done on purpose. When I thereby broke the vase, I did it unintentionally. It was an accident, a matter of chance. This is a different sense of “a matter of chance” to the ones we met previously, this one being connected with accidental occurrences. Something that is a matter of chance in this sense is outside of the agent’s control. A free action, we noted in Sect. 2.2, is one that is under the agent’s control. It must therefore be a matter of chance in the sense of being undetermined, something which had a absolute probability of occurrence greater than 0 but smaller than 1 in every prior state of the world. But an action that is a matter of chance in the sense of being accidental is not under the agent’s control. It is therefore not a free action. Thus, unintentional actions are not free. The same individual act of will may be an intentional action as some action types and an unintentional action as other action types, so it may be a free action in some respects and an unfree action in others. There are two senses of ‘free’ at work here. An act of will is free in the sense that it is undetermined. An action is free as a particular action type in the sense that it is intentional as that action type. Thus, to say that something is a free action is to say that it is an individual action that exemplifies an action type, that it is intentional as that action type, and that it is identical to an undetermined individual act of will. Since every individual action is identical to an undetermined individual act of will, we can make the point more succinctly: an action is free as a particular action type if and only if it is intentional as that action type. It might seem that some intentional actions are determined. Suppose that Andrew intentionally kills Beatrice by shooting her in the head. Andrew pulls a trigger which fires a gun, which propels a bullet through the air and into Beatrice’s skull, thereby killing her. We can reasonably

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suppose that the series of events that runs from Andrew’s pulling the trigger to the death of Beatrice was a causally determined process. In that case, once Andrew had pulled the trigger, it was determined that he would kill Beatrice. Once that trigger was pulled, Andrew’s killing of Beatrice had an absolute probability of 1. Yet, Andrew killed Beatrice intentionally; so his intentional action of killing Beatrice had an absolute probability of 1 some time before it occurred and was thus unfree. That objection fails to distinguish individual actions and action types. Andrew performed just one individual action which exemplified several action types. Once his individual action of pulling the trigger caused the gun to fire, that same individual action became an action of the type firing the gun; once the bullet killed Beatrice, the same individual action became an action of the type killing Beatrice; and that same individual action was identical to Andrew’s undetermined act of will the content of which was to kill Beatrice by shooting her in the head. Thus, Andrew’s one individual action, however many action types it exemplified, was undetermined; but once Andrew pulled the trigger it was determined that his single individual action would acquire a number of properties, including being an action type of firing a gun and being an action type of killing Beatrice. However, it was intentional as those action types only because those types were represented in the content of the undetermined act of will; and the content of an act of will is, like the occurrence of the act of will, up to the agent, and thus undetermined. It is therefore not possible that an intentional action is predetermined to occur; and it is not possible that, prior to its occurrence, an act of will is predetermined to be an intentional action of some type, that it will have a specific intentional content. John Locke (1632–1704) describes another kind of case that seems to challenge that claim: suppose a man be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room where is a person he longs to see and speak with; and be there locked fast in, beyond his power to get out: he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable company, which he stays willingly in, i.e. prefers his stay to going away. I ask, is not this stay voluntary? I think nobody will doubt it; and yet, being

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locked fast in, it is evident he is not at liberty not to stay, he has not freedom to be gone. (Locke 1959, book II, chap. XXI, sect. 10, p. 317)

The man intentionally remains in the room and, thus, on our account, he remains there freely. Yet he has no way of getting out of the room. His remaining in the room had an absolute probability of 1 even before he woke up, even before he had the opportunity to decide whether or not to remain. He remains in the room intentionally, and thus freely, even though it was determined beforehand that he would remain in the room. However, the example does not show that an intentional action may be determined. What had a probability of 1 even before the man chose to remain in the room is that he would remain in the room, not that he would intentionally remain in the room. Suppose that, despite the delightful company, the man (perhaps to spite himself ) got up to leave. He would then have discovered that he was trapped. He would have remained in the room; but he would not have done so intentionally. He would have remained in the room against his will, despite his intention to leave. Thus, the probability of his intentionally remaining in the room was greater than 0 but smaller than 1, even though the probability of his remaining in the room was equal to 1. A similar type of case, elaborated by Harry Frankfurt (1969, pp. 835–839), has become known as a Frankfurt-type case. I have never seen a coherent description of such a case. The descriptions typically confuse actions with bodily motions or assume that actions can be determined. Here is my attempt at a description that is at least superficially coherent. Jones will shortly face a situation in which she must choose to move her hand either to the right or to the left, there being no other options. Black will ensure that Jones moves her hand to the right. If he knows that Jones is about to move her hand to the right freely, he will do nothing. However, Black has some sophisticated equipment that allows him to monitor and interfere with Jones’s brain activity. As Jones’s acts of will are undetermined, Black cannot know for sure what act of willing will occur before it occurs. But Black’s equipment can detect acts of will as soon as they occur; and Black has programmed his equipment so that, if Jones wills to move her hand to the left, the signal that act of will sends

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to her muscles will be inverted, so that her hand will move to the right. Suppose, for simplicity, that there are just two possibilities. (i) Jones wills to move her hand to the right, so Black does not interfere. Jones’s willing is undetermined and it brings about the motion of her hand to the right. (ii) Jones wills to move her hand to the left, so Black’s equipment inverts the signal so that Jones’s act of will brings about the motion of her hand to the right; and the more Jones tries to move her hand to the left, the more she moves it to the right. If Jones acts without Black’s intervention, she moves her hand to the right intentionally and freely. Yet, when she moves her hand to the right, she could not have done otherwise: her moving her hand to the right had a probability of 1 before it occurred and was thus determined. It therefore seems that an intentional, or free, action may be determined. As in the case of Locke’s example, the seeming is specious. If Jones acts without Black’s intervention, she moves her hand to the right intentionally and her action is identical to an undetermined act of will, so she acts freely. If she acts with Black’s intervention, her willing to move her hand to the left is undetermined and free; but moving her hand to the right is no part of her aim in performing that willing, so she moves her hand to the right unintentionally and thus not freely. What was determined was that Jones would move her hand to the right, not that she would do so intentionally (and thus freely). Anyhow, I suspect that the description of the case is incoherent because Jones could choose not to will to move her hand at all. Finally, we should note the link between free action and moral responsibility. We can do that while clearing up another confusion in Frankfurt. If a robber put a gun to my head and I gave her my money, my action was intentional and undetermined: I could have refused and got a bullet in the head. So, on the foregoing account of free action, my action was free. But the gun to my head means that I was coerced; and, says Frankfurt, it “is generally agreed that a person who has been coerced to do something did not do it freely and is not morally responsible for having done it” (1969, p. 830).

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Frankfurt is doubly confused. The first confusion muddles up two different kinds of freedom: social or political freedom, on the one hand, and free will, on the other. Coercion excludes freedom; it does not exclude free will (Fitzgerald 1970, p. 129). The robber used her gun to take away my freedom to hold on to my money; but in giving her the money I exercised my free will. When a coerced person says that she could not do otherwise, she means that she could not reasonably be expected to do otherwise, which is a way of disclaiming moral responsibility. That brings us to the second confusion. Free will is necessary for moral responsibility because, without it, the agent could not have done otherwise; indeed, without it, the agent could not have acted at all, she would not even have been an agent. However, free will is not sufficient for moral responsibility. The latter also requires a number of other conditions, including the following three. First, the agent must have what we can call ‘minimum competence.’ Children, and also adults suffering a mental impairment that makes them incapable of informed consent, are capable of free action, but their lack of minimum competence means that they are not (fully) morally responsible for their actions. Second, moral responsibility may be diminished if the free action is performed under duress, that is, if the action is coerced or performed under coercive circumstances which impose on the agent a high cost if she fails to perform the coerced action-type. Third, moral responsibility for an action of a particular type is normally diminished if the action is unintentional as that action type and the agent could not reasonably have known that her free act of will would instantiate that type of action (as with Jones in the Frankfurt-type case if Black intervenes).

2.4 Cornucopia of Confusion Most twentieth-century and contemporary philosophical debate about free will seems either irrelevant to the topic or confused. A central problem seems to be that, with very few exceptions, recent philosophers, at least when they are philosophising, view persons as mechanisms rather than as agents. Consequently, instead of seeing actions they see bodily motions. They may then ask the ridiculous question: what makes a bodily

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motion into a free action? Since nothing can make a bodily motion (a mere event) into a free action, their answers to the question are often grotesque. A connected problem is that such philosophers do not really believe that people can have free will, so they see their task as finding or inventing something other than free will that might do duty as a substitute for it. Indeed, in contemporary analytic philosophy, talk of acts of will is generally taboo. So when philosophers perceive the theoretical need for reference to acts of will, the prevailing taboo leads them to invoke instead other mental items, such as desires, decisions, intentions, deliberations, evaluations, preferences, choices, character or motives to do the job that acts of will do. In the rare cases in which they do talk of the “will,” they mean by it one or more of such items (for example, Kane 2007, p. 16). Despite the development of quantum theory, many recent philosophers are determinists who either deny outright that agents act freely or argue that some feeble simulacrum of free action is compatible with determinism. The “compatibilist” philosophers try to show that an agent can act freely even if the entire world is governed by deterministic laws. That depends upon identifying actions with bodily motions. According to compatibilism, all bodily motions are causally determined but a subclass of those bodily motions are distinguished as free actions, namely those that are determined by antecedent events within the agent, involving the agent’s beliefs and desires, or intentions or decisions or choices or character or a “reasons-responsive mechanism” (Fischer 2007, pp. 78–80) or such like. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) complained about that sort of approach that it was “a wretched subterfuge” and “petty word-jugglery” which reduces free agency to “the freedom of a turnspit” (Kant 1898, pp. 189–191). I doubt that Kant’s judgement is harsh enough, since a turnspit, though trapped, did have agency. A leading compatibilist philosopher was Donald Davidson (1917–2003). He claimed that an intentional action must be done for a reason and that an action is done for a reason if and only if it is causally determined, in the right sort of way, by that reason. For Davidson, the reason for an action was a combination of beliefs and desires. He thought that any successful analysis of acting for a reason would depend on the reason causally determining the action (Davidson 1982, pp. 6, 9–11, 63,

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85, 264), even though he admitted defeat in his own attempts to analyse intentional action in terms of causal determination because of problems involving “deviant causal chains” (Davidson 1982, pp. 79–81, 264–265). Davidson deflected attention (perhaps his own as well as that of other people) from the falsity of his claim, that an intentional action must be done for a reason, by declaring it to be a conceptual or logical truth (Davidson 1982, pp. 6, 264). But in fact there are numerous intentional actions that are not done for reasons. For example, when I get up in the morning and enter my kitchen, I pour and drink a glass of orange juice. On some mornings, being thirsty, I have a reason for drinking the juice; but on many mornings I have no reason for drinking it, I just do it out of habit. The habit explains why I do it; but it does not provide a reason I have for doing it. Yet my drinking the juice is intentional: it is something that I aim to do and that I might fail to pull off, for example, by missing my mouth and spilling the juice all over my shirt; and if, as I am about to do it, I am asked what I am going to do, I could say truly that I intend to drink the juice (for other examples, including some of other types, see Frederick 2010a and also Pollard 2005, 2006). We saw in Sect. 2.2 that Davidson’s claim, that acting for a reason must be analysed in terms of causal determination by the reason, is false because an action cannot be causally determined. Alfred Mele (2003, p. 39) takes himself to be generalising Davidson’s claim when he says that acting in pursuit of a goal must be analysed in terms of causation by the agent’s reasons(s). However, the two claims are quite different. An intentional action must have an aim or goal, that is, something it is intended to be or to bring about; but in the case of an action that is not a means to an end, the goal of the action is not a reason for doing it (Frederick 2010a, sect. 3). We just noted that some actions that are intentional, and thus have goals, are not done for any reason. Further, we provided in Sect. 2.3 an analysis of acting in pursuit of a particular goal that does not refer to causation by the agent’s reasons. In brief: an agent performs an action type in pursuit of a particular goal if and only if the action type is instantiated in an individual act of will of the agent which has an intentional content that includes that goal. Finally, the idea of acting for a reason does not seem open to informative analysis. It belongs to a set of basic ideas of teleological theories about persons that should be evaluated

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according to their explanatory usefulness. We can compare those ideas to the key notions of a scientific theory, which are capable of neither explicit nor implicit definition. The best we can do is to explain their relations to each other and to other notions and to illustrate their use with examples and in solving problems (Feyerabend 1981; Findlay 1970; Kuhn 1977, chap. 12; Popper 1959, sects. 17 and 20). Other philosophers (including Ekstrom 2000; Kane 2007, pp. 26–31; Mele 1995, pp. 211–236; and Nozick 1981, pp. 294–316) admit indeterminism, at least as a possibility, and then contrive accounts of free action that make it dependent on the occurrence of random mere events connected to the bodily motions that they identify with actions. Such accounts seem to founder on a version of Hobart’s objection: if an agent’s action were caused by a random event it would be outside of her control, it would be as if it had been thrown into her mind by a freakish demon. I criticise such “indeterministic causation” accounts of free action in more detail elsewhere (Frederick 2013b, sections 2, 3, and 5). Finally, some philosophers have propounded a theory of agent causation. They see that free action is incompatible with determinism and they mistakenly accept that an undetermined act would be random and outside of the agent’s control. They therefore propose that a free act is one that is caused or determined by the agent (Chisholm 1982; Taylor 1966). The view appears to involve an infinite regress: if the agent causes her act, then her causing the act is an act which she must in turn cause, and so on ad infinitum. It is also inconsistent: if the agent’s act were caused (by the agent or by anything else) it would not be an act; it would rather be a mere event. Needless to say, agent causationists have developed convoluted theories to try to avoid difficulties of these types; but we need not consider them here.

2.5 Conclusion Free will initially seemed problematic because it conflicted with traditional fatalistic cosmological theories that were associated with ancient religions. In the Enlightenment it seemed problematic because modern science was thought to imply determinism. Today, when the most

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fundamental science is indeterministic, free will still seems problematic because it seems to many to be inconsistent with indeterminism. Yet, given our natural inclination to think that we act freely, the claim that we have free will seems highly plausible. Free will requires undetermined acts of will and is thus inconsistent with determinism. I expounded the ubiquitous objection that undetermined actions would be outside of the agent’s control; and I explained how the objection depends upon a confusion between acts and mere events. Thus, the grounds for thinking free will to be inconsistent are mistaken. I invoked probabilistic laws to explain how actions may be undetermined yet understandable, how we are able to influence others and to make plans that depend on other people’s behaviour, and how social science is possible. I developed the theory of free will by drawing upon some distinctions and insights of the theory of action and I disposed of various objections that might be made to the theory. An individual action is free as exemplifying a specific action type if and only if it is intentional as exemplifying that action type. The event corresponding to the action type (as a death corresponds to a killing) is brought about by an act of will of the agent the content of which represents her acting in a way that instantiates the action type. The individual action and the act of will are the same event. An act of will is an undetermined act which, being an act, is inherently under the agent’s control. Actions are more or less predictable because they are subject to probabilistic laws. Recent philosophers have followed each other into a blind alley on the question of free will. A bias toward determinism or a failure to distinguish acts from mere events leads them to discount the possibility of free will. Even those sympathetic to free will try to substitute for it some or other conceptual monster because they are unable to see how free will itself can be reconciled with their assumptions, sometimes due to confusions between action types and individual actions. There have been some notable exceptions, such as McCann (1998) and Steward (2012), but even the exceptions have veered away from viewing actions as events with an absolute probability between 0 and 1, though at one point McCann (1998, p.  187) comes close. That leaves them with the difficulty of explaining how social science and everyday planning are consistent with

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free will. I will say a few words on Steward’s response to that difficulty shortly but I will defer criticism of it until Chap. 3, Sect. 3.4. The theory of free will sketched here is incomplete, of course, with many questions left so far unanswered. One such question is whether animals have free will. For instance, it seems that, when a rat presses a lever to get some food, its action realises its aim, and its motion of pressing on the lever was brought about by its act of will. So the rat seems to be acting intentionally. If the rat really is, as it seems, an agent, rather than a machine, its act of will had an absolute probability value greater than 0 but smaller than 1 at every time before it occurred. But does a rat really have free will? Given the theory of evolution, it would be puzzling if humans had free will but all other animals did not. However, even if a rat does have free will, it seems clear that it does not have moral responsibility. As explained at the end of Sect. 2.3, free action is necessary but not sufficient for moral responsibility. A rat, lacking what I called ‘minimum competence,’ cannot be morally responsible. A full account of minimum competence would be a separate project but various components of it will be discussed in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2. Suffice it to say here that for an agent to be morally responsible, she must have a conception of herself as a person in relation to other persons and a conception of moral demands and the obligations of persons to fulfil them. A rat, we think, is lacking such conceptions, but incipient versions of some of them may be in the possession of some of the higher animals, such as apes and dolphins (Frederick 2010b, pp.  34–36). I say a little more about that in Chap. 4, Sects. 4.1 and 4.3. Another question is whether our free will enables us to interfere with laws of nature. When the laws of nature were thought to be deterministic, free will appeared to be an anomaly; in addition, because free acts bring about changes in the physical world, they appeared to be an interference with the natural order, possibly also upsetting fundamental laws such as the conservation of energy (Prichard 2002, p. 277). Once we subsume free actions under probabilistic laws it seems that free actions might be able to fit in with the rest of the natural world under a unified law-­ governed scheme. There is a worry, though, about our actions being governed by probabilistic laws. For then, while it may be up to each of us how she acts on a particular occasion, it seems that the frequency with

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which she acts in that way on occasions of that type is not up to her. But we usually think that the scope of our free will gives us greater leeway than that (Popper 1973, p. 233). There seem to be two ways in which such greater leeway can be acknowledged. The first is to note that the frequency implied by a probabilistic law is one that holds in the long term. Shorter-term samples of behaviour subject to the law may exhibit frequencies wildly divergent from that implied by the law. Human life is short. Indeed, it is very short compared to the timescale over which a sequence of actions subject to probabilistic law would be required to converge on the frequency implied by the probabilities specified in the law. So a law specifying, for instance, that there is a 0.7 probability that I will make myself a cup of coffee at mid-morning and a 0.3 probability that I will not, may be consistent with any behaviour on my part throughout my life, even though it will imply that some types of behaviour are unlikely or even highly unlikely, given past behaviour. That would imply that our commonsense predictions of everyday behaviour are more liable to be upset than was granted above, which is a point we can concede. That concession need have no implications for social science, though, because social science deals with masses of people, not relatively few, and is thus able to substitute the very many for the very long term and thereby to employ probabilistic laws more effectively. The second way in which we may have greater leeway is to allow that our free will gives us the capacity to interfere with the laws of nature (Popper 1982, p. 130; Popper and Eccles 1983, p. 542). So, in addition to acting freely but within the limits specified by probabilistic laws, we might also have a capacity to perform free actions that have no specifiable probability. Such actions, coming ‘out of the blue,’ would enable us to break out of the familiar patterns. Of course, if we were interfering with the probabilistic laws all the time, we would be unpredictable; but our interferences would be infrequent because we are largely, and unavoidably, creatures of routine. Every change in ourselves that we initiate presupposes a background of dispositions, expectations and assumptions that are, for the time being, held steady or taken for granted. So, even if we may change anything in our styles of behaviour, we cannot change everything at the same time (Popper 1994, pp. 134–139; Hayek 1978). I mention this second way of giving us greater leeway than is suggested by

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probabilistic laws only as a possibility; the first way seems sufficient to accommodate the greater leeway that we seem to have while maintaining that probabilistic laws have no exceptions. A difficult problem on which I have not commented at all, because it is far beyond my competence, is where acts of will figure amongst the neurophysiological events that precede a bodily motion that corresponds to an action. A comment must be made on a problem that appears regularly in debates about free will, namely, that some people appear to be subject to compulsions which render them unable to resist acting in particular ways, such as a drug addict or someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Steward says that, while such a person may, under some circumstances, be unable to avoid performing an action of a general type, such as injecting a drug or washing her hands, it is still up to her when and how she does it. If she defers performing an action of the general type in question, it seems that a time will come when she can resist no longer and she has to act at that time; but even then she has a choice between numerous rival more specific ways of performing an action of that general type. Thus, she settles for herself which arm to inject into, where and in whose company; or where to wash, how thoroughly to do it, whether with hot water or cold, soap or no soap, and so on (Steward 2012, pp.  38, 182–183). Thus, even supposing that there is, at some time prior to her action, an absolute probability of 1 that she will wash her hands, still, when she does wash them, she acts freely because she has a choice among different ways of doing it. Compulsions restrict our options but always leave us more than one. Karl Popper (1902–1994) put forward a similar view as a general account of free will (Popper 1973, pp. 220–221, 1982, pp. 22–24, 41). Steward’s account is better in that it is limited to compulsive behaviours; but it still seems unsatisfactory. If Steward were right, it would seem to follow that there are some intentional actions that have an absolute probability of 1 before they occur. The drug addict intentionally injects the drug; the compulsive hand-washer intentionally washes her hands. In both cases the agent is controlling what she is doing and how she is doing it. Yet it is supposed to be the case that the agent has no option but to perform an action of that type. That is paradoxical. There also seem to be two further problems.

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The first problem can be seen if we compare the compulsive behaviours with a natural function. Let us pick urination. Normally, urination is an intentional action: there is something the agent does intentionally to let the urine flow. Yet, it seems, it is determined, prior to her act of urination, that she will urinate by a particular time. She can choose when or where (or with whom) she urinates; but, given the facts about her body at time t1, there is an absolute probability of 1 that she will urinate by time t2. Suppose that she holds off from urinating. As time t2 draws near, she will feel more and more desperate to urinate. Eventually she can hold off no longer and the urine flows. Normally, what happens in such a case seems to be that the agent becomes increasingly uncomfortable and chooses to urinate to avoid the discomfort. She could have held off for longer, but the cost of doing so was high. So her action was intentional and undetermined. But suppose instead that she resolved to hold off from urinating no matter how uncomfortable it made her feel. It seems that there would shortly arrive a time when, despite her best efforts to contain herself, the urine flows; but not because she lets it; rather, in spite of her trying to hold it. In that case, the urination is not an action of hers, and clearly not an intentional action; it is something that happened to her despite her acting to try to prevent it happening. If this account is correct, then, while it is true that at time t1 there is an absolute probability of 1 that she will urinate by time t2, it is not the case that at time t1 there is an absolute probability of 1 that she will intentionally urinate by time t2. At any time up to t2, she has the choice between two intentional actions: to urinate or to avoid urinating. If she chooses the latter, then, at time t2, she urinates but not as an action. Compare that with the case of the compulsive hand-washer. We are told that at time t1 there is an absolute probability of 1 that she will wash her hands by time t2. Until then, she may choose to wash or not to wash; but when time t2 arrives, she will wash, whether she wants to or not. It seems that that can be so only if, as in the case of urination, the washing that then occurs is not an action but is rather just something that happens to her. At times before t2 she can avoid washing but only by becoming increasingly uncomfortable; so she usually gives in and washes. But if she stays firm in her resolve not to wash, even at the cost of great discomfort at time t2, it seems that the only way that she can end up washing is

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if she loses control of her body and washes, not as an action, let alone an intentional action, but as some kind of mechanical event. She would be a witness to her washing, not an agent of it. So, if there are compulsive behaviours, they are not compulsive actions. Prior to an intentional action occurring, it cannot have an absolute probability of occurrence equal to 1. The second problem is that the theory, that what are normally referred to as ‘compulsive behaviours’ are really compulsive, appears to be refuted. Some obsessive-compulsives manage to give up their repetitive behaviours and some drug addicts manage to kick their habits; so their supposed compulsive behaviours seem not to have been compelled after all. I suggest that the supposed compulsive actions only seemed to the agents at the time to have had that character. Perhaps the person subject to ‘compulsive behaviour’ is deceiving herself that she is compelled. The self-deception would permit her to avoid taking responsibility for the behaviour. It would be maintained by dismissing or explaining away counter-evidence. However, that large topic in the murky study of psychopathology cannot be pursued here. It has been standard for philosophers in all ages to conceive of rational agents as being compelled by reason. They contend that there are many situations in which rationality demands that the agent act in a specific way and that an agent will so act provided she is not diverted by some non-rational force or some form of irrationality. Even Steward subscribes to a version of that view, since she treats compulsion by reason in the same way as she treats the other sorts of compulsions just mentioned (Steward 2012, pp. 168–176). That enables her to explain how human actions are sufficiently predictable to make social science and interpersonal management possible. In the next chapter I criticise and reject the idea of rational compulsion; and I criticise Steward’s position in Sect. 3.4. The account of free action and free will given above is incomplete in that it says nothing about omissions. In some sense, omissions are things that we do, even though an omission is often an absence of an act. In my discussion in Sect. 2.3 of the case described by Locke, when a man stays in a locked room to speak to his interlocutor, I said that the case did not show that an intentional action may be determined by prior circumstances. In fact, however, the man in Locke’s example did not act: his

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remaining in the room was not an action; he performed no act of will to stay in the room; he did not move himself or exert himself to stay in the room. He stayed in the room simply by not acting to leave; his staying was an omission. So what I should have said was that Locke’s example does not show that an intentional omission may be determined by prior circumstances. There are parallels between actions and omissions that made my description natural. While there was no act of will to remain, there was an intention to do so and perhaps a decision. I am unhappy with contemporary philosophical accounts of omissions; but I do not as yet have an account of my own to offer. I have not claimed to prove that we do act freely. It comes naturally to us to think in that way; but that is simply because we have a culturally or biologically inherited conceptual scheme which involves the concept of agency, which we apply to animals as well as to ourselves. Indeed, our ancestors applied the concept of agency to (what we now think of as) inanimate nature; but currently accepted scientific theories have dispensed with the notion of agency in their explanations of inanimate phenomena. It is at least conceivable, despite the protestations of some philosophers, that the future progress of science will produce theories that explain animal and human behaviour fully in non-teleological terms (Frederick 2012). If that happens it may then appear plausible that we never act freely, and thus that there are no acts of will (since they are essentially free acts), and thus that we never act at all, since even unintentional (and thus unfree) actions qualify as actions only if their corresponding events are brought about by acts of will.

References Chisholm, Roderick. 1982. Human Freedom and the Self. In Free Will, ed. Gary Watson, 24–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, Donald. 1982. Essays on Actions and Events. Reprinted with Corrections. Oxford: Clarendon. Descartes, René. 1931. The Passions of the Soul. In Philosophical Works, Vol. 1. Trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T.  Ross, Corrected ed., 329–427. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ekstrom, Laura. 2000. Free Will. Boulder: Westview Press. Feyerabend, Paul. 1981. On the Interpretation of Scientific Theories. In Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, 37–43. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Findlay, J.N. 1970. The Teaching of Meaning. In Ascent to the Absolute, 78–89. London: George Allen & Unwin. Fischer, John Martin. 2007. Compatibilism. In Four Views on Free Will, ed. J.M.  Fischer, R.  Kane, D.  Pereboom, and M.  Vargas, 44–84. Oxford: Blackwell. Fitzgerald, P.F. 1970. Voluntary and Involuntary Acts. In The Philosophy of Action, ed. Alan R.  White, Corrected ed., 120–143. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frankfurt, Harry. 1969. Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. Journal of Philosophy 66 (23): 829–839. Frederick, Danny. 2010a. Unmotivated Intentional Action. Philosophical Frontiers 5 (1): 21–30. ———. 2010b. Popper and Free Will. Studia Philosophica Estonica 3 (1): 21–38. ———. 2012. Critique of an Argument for the Reality of Purpose. Prolegomena: Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 25–34. ———. 2013a. Popper, Rationality and the Possibility of Social Science. THEORIA: An International Journal for the Theory, History and Foundations of Science 28 (1): 61–75. ———. 2013b. Free Will and Probability. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (1): 60–77. Hayek, Friedrich. 1978. The Errors of Constructivism. In his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, 3–22. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hobart, R.E. 1934. Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It. Mind 43 (169): 1–27. Hornsby, Jennifer. 1980. Actions. London: Routledge. Kane, Robert. 2007. Libertarianism. In Four Views on Free Will, ed. J.M. Fischer, R. Kane, D. Pereboom, and M. Vargas, 5–43. Oxford: Blackwell. Kant, Immanuel. 1898. The Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbot. London: Longmans. Kuhn, Thomas. 1977. The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laplace, Pierre-Simon. 1902. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Trans. F.W. Truscott and F.L. Emory. New York: Wiley.

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Locke, John. 1959. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Collated and Annotated by Alexander Campbell Fraser. New York: Dover. McCann, Hugh. 1998. The Works of Agency. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mele, Alfred. 1995. Autonomous Agents. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Motivation and Agency. New York: Oxford University Press. Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pollard, Bill. 2005. The Rationality of Habitual Actions. Proceedings of the Durham-Bergen Postgraduate Philosophy Seminar 1: 39–50. ———. 2006. Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1): 57–68. Popper, Karl. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1973. Objective Knowledge, Corrected ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1982. The Open Universe. London: Routledge. ———. 1994. Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem. London: Routledge. Popper, Karl, and John Eccles. 1983. The Self and its Brain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Prichard, H.A. 2002. Acting, Willing, Desiring. In Moral Writings, 272–281. Oxford: Clarendon. Russell, Bertrand. 1910. The Elements of Ethics. In Philosophical Essays, 1–58. New York: Longmans. Ryle, Gilbert. 1970. The Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Steward, Helen. 2012. A Metaphysics for Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Richard. 1966. Action and Purpose. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. van Inwagen, Peter. 2002. Free Will Remains a Mystery. In The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. Robert Kane, 158–177. New York: Oxford University Press.

3 Rationality and Fallibilism

3.1 Compulsion, Submission and Spontaneity Rationality is normative. It is connected with knowledge; and knowledge is connected with reasoning. Traditionally, it was thought that good reasoning is that which conforms to the norms of rationality. Reasoning may be theoretical, which is concerned with matters of fact or truth, or it may be practical, which is concerned with matters of right or good or what we ought to do. In valid reasoning, truth flows from premises to conclusion, so rationality requires that, if we accept the premises, we accept the conclusion. Thus, the norms of theoretical rationality were connected with the laws of deductive inference and, later, also with rules of inductive inference. The overriding norm of practical rationality is the instrumental principle, according to which a rational agent is one who acts in a way appropriate to his aims. If an agent has a particular aim, and a specific type of action is required in order to achieve that aim, then the agent has a reason for performing that type of action. A rational person is one who complies with the norms of rationality; one who violates those norms is irrational. As Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) put it: “no Person can disobey

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Reason, without giving up his Claim to be a rational Creature” (Swift 2005, p. 261). Since philosophers usually connect argument, reasons and reasoning with justification, it is commonly held that a rational agent is one who is justified in his beliefs, desires and decisions. Some philosophers see the norms of rationality as akin to the laws of nature. If I kick a football, then by virtue of the laws of motion, the force of my kick compels the ball to accelerate in a particular direction, so long as no other force deflects the ball or stops it from moving. Similarly, it is sometimes held that, if I accept the premises of an argument, then by virtue of the norms of rationality, I am compelled to accept the conclusion, so long as nothing interferes with the process; and if I have an aim, then by virtue of the norms of rationality, I am compelled to pursue the means of achieving it, so long as nothing intervenes to stop me. Thus, Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) says: What happens [in practical reasoning] seems parallel to the case of thinking and inferring about the immovable objects of science. There the end is the truth seen (for, when one conceives the two premisses, one at once conceives and comprehends the conclusion), but here the two premisses result in a conclusion which is an action—for example, one conceives that every man ought to walk, one is a man oneself: straightway one walks; or that, in this case, no man should walk, one is a man: straightway one remains at rest. And one so acts in the two cases provided that there is nothing in the one case to compel or in the other to prevent. Again, I ought to create a good, a house is good: straightway I make a house. I need a covering, a coat is a covering: I need a coat. What I need I ought to make, I need a coat: I make a coat. And the conclusion I must make a coat is an action. (Aristotle 2004, 7) [In] the practical syllogism … [w]hen the two premises are combined to form the syllogism, we have a result analogous to what we have in pure ratiocination. As in the latter the mind is forced to affirm the conclusion, so in the practical syllogism we are forced straightway to do it. (Aristotle 1955, VII, 3)

But that is true only of rational agents, since a person may be deflected from the rationally required action by irrational passions (Aristotle 1955, VII, 3) or impulses (Aristotle 1955, VII, 7).

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Other philosophers deny that the norms of rationality compel us. Instead, they view rationality as a freely chosen submission to the norms of reason, which they may insist is true freedom. Thus, René Descartes (1596–1650) proclaimed: this indifference which I feel, when I am not swayed to one side rather than to the other by lack of reason, is the lowest grade of liberty, and rather evinces a lack or negation in knowledge than a perfection of will: for if I always recognised clearly what was true and good, I should never have trouble deliberating as to what judgement or choice I should make, and then I should be entirely free without ever being indifferent. (Descartes 1931, p. 175)

Descartes thought that we had access to some infallible knowledge of what is true and what is good by means of an examination of our clear and distinct ideas. Most traditional philosophers similarly thought that we possessed some or other criterion by which to distinguish the true and the good from their opposites. Such conceptions of rationality are authoritarian in that they leave little scope for genuine rational choice: submission to the norms of rationality is a kind of voluntary slavery. The dominance of authoritarian conceptions of rationality during the Enlightenment may, in part, be explained by the resounding success of Isaac Newton’s theory, which seemed to be a testament to our ability to achieve certainty. However, as the ancient sceptics had argued, such authoritarian conceptions of rationality are entirely inappropriate for fallible creatures like us. In the twentieth century there was a growing appreciation of that after Newton’s theory was overthrown by Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) general relativity theory, and after general relativity was itself impugned because of its inconsistency with quantum mechanics, and after Russell’s Paradox revealed a contradiction at the heart of logic, and after Kurt Gödel’s (1906–1978) first and second incompleteness theorems revealed that there are some mathematical truths that cannot be deduced from any finite set of axioms and that arithmetic cannot be proved to be consistent. In this context it appeared that, “in searching for the truth, it may be our best plan to start by criticizing our most cherished beliefs” (Popper 1972, p. 6).

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Our fallibility demands a non-authoritarian conception of rationality as spontaneity tempered by criticism. That conception was propounded by Karl Popper. He called it ‘critical rationalism.’ It has been almost entirely ignored by contemporary philosophers, whose merely grudging acceptance of our fallibility has led them to attempt to maintain the authoritarian conception of rationality with some modifications. I will criticise some typical contemporary views in the next three sections, in which I set forth a fallibilist conception of theoretical and practical rationality. In Sect. 3.2, I apply Popper’s approach to give an account of deductive reasoning which shows that reasoning depends upon undetermined and fallible decisions. In Sect. 3.3, I outline Popper’s approach to scientific knowledge, which dispenses with so-called inductive inference in favour of methodological rules freely adopted but held open to revision. In Sect. 3.4, I criticise contemporary decision theory. I discuss decision problems involving risk, ignorance, and uncertainty, questions of blame, and how we may decide what to do when we do not know what we ought to do. Again, the emphasis is on fallibility and free decisions. In Sect. 3.5 I give a brief conspectus of rationality emphasising the roles of argument and free decisions, and showing the primacy of practical reason.

3.2 Deductive Reasoning The characterisation of a logically valid deductive argument is a contentious matter. Traditionally, it was characterised as an argument such that it is necessary that, if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true (Aristotle 2007a, I, 1). Nowadays, at a minimum, philosophers generally will want to insist that the necessity in question must be knowable a priori; otherwise ‘this is water, therefore, this is H2O’ will be classified as logically valid, given that it has been discovered empirically that, necessarily, water is H2O (Kripke 1980). There is also a tendency, perhaps more prominent amongst logicians than amongst philosophers, to limit logical validity to formal validity, that is, cases in which the transmission of truth from premises to conclusion depends only on the logical forms of the propositions that make up premises and conclusion. We do not need to take a position on these matters here (though some relevant

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comments are made in the Technical Note at the end of Sect. 5.2 of Chap. 5). We can speak loosely of the truth of the premises guaranteeing the truth of the conclusion, or it being necessary that, if the premises are true, then so is the conclusion. If an argument is invalid, then it is possible for its premises to be true while its conclusion is false. A possible situation in which that is the case is called a ‘counterexample’ to the argument. So a valid argument is one that has no counterexample. Some contemporary accounts of the process of deductive reasoning follow the traditional authoritarian conception of rationality, according to which reasoning is governed by indisputable norms of rationality with which a rational agent must comply. Sometimes the norms are assimilated to laws of nature, so that we are compelled to reason validly so long as there is no intervening force that leads us astray. For example, according to John Broome: When one proposition implies another (and the implication is immediate and obvious), believing the one requires you to believe the other … If you intend an end, and believe some act is a necessary means to it, your intention and belief normatively require you to intend the means. Reasoning will bring you to intend it. (Broome 2002, p. 95)

He adds the qualification that this is so provided that you are not irrational (Broome 2002, p. 88). He says that the requirements mentioned are requirements of rationality (Broome 2008) and he regards reasoning as a causal process (Broome 2013, pp.  221, 237), so irrationality is to be explained by interfering forces. Bill Brewer also views reasoning as a causal process: consider what is involved in following a valid deductive argument with real understanding, in a way that yields knowledge of its conclusion. Of course there is always the possibility of a slip or unnoticed error, but in cases where I do not go wrong, I am correctly compelled by the argument to believe its conclusion. In following and fully understanding the argument, this ­compulsion is not simply a blind and mysterious manipulation of my beliefs by some reliable mechanism, however well established by evolution, benevolent hypnosis or whatever. I am not just a machine which runs along those rails. For if my following the argument is really to extend my knowl-

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edge, then my understanding of it must give me some appreciation of why I am right in believing its conclusion … … Epistemologically productive reasoning is not a merely mechanical manipulation of belief, but a compulsion in thought by reason, and as such involves conscious understanding of why one is right in one’s conclusion. (Brewer 1995, pp. 241–242)

Christine Korsgaard subscribes to a similar view: The necessity, or the compellingness, of rational considerations … may lie in the fact that, when they do move us—either in the realm of conviction or in that of motivation—they move us with the force of necessity. But it will still not be the case that they necessarily move us … [because] a person may be irrational … … For me to be a theoretically rational person is not merely for me to be capable of performing logical and inductive operations, but for me to be appropriately convinced by them: my conviction in the premises must carry through, so to speak, to a conviction in the conclusion. (Korsgaard 1996, p. 320)

However, she differs from Broome, Brewer and numerous others in that, in Kantian style, in place of causal determination she puts the rational agent’s voluntary submission to inviolable norms of rationality (Korsgaard 1996, pp. 330–332). We might say, in an ironic echo of the quotation from Immanuel Kant in our previous chapter, Sect. 2.4, that on Korsgaard’s view the rational agent freely chooses the life of a turnspit. Broome contends that the causal process that leads a rational agent from premises to valid conclusion is also a computational one (Broome 2013, p. 232). Some other philosophers agree, as do many psychologists, neuroscientists, and artificial-intelligence researchers. The idea that deductive reasoning is computational goes back at least to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679); but its recent form was introduced by Alan Turing (1912–1954), who suggested that a digital computer programmed to execute a mechanical procedure could be made to imitate a human being’s intelligent responses to questions so well that it would be difficult to tell the two apart, thereby raising the question of whether the machine could think (Hobbes 1962, pp. 81–82; Turing 1950). On this computational

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view, the agent arrives at a conclusion from a set of premises by means of the application of a small number of rules of inference operating on formal or syntactic properties of the premises and on the propositions derived from the premises during the process of reasoning. A simple-­ minded version of this view would have the agent consciously applying an articulated set of rules to a set of premises in order to derive a conclusion. A more sophisticated view would maintain that the agent’s valid reasoning utilises his implicit knowledge of such rules which he could articulate a priori under the right circumstances. Alternatively, the computational process may be conceived as sub-personal, happening somewhere in the brain unconsciously, in which case the mechanical application of the rules may take place without the agent being in a position to articulate the rules; though the agent may be credited with at least a dim awareness of his sub-personal computations, to give him an inkling of how he could be getting things right, so that his inferences can count as knowledge (Davies 2000, pp. 96–103). Although proponents of the authoritarian view are inclined to speak of deduction taking an agent from beliefs to beliefs, or from beliefs and intentions to intentions or actions, they would perhaps all admit Gilbert Harman’s point (1986, chap. 2), as Broome does (2013, pp. 243–245), that someone who reasons from his beliefs to a conclusion he regards as false or unacceptable may decide to revise one of his premises rather than accept the conclusion. However, even in such cases the agent must first see that the conclusion follows from the premises: the reasoning to the conclusion is presupposed by the resultant adjustment of propositional attitudes. We are concerned here only with the account of valid reasoning from premises to conclusion, so we can ignore questions about transmission of beliefs and intentions. The authoritarian view seems to have a number of defects. One obvious difficulty is that there are infinitely many conclusions that follow validly from any set of premises, so if an agent were rationally compelled to infer valid conclusions, he would never be able to stop. According to Broome, an agent is compelled to derive only the immediate and obvious conclusions; but there are still many of them. For example, from the premises ‘All men are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a man,’ we may validly conclude ‘Some men are mortal,’ or ‘Someone is a man,’ or ‘Socrates is a

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mortal man,’ or ‘If Socrates were not mortal, he would not be a man,’ or ‘Socrates is Socrates,’ or ‘All men are men,’ or even ‘Socrates is mortal.’ There are too many immediate and obvious conclusions for it to be plausible to say that we are rationally required to infer them all. Further, a rational agent may fail to draw any conclusion if he has no particular interest at the time in men, mortality or Socrates, or just no particular interest in drawing a conclusion. Under such circumstances, if the two premises occur to him, he may just dismiss them. It would be a pointless waste of time to draw all the immediate and obvious consequences from every set of propositions that crosses one’s mind, so it can hardly be a requirement of rationality that we do so. Broome intends to circumvent such difficulties by maintaining that an agent will draw an immediate and obvious conclusion if he cares whether the conclusion is true or false (2013, p. 3). That may also explain which of the large number of immediate and obvious valid conclusions the agent infers. However, it leaves us without an account of reasoning to conclusions that are not immediate and obvious, or to conclusions which the agent does not care about. In logic, mathematics, the sciences and philosophy, people often reason validly to surprising conclusions (Russell’s Paradox and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, for example); and in trying to derive validly a conclusion that he cares about, a theorist will often validly derive instead various uninteresting conclusions that he does not care about. These are cases of reasoning for which the authoritarian conception seems to offer no account. It is a commonplace in reasoning research that people generally are pretty bad at deductive reasoning, often making very basic errors (Williamson 2006, pp. 14–15). On the authoritarian view, that implies that irrationality is widespread, either because of interfering forces or because of wilful refusal to obey the laws of logic. Further, even if an agent were forced to a conclusion by means of a causal process, that would not be the end of the story. It is, in principle, open to any agent to evaluate critically an inference he has made in order to test whether it is valid. And even if an agent’s reasoning to a conclusion follows rules of inference that he has freely adopted, it is still open to him to evaluate whether the conclusion follows and to re-evaluate the rules of inference he previously adopted. That should nowadays be obvious given

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that every significant principle of inference has been called into question by serious and able logicians who have in consequence developed non-­ standard systems of logic (Priest and Thomason 2007, pp. 96–98). These logicians may be mistaken; and, if they are, they are refusing to draw valid inferences. But they are attempting to circumvent what they see as difficulties and paradoxes that afflict standard logic. Their use of arguments to try to solve problems seems a paradigm of rationality; but because their reasoning does not conform to the traditional pattern, the authoritarian view of reasoning brands them as irrational. So, first, if there is a causal process of reasoning of the sort posited on the authoritarian view, it is not the whole picture; it is the agent’s responsibility to evaluate whatever results the process throws up and to throw them out if they do not pass muster. Second, if there is no such causal process of reasoning, the agent may still reason by considering possible conclusions and evaluating them. The supposed causal process of reasoning is therefore neither sufficient nor necessary for a rational agent to reason validly. The variant authoritarian conception of reasoning according to which the norms of reasoning are given and a rational agent is one who freely submits to them faces a similar problem: a rational agent is one who may question any existing norm and try to replace it with a better one. Deductive reasoning is a spontaneous and critical activity. When we draw a conclusion from a set of premises we are making a guess about what follows validly. Once we have made such a guess, if we are not to suspend judgement about it, we seem to have only three options: to accept it, to reject it, or to test it. There seem to be only two ways to test a guess about validity: to seek a counterexample or to seek a derivation. Those options may be pursued alternately, or even in parallel. If we seek a counterexample to our guess, we try to think of a set of possible circumstances in which the premises are true but the conclusion is false. If we fail to find a counterexample, that does not mean that one does not exist, so we have to decide whether to accept that the conclusion follows or to continue our search. If we think we have discovered a counterexample, we have to decide whether to accept, reject or test it. For, we may be mistaken in thinking of an actual situation that it satisfies our premises and the negation of our conclusion; and an imagined situation may conceal an inconsistency. So we have two ways of testing a

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counterexample: we can try to show that it does not in fact satisfy either the conjunction of the premises or the negation of the conclusion; or we can try to derive a contradiction from it. If we try to construct a derivation of our guess, we try, in the simplest case, to guess another proposition which follows more evidently from the premises than does our guessed conclusion, and from which, in conjunction with the premises, our guessed conclusion more evidently follows; and we may repeat this process until we have a chain of propositions linking original premises and original guessed conclusion in a set of steps each of which seems intuitively evident. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, in the more complex cases in which we try to construct a conditional or indirect ‘proof.’ If we fail to come up with a derivation, we have to decide whether, nevertheless, to accept the guessed conclusion as following from the premises. If we succeed in thinking up a derivation, we have to decide whether to accept, reject or test each step of it. If we decide to test, we have the same two options as before, namely, seek a counterexample or seek a (further) derivation. In our search for a counterexample or a derivation we may turn to formal methods which enable us to use algorithms to get answers to our questions. An algorithm is a procedure for answering a question in a finite number of mechanical steps. The use of formal methods will mean, first, choosing a system of formal logic and, second, identifying suitable logical forms for our premises and conclusion. If the argument can be formalised in classical propositional or first-order predicate logic, then, if it is valid in that system, we will be able in principle to show that it is so in a finite number of mechanical steps; and, if it is invalid in that system, we may, depending on the logical forms of its premises and conclusion, be able to show in a finite number of mechanical steps that there is a counterexample (Jeffrey 2004, pp.  113–123). However, before we can accept these formal results, we have to make three different types of decision. First, we have to decide whether to accept, reject or test our attempted conversions of our premises and conclusion into logical form. If we decide to test, we can, as usual, seek a counterexample or seek an informal derivation. Thus, the validity of the formalised inference is by itself no guarantee of the validity of the unformalised inference.

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Second, we have to decide whether to accept, reject or test that we have not made a mistake in our application of the formal methods. For example, we might test the result of a large truth-table by attempting a reduction to conjunctive normal form. Third, we have to decide whether to accept, reject or test the formal methods themselves. If we decide to test these, once more we can seek either a counterexample or a derivation; and once more this means that we have ultimately to resort to intuitive evidence. For, while the soundness of some formal methods can be derived from the soundness of other formal methods, that presumes the soundness of those other formal methods. If we are to avoid an infinite regress or circularity, we must ultimately accept some formal methods upon intuitive evidence of their soundness, or upon intuitive evidence of the soundness of informal arguments intended to demonstrate their soundness (compare and contrast Nagel and Newman 1971, pp. 92–102). At no point in this procedure do we reach any implication that is guaranteed to be valid. In deciding whether one proposition follows from others we cannot avoid deciding whether to accept intuitive evidence: either intuitive evidence that a proposition follows from others, or intuitive evidence that an apparent counterexample to an inference is real. But intuitive evidence is always fallible. Many firmly-held intuitive convictions have been overturned by the growth of knowledge, such as the absoluteness of simultaneity and the logicians’ supposed self-evident truth that every property defines a set. Simply understanding a proposition or argument cannot by itself yield knowledge of truth or validity. As Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and Bertrand Russell concluded: Infallibility is never attainable, and therefore some element of doubt should always attach to every axiom and to all its consequences. In formal logic, the element of doubt is less than in most sciences, but it is not absent, as appears from the fact that the paradoxes followed from premises which were not previously known to require limitations. (Whitehead and Russell 1927, p. 59)

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There is therefore always a gap between the evidence and the decision. No evidence can be rationally compelling. As a consequence, every decision is fallible and is, in principle, open to review or revision at a later date. Three connected points should be noticed. First, it involves a vicious regress to maintain that a decision cannot be taken without reasoning; for one cannot reason without taking decisions. So, for every possible rational agent, it is impossible to avoid arbitrary decisions (with the perhaps possible exception of an omniscient God). Second, although we cannot reason about every decision, we can, in principle, reason about any decision. For example, an agent may reason about any particular decision whether or not to accept, test or reject a particular conclusion. In such reasoning he may take account of how evident the inference appears, how doubtful it is compared with other doubts he could address instead, how crucial the inference is to his project, how much time he has, and so on. But if his reasoning about this decision is to reach a conclusion, he will have to take other decisions without reasoning. Third, although it is open to a rational agent to question, test or reject the validity of any putative implication, the fact that his time is limited means that he will often accept intuitively-­ evident inferences immediately, without a second thought, because his attention is focused on other problems. For example, few people will normally question the validity of a simple argument in explicit modus ponens form. Deductive reasoning, then, is not a process that a rational agent is compelled to undergo, either by causal laws or by free submission to rational direction. It is instead a goal-directed, creative and critical activity of a free agent. His goal is to discover what follows validly from a set of premises and he uses his own initiative to try to reach that goal by guessing a conclusion and freely deciding whether to accept or reject the guessed conclusion as following from the premises, or to test whether it does. If he decides to test he tries to guess a potential counterexample, or a derivation, and he makes at least two further decisions: how far to continue with testing; and whether or not to accept the conclusion as valid in the light of the tests. An implication of this account is that no causal process is a process of reasoning. A Turing machine that mechanically applies a set of rules to get from premises to conclusion only simulates reasoning (Popper 1982,

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pp. 81–85; Popper and Eccles 1983, pp. 75–81; Searle 1980). In contrast, a person who applies an algorithm or a formal proof procedure to given formalised information is still reasoning because he is using the mechanical, or computational, method merely as a part of his procedure: the mechanical method is just one way he uses of testing for validity. Indeed, in practice, a person trying to apply a set of rules mechanically will often make mistakes precisely because he is not operating purely mechanically but is reasoning with the aid of rules. We must therefore criticise the use of the term ‘reasoning’ to describe the various mechanical processes postulated in cognitive psychology. Plainly, some such processes exist, for example, in perception, and plainly they are cognitive processes in the sense that they enable us to acquire knowledge. But they are not processes of reasoning. To an extent, this distinction is often acknowledged by cognitive scientists themselves, when they distinguish two types of cognitive system in humans. System 1, which humans share with other animals, comprises processes which are rapid, parallel and automatic, only the final products of which are posted in consciousness. These processes employ short-cut heuristics which often produce the same results, or approximately the same results, as valid deductive reasoning for types of problems that are frequently encountered in the creature’s environmental niche, but not for other types of problems. System 2, on the other hand, is distinctively human, though inchoate versions of it may exist in the higher animals. It comprises processes which are conscious, slow, sequential, volitional and of limited capacity, but permits abstract hypothetical thinking and enables us to override or inhibit the default responses emanating from System 1 (Evans 2003, 2008). However, there is a pronounced tendency among psychologists to interpret even the System 2 volitional processes in terms of algorithms or mechanisms. Apart from its ideological ‘naturalist’ appeal, there may be two other reasons for that tendency. First, logic and mathematics are typically presented as axiomatic systems. Such a system begins with some axioms and definitions from which are derived theorem after theorem, using a restricted number of rules of inference. It can thus appear that the system is the product of mechanical reasoning by consecutive steps each of which validly infers a proposition from other propositions that have

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either been derived in this way themselves or were accepted as axioms or definitions. But that is an illusion. The formal presentation of results hides the informal process by which the results were originally attained (Lakatos 1977; Polya 1990). As W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000) put it: “the mathematician hits upon his proof by unregimented insight and good fortune, but afterwards other mathematicians can check his proof ” (1951, p. 87). Similarly, Paul Halmos (1916–2006) says: “When you try to prove a theorem, you don’t just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork” (1985, p. 321). Axiomatic systems and procedures had to be discovered by guessing, testing and deciding: they are the product of reasoning, not the process of it. The application of algorithms or formal proof procedures is a learned technique; and, as we noted above, one which an agent does not apply purely mechanically, even if he tries to do so. The second reason for the tendency to interpret reasoning in terms of mechanisms is that it often happens that the initial guess of a conclusion is merged with a decision to accept it as following from the premises, in that the agent does not consider rejecting or testing. In some cases this will be because the inference is of a kind which is habitual for the agent. Some of these habits may be nurtured; in other words, the intuition that the conclusion follows is a product of upbringing or acculturation, including education, for example, in mathematics or formal logic. But some of these habits may be instinctive and thus inherited biologically. In all these cases, it may seem that drawing a conclusion is automatic and it may seem inconceivable to the agent that the premises could be true while the conclusion is false; and to some agents in such a situation it may even seem that they are compelled to accept the conclusion given that they accept the premises. However, a rational agent is not bound by his habits; though changing, or overriding, the more ingrained habits may require significant effort. ‘Compulsion by reason’ is a contradiction in terms, at least for fallible agents. An agent who feels himself unable to resist drawing an inference from a set of premises, far from being rational, seems likely to be the victim of a neurotic compulsion (Popper 1972, p. 207).

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Before leaving the topic of deductive reasoning we should consider Lewis Carroll’s (1832–1898) dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise (Carroll 1895). Briefly, Carroll asks us to consider the following argument: ( A) things that are equal to the same are equal to each other; (B) the two sides of this triangle are things that are equal to the same; therefore, (Z) the two sides of this triangle are equal to each other. The tortoise supposes that he accepts (A) and (B) as true but denies the conditional, (C) necessarily, if (A) and (B) are true, then (Z) is true. He then asks how he can be forced logically to accept that (Z) is true. Achilles asks the tortoise to add (C) to (A) and (B), as another premise. The tortoise agrees. Achilles then exclaims: if you accept (A), (B) and (C), you must accept (Z), because it follows logically. He affirms the conditional: (D) necessarily, if (A), (B) and (C) are true, (Z) is true. The tortoise says that, if he fails to see the truth of (D), he could accept (A), (B) and (C) but still not accept (Z). Achilles then adds (D) to (A), (B) and (C), as another premise. The tortoise accepts (A), (B), (C) and (D); then he asks what would happen if he still refuses to accept (Z). Achilles replies: “Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it! … Logic would tell you ‘You can’t help yourself. Now that you’ve accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!’ So you’ve no choice, you see.” The tortoise asks Achilles to add that as another premise … Carroll’s dialogue has prompted a great deal of interesting debate, most of which seems to miss the point. A widely accepted solution to the puzzle presented by Carroll is that of Gilbert Ryle (1971, pp. 216–217), who says that drawing a valid inference is a matter of knowing how rather than

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knowing that. Achilles fails to move the tortoise, Ryle says, because accepting a conditional proposition is a matter of knowing that. But to reason one must know how to infer some propositions from some others. Such know-how is exhibited in the execution of valid inferences and in the avoidance, detection and correction of fallacies. The tortoise is being “dull,” “inefficient” and “silly” in failing to “perform an intelligent operation” because of a lack of know-how, which no addition to his knowledge of propositions will rectify. It seems clear that Ryle is mistaken. The tortoise is taking a position similar to the deviant logicians of our own day, who accept a set of premises but refuse to draw the usual inference because they reject the relevant conditional. If the conditional is added as an additional premise they might still refuse to draw the conclusion because they also reject the conditional corresponding to the new argument. Their failure to draw the usual inference does not mean that they are dull, inefficient and silly people who do not know how to draw a valid inference. One who knows how to draw valid inferences does not thereby know which inferences are valid. He knows how to make a guess about what follows validly and how to decide to accept the guess; and he will have at least some inkling about how he might evaluate the guess that he has made. If he is presented with an inference, the guess has already been made, so to draw the inference he has only to decide to accept it, perhaps after evaluating it. All this can be done, and is done, by deviant logicians. They know how to draw valid inferences despite rejecting some arguments deemed valid in classical logic. The distinction between knowing how and knowing that is a useful one; but it is misapplied to Carroll’s puzzle. The tortoise is not simply failing to draw an inference; he is expressing doubt or denial that the inference is valid. He accepts the truth of (A) and (B), but he denies that the conditional (C) is true, and as a consequence he doubts or denies the truth of (Z). He then agrees to accept, ‘for the sake or argument,’ that (C) is true; but he still does not accept that (Z) is true because he doubts that the conditional (D) is true; and so on. The tortoise knows how to draw an inference; he just refuses to do so because of lack of knowledge that. Carroll seems to be doing three things. First, he seems to be making fun of the authoritarian conception of reasoning according to which we are compelled by norms of logic to draw inferences. The tortoise is not so

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compelled. Of course, the authoritarians allow that irrational people are not so compelled; but, as presented by Carroll, the tortoise appears to be far from irrational, and Carroll may be inviting us to identify with the tortoise and to concur that we, too, are not compelled by the norms of logic. Second, he seems to be saying that, by adding to the premises of an argument its corresponding conditional, we get a new argument with a different corresponding conditional, and assenting to the truth of the first conditional is not the same as assenting to the truth of the second. So, if we try to persuade someone that an argument is valid by simply adding its corresponding conditional as an additional premise we will begin on an infinite regress. Third, the overall point may be to show that the norms of logic are rationally questionable (something that seems not to have occurred to Ryle).

3.3 Improving Our Theories Traditionally, it was thought that theoretical reasoning is divided into two types: deductive and inductive. Aristotle thought that inspection of a finite number of particulars could enable us to intuit their essence, thereby enabling us to infer validly from a statement of the form ‘All observed things of kind K1 are of kind K2’ to a statement of the form ‘All things of kind K1 are of kind K2’ (Aristotle 2007a, II, 23, 2007b, II, 19). But David Hume (1711–1776) argued that individual experiences tell us only about themselves: they give us no information about other experiences. For example, even if it is true that every emerald we have observed has been green, it does not follow that every emerald is green, for there may be some emeralds that we have not observed that are not green. The fact that all observed emeralds have been green does not even imply that it is probable that every emerald is green, because we can have no idea whether our experience of things so far has been representative of how things are in general. Therefore, inductive inference is not valid. Consequently, we can have no justification for thinking that our general theories are either true or even probably true. Of course, we may find our general theories plausible, or ‘subjectively probable,’ given our particular experiences or inclinations; but we can have no grounds for linking

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plausibility or subjective probability to truth or to objective probability (Hume 1888, book I, pt. III, sect. vi, pp. 86–94 and sect. xii, p. 139; pt. IV, sect. ii, p. 218, 1975, sect. IV, pt. II, pp. 32–39 and sect. V, pt. I, pp. 40–47). Some philosophers seem simply to ignore Hume’s problem. For example, Gilbert Harman describes as “warranted” an “inference to the best explanation” thus: one infers, from the premise that a given hypothesis would provide a “better” explanation for the evidence than would any other hypothesis, to the conclusion that the given hypothesis is true. (Harman 1965, p. 89)

In general, philosophers who have responded to Hume’s problem have tried to show that Hume was mistaken. Kant, and others following him, attempted to show that some of our general theories can be justified on a priori grounds, that is, independently of experience. Surprisingly, such attempts continue even after the discovery of Russell’s Paradox, which showed that “from premises which all logicians of no matter what school had accepted ever since the time of Aristotle, contradictions could be deduced” (Russell 1959, p. 58) and Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, which showed that any theory that assumes arithmetic, as virtually all theories of any interest do, cannot be proved to be consistent (let alone true). Thus even our best a priori theories may, for all we can know, turn out to be false. Other philosophers have tried to show that our theories are justified in a weak sense, that they are “prima-facie justified” or “supported” by empirical or intuitive evidence. However, since these philosophers admit that such prima-facie justified theories may turn out to be false, so they do not solve the problem: it remains the case that our best empirical and a priori theories may be false and that they may, indeed, be shown to be faulty the very next time that we examine them critically; in which case we are not justified in thinking them true, or even probably true in an objective sense of ‘probability.’ Indeed, even if it could be shown that supported or prima-facie justified theories were, objectively, probably true, we would still not be justified in thinking them to be true, since even a highly probable theory may be false.

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Things are worse still, because it is not only our general theories that we cannot know to be true. Even ordinary statements of what we observe by means of our senses involve theoretical interpretations that may be false. A simple observation statement such as ‘Here is a glass of water’ implies that the receptacle will exhibit the law-like behaviour of glass and that its contents will behave in the law-like way that water does; and these implications may be inconsistent with other observation statements (Popper 1959, sect. 25 and appendix *x). Indeed, after the discovery of heavy water, we learned that there were innumerable statements of the form ‘This is water’ that had been accepted by scientists and others over the centuries that were false, because the liquid they referred to was a mixture of two physically different substances (Popper 1966, vol. II, addendum I, sect. 4). We can never know of any observation statement that it is true. Unlike contemporary epistemologists, Popper does not attempt the fruitless task of trying to defeat the sceptic. He accepts the sceptical arguments but he shows that we can still make theoretical progress. Philosophers traditionally deemed the aim of theoretical rationality to be truth; and almost all contemporary philosophers agree. However, given that we have no way of telling whether any of our theories or observation statements is true, that aim is not appropriate to our situation. Popper proposed instead that we should aim to get theories that are better than those that we have (1973, chap. 5). The aim is recursive: once we obtain a better theory, it becomes one of the theories that we have, so we then try to obtain an even better one. It might be suggested that, rather than starting from where we are, we should reject all our current theories and then start again from scratch. However, even if we could do that, we would have nothing left with which to think. Even our observations are possible for us only because we decipher the messages we get from our sense organs by means of an interpretative framework which is constituted by inherited theories (see the example below). Some of those theories are built into our sense organs and result from biological evolution; others are inherited culturally, handed down, with modifications, from past generations (Popper 1959, appendix *x; 1973, pp. 145–146, appendix; 1994, chap. 2).

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Thus, we start from where we are, by accepting our inherited theories, both general theories and observation statements, and we aim to bring it about that we accept better and better theories in a process of continuous improvement (Popper 1972, chap. 4). We must therefore make decisions concerning three things: first, the properties that make a theory good, so that we can decide when one theory is better than another; second, how we should proceed to try to obtain better theories; and third, how we can prevent ourselves from accepting worse theories than those we had before. The following exposition regiments Popper’s too-loose terminology, following a proposal I made elsewhere (Frederick 2019). Good And Better Theories. We want theories to help us to make sense of the world and our place in it. A good theory, then, should explain what is going on; it should explain how things work; it should solve some problems that are troubling us. The explanation should not, however, be whimsical. A fairy story might give us an explanation of what is happening; and that explanation might even please us with its simplicity. But it cannot be taken too seriously unless we have a way of testing it against the world as we experience it. Let us say that an observation statement is a statement describing something that we could conceivably observe with our actual powers of observation. Thus, (O) there is a pink elephant in Trafalgar Square on 1 January 2021 is an observation statement: we can use observation to decide whether or not to accept it. We can test a theory against the world as we experience it if and only if the theory is inconsistent with some observation statements, that is, if and only if the theory is falsifiable. So, ‘all elephants are grey’ is falsifiable because it is inconsistent with (O). A theory that is unfalsifiable cannot be tested against observation statements because it is consistent with every observation statement. For example, the theory, ‘every person has a guardian angel,’ is inconsistent with a statement of the form ‘person A does not have a guardian angel.’ But a statement of the latter form is not a statement describing an observation that we could conceivably make with our actual powers of observation, because we cannot observe the non-existence of an ethereal being. Our failure to observe a person’s guardian angel does not amount to observing that the person

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has no guardian angel. An unfalsifiable theory is immune to empirical criticism; but not because it survives such criticism, only because it does not risk such criticism. It therefore lacks a property that is desirable in a theory. If we have two rival theories one of which is falsifiable and the other of which is not, the former is the better of the two, other things being equal. Other properties of a good theory are simplicity, wide scope and novel insights. Let us count one theory as a rival to another only when the two are inconsistent with each other; and let ‘P’ and ‘Q’ stand in for designations of rival theories. The following are the main properties of theories that we use in rating P better than Q (Popper 1959, chaps. 1–7; 1972, chap. 10): (i) P explains what Q explains and also explains some other things too; (ii) P provides a unified solution to problems that are solved in different ways by Q; (iii) P is falsifiable while Q is not; (iv) P entails surprising falsifiable predictions that are not derivable from Q, and those predictions survive testing; (v) P corrects Q, that is, P shows that some falsifiable predictions of Q that were thought to be successful were actually not successful and it explains why they seemed to be successful. Here is an illustration. In the seventeenth century, there were successful scientific theories concerning terrestrial and celestial motion. One was Galileo Galilei’s ‘law of freefall’ which stated that freely falling bodies on Earth have constant acceleration. Another was Johannes Kepler’s (1571–1630), ‘first law’ which said that the planets have elliptical orbits around the sun. Toward the end of that century Newton proposed a new theory that explained both terrestrial and celestial motions. Newton’s theory contradicted both Galileo’s and Kepler’s theories. Contrary to Galileo’s ‘law,’ it predicted that the acceleration of freely falling bodies is not constant; but it also explained why the assumption of constant acceleration gives a close approximation for bodies relatively close to the earth. Contrary to Kepler’s ‘first law,’ Newton’s theory predicted that the orbits of the planets are only approximately elliptical because of the effects of interplanetary gravitation. The theory also explained things that were not

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explained by the conjunction of Galileo’s and Kepler’s theories, such as the motions of the moon and of the tides. The surprising predictions of the theory survived empirical testing, Thus, Newton’s theory had properties (i), (ii), (iv) and (v) in comparison with the conjunction of Galileo’s and Kepler’s theories; and, like that conjunction, it was falsifiable. It was thus a better explanation (Popper 1973, chap. 5). One theory may be better than another with regard to some of the properties of a good theory but worse with regard to some other of those properties. As a consequence there may be times when we are unable to decide which of two or more rival theories is the best of those that we currently have. When we can decide which of a set of rival theories is best, we can articulate our assessment as a deductive argument; but the process that generates the deductive argument is a creative and critical one rather than one of algorithmic computation (recall Sect. 3.2, above). What To Do. Popper’s guidance for how we should proceed in order to improve our theories is, in brief: criticise and test, propose new conjectures, criticise and test, accept or retain a theory when it is better than its rivals (1959 chaps. 1–5, esp. sects. 19–20). That needs to be spelt out in more detail. Having accepted our inherited theories and observation statements, we set out to criticise them in order to identify problems. Thus, we may use the properties of a good theory to identify shortfalls in our current theories with regard to simplicity, scope, surprising implications, and falsifiability; and we may look for inconsistencies either within an accepted theory, or between one such theory and another, or between an accepted theory and an accepted observation statement. Second, we look for ways to solve the problems that our critical examination has exposed, either by proposing amendments to existing theories to improve them or to remove contradictions, or by proposing new theories. Either way, our proposals are conjectures that may or may not be better than the theories that we already have. We then need to criticise the conjectures so that we can compare their relative strengths and weaknesses to those of their rival theories. We should hold all of our theories open to criticism and be ready to replace them when we find better ones. Empirical criticism is possible only if we have observation statements that we accept for the purpose of the criticism. Given that we can never

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know which observation statements are true, the ones that we accept cannot be the ones that we know to be true. Popper proposes that we accept a new observation statement if different observers can agree it to be a description of what they observe (Popper 1959, chap. 5). A difficulty is that, given that we are using observation statements for empirical criticism, and given that observation statements are theory-laden, advocates of rival theories may interpret the same observed situation or event in different ways, so they might not agree on a statement that describes the observed event. That difficulty is surmountable. Suppose, for example, that an Aristotelian, a Galilean, a Newtonian and an Einsteinian observe the same event. The Aristotelian says: “that apple left the tree-branch in search of its natural place.” The Galilean says: “that apple fell to Earth.” The Newtonian says: “that apple was pulled to the ground by the Earth’s gravitational force.” The Einsteinian says: “that apple took the easiest course through curved space-time.” These observation statements are inconsistent with each other. The same event is seen as a different type of event by each of the observers because they interpret what they see in the light of their different theories. However, there is a neutral observation-statement that all four can agree upon; perhaps, “that apple moved from the tree-branch to the ground in approximately a straight line.” The four conflicting theories generate the four conflicting observation statements; but the four theories can be tested against observation statements that are phrased neutrally with respect to them. An observation statement that is neutral with respect to those four theories will not be neutral with respect to some others. For example, a fifth person may say: “that was not an apple.” In that case, a neutral observation statement may be: “that approximately-spherical object moved from the tree-branch to the ground in approximately a straight line.” A sixth person may have some startling new theory of motion which requires formulating a neutral observation statement in a way that we cannot anticipate. No observation statement describing the event will be neutral with respect to all theories. Still, if our observations are experiences which bring us into contact with aspects of an external world, then we should be able to find a formulation that is neutral with respect to all the theories in contention in a given discussion. We should be able, with effort, to strip away the alternative interpretations in contention, not to

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reveal some content which is free of interpretation, but to find an interpretation on which we can agree (Frederick 2016, p. 641). An accepted observation statement may be used in empirical criticism only if it describes a reproducible situation or event, that is, one that occurs regularly in nature or one that we can bring about regularly. That excludes freak observations, due either to freak situations or events, or to freak observers, from being used in empirical criticism. Some of the observation statements that we accepted because they were part of our inheritance, when we agreed to start from where we are, might not describe reproducible situations or events, in which case they cannot be used for empirical criticism. We may generally assume that there is some explanation for a freak observation, though we might not be able to discover what it is; and seeking such an explanation may often not be a priority. If a theory is inconsistent with an accepted observation statement that describes a reproducible situation or event, then the theory is falsified. It should be noted that a falsified theory need not be a false one, given that the accepted observation statement with which it is inconsistent might be false (Popper 1959, chap. 5). Popper, in his more popular expositions, had an unfortunate tendency to speak as if ‘falsified’ implied ‘false’ (Popper 1972, pp. 37, 56, 115, 192, 276). For example, the theory, ‘nothing travels faster than the speed of light,’ is falsifiable, since we have ways of measuring the speed of objects and it is conceivable that, with our actual powers of observation, we observe a measurement of an object’s speed which shows it to be faster than 186,282 miles per second. Indeed, experiments have been conducted at CERN in Switzerland to try to falsify the theory; but they have so far been unsuccessful in yielding an accepted observation statement that is inconsistent with the theory and that describes a reproducible result. In contrast, the theory, ‘all swans are white,’ is not only falsifiable but also falsified, since many observation statements of the form, ‘that is a black swan,’ have been accepted. The fact that all observation statements are theory-laden and might be false means that in responding to a falsification we have a choice between replacing the observation statement or replacing the theory. Replacing the observation statement requires replacing one of the theories presupposed by the observers who agreed to accept it. So we are presented with

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a choice of which theory to replace. There is indeed a further choice because, when deriving an empirical prediction from a theory, we usually make use of background assumptions, that is, other theories that are provisionally taken for granted. So, in responding to a falsification, we typically have three options: replace the observation statement, replace the theory under test, or replace a background assumption upon which the derivation of the inconsistency constituting the falsification depends. Whichever way we choose, the result will be acceptable only if contributes to progress by giving us a better theory (Popper 1959, sect. 20). The following are examples of each kind of choice. In the late-seventeenth century, observation statements of the positions of the moon that had been accepted by the Astronomer Royal were inconsistent with predictions of the moon’s positions that were derived from the conjunction of Newton’s theory with accepted background assumptions; so that conjunction was falsified. Newton, unsurprisingly, was reluctant to seek a replacement for his theory. Instead, he sought a replacement for a theory assumed by the observation statements. Anyone who makes a statement about the position of the moon in light of his observation of the moon assumes a theory about atmospheric refraction, whether he realises it or not. The reason is that either the atmosphere refracts light or it does not; and if it does, the moon will not be where we seem to see it. Further, there is an infinity of ways in which the atmosphere could refract light. Newton replaced the theory of atmospheric refraction assumed by the Astronomer Royal with an alternative hypothesis. On that alternative hypothesis about refraction, each of the previously accepted observation statements about the moon’s positions had to be replaced with new ones; and those new observation statements were consistent with Newton’s theory. Newton thereby achieved consistency while also explaining why the rejected observation statements seemed to be true. However, that was an acceptable way of resolving the inconsistency only if Newton’s new theory of refraction was better than the old one. That turned out to be so because Newton’s new theory of refraction did not apply only to the moon. It made surprising falsifiable predictions concerning the observed positions of other objects; and those predictions survived testing (Lakatos 1978, p. 216).

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In the mid-nineteenth century, predictions of the motion of Uranus entailed by the conjunction of Newton’s theory with some background assumptions about the solar system were inconsistent with accepted observation statements. Urbain Le Verrier (1811–1877) did not challenge any theories presupposed by the observation statements. Instead, he turned his attention to revising the falsified conjunction of theories. Rather than revising Newton’s theory, he chose to revise one of the background assumptions, namely, the theory that there are seven planets. He proposed a new hypothesis that there is an eighth planet exerting a gravitational pull on Uranus sufficient to account for the accepted observation statements about Uranus’s positions. He used Newton’s theory to calculate the size and orbit of the new planet. He thereby removed the inconsistency between Newton’s theory and the accepted observation statements. However, that was an acceptable way of resolving the inconsistency only if Le Verrier’s new theory about the number of planets was better than the old one. That turned out to be so because the new theory, in conjunction with Newton’s theory, implied surprising falsifiable predictions concerning observable positions of the new planet. When telescopes were pointed in the right direction, the new planet was discovered; it was named ‘Neptune’ (Kuhn 1957, pp. 261–262). In the late-nineteenth century, accepted observation statements of the positions of Mercury were inconsistent with some of the predictions entailed by the conjunction of Newton’s theory with some background assumptions about the solar system. Le Verrier again proposed a revision to a background assumption, by conjecturing the existence of a ninth planet, using Newton’s theory to calculate its size and orbit. He even gave the planet a name, ‘Vulcan.’ Unfortunately, that time, Le Verrier’s conjecture failed the empirical test: Vulcan was not there. Einstein’s solution involved replacing Newton’s theory with a new conjecture, general relativity theory. That theory was not addressed to the problem of the motions of mercury; but it did account for them and it also implied novel predictions about the bending of light that survived empirical testing (Zahar 1973, pp. 249–250, 256–259). In each of those examples, the new theory was better than its predecessor because it entailed novel predictions that survived empirical testing. But it is sufficient for a replacement theory to be acceptable if it is better

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than its predecessor in any of the ways (i)–(v), above, so long as it is not also worse in some of those ways. The same applies in other cases of inconsistencies within our accepted body of knowledge: replacement of one theory by another that removes the inconsistency is acceptable only if the new theory is, overall, a better theory than the theory it replaces; otherwise the change to theory is pseudo-scientific. What To Avoid. Popper adds some specific norms to prohibit pseudo-­ scientific ways of proceeding that have the effect of frustrating progress (Popper 1959, sects. 11 and 20). These norms are implicit in the preceding but are worth stating separately. Thus, we should: • never attempt to justify a theory or regard it as beyond criticism; • never ignore or dismiss a falsification; • never dismiss an experimentalist or critic as incompetent or duplicitous, instead of criticising his argument; • never append to a theory a list of exceptions, adding a new exception every time the theory is falsified; • never interpret the axioms of a theory as a set of implicit definitions, so that the theory means whatever it has to mean to come out true; • never add to a theory, to rescue it from falsification, an auxiliary hypothesis which does not give us a better theory overall. In summary, Popper’s approach to theoretical rationality is to replace the traditional aim of seeking truth with the new aim of improving our theories. That aim is clarified by identifying a set of properties that make one theory better than another. One of the most important of those properties is the property of falsifiability because a theory is better if it can be tested against our experiences and better still if it survives such testing. Popper’s “methodological rules” (Popper 1959, sect. 20) concerning how to proceed and how not to proceed are designed to assist us in achieving our epistemic aim. They are therefore norms of theoretical rationality. Contravention of them is instrumentally irrational given our epistemic aim. Adhering to the rules about what to do will facilitate our pursuit of our aim; adhering to the rules about what not to do will prevent us from regressing to a worse state of knowledge.

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We rejected truth as our theoretical aim because we have no way of discriminating true from false theories. We cannot compare a theory directly with the world and our comparative evaluations of theories concern properties that have no bearing on a theory’s truth. As we recently noted, Newton’s theory was far superior to those of Galileo and Kepler; but it turned to be worse than general relativity. The properties that we use to rate theories as better or worse may identify one theory as best at one time but a rival theory as best at a later time. Those properties are therefore not related to truth, which is timeless. It is not the case that Newton’s theory was true until general relativity was formulated and then false thereafter; but it was the best theory we had in its domain until general relativity was formulated. Of course, our ways of discriminating theories as better or worse are not infallible. Every statement that one theory has a property of a good theory that a rival theory lacks, or that it has the property to a greater extent, is fallible and thus open to revision. For instance, we can tell whether a theory is falsifiable by thinking of an observation statement with which it is inconsistent and we can tell that the inconsistency exists by deriving a contradiction from the conjunction of the theory with the observation statement. But it could turn out that there was a mistake in our derivation. Similarly, what a theory explains depends upon what statements are logically derivable from it, so comparisons of explanatory power are similarly fallible. We have fallible ways of determining whether one theory is better than another; but we have no way of determining whether a theory is true. It might be objected that by adhering to Popper’s proposed norms, we may improve our theories but, since those theories may be false, and since even if they happen to be true they cannot be known to be true, they do not count as knowledge. Popper might dismiss the objection as a verbal quibble: who cares whether we call our best theories ‘knowledge’? They are still valuable. However, we seem constituted to have a yearning for knowledge, in at least something like its traditional sense, so once we have accepted that we cannot have it, it might still be worthwhile to show that there is a substitute that we can have which mimics knowledge in some important ways. Theories that qualify as best with regard to our desirable properties of theories do that: they help us to understand things, they often predict successfully what will happen, they enable us to solve

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problems, and they inform the development of new technologies. Why not, then, give our currently best theories the honorific title of ‘knowledge,’ especially since the word ‘knowledge’ (and its cognates) is one that we find it difficult to do without? I propose to follow Popper’s practice of calling ‘knowledge’ all of our currently-best theories that have at some time made surprising empirical predictions that survived testing. When we accept a theory as knowledge or as the currently best theory in its domain, we do not accept it as true, because we can have no idea whether it is true. However, we need to be careful in handling the logical equivalence: (E) p if and only if it is true that p. That means that if we accept that p, then we accept that it is true that p. But we must distinguish different kinds of acceptance. We can agree that the following pairs are equivalent: • accepting-as-true that p, accepting-as-true that it is true that p; • accepting-as-currently-best that p, accepting-as-currently-best that it is true that p; • accepting-as-knowledge that p, accepting-as-knowledge that it is true that p, But none of that implies that the following two are equivalent #  accepting-as-currently-best that p, accepting-as-true that p or that the following two are equivalent #  accepting-as-knowledge that p, accepting-as-true that p. So, when we accept a theory as knowledge we also accept as knowledge that the theory is true; but that does not mean that we accept as true that the theory is true. That may seem somewhat specious; but we know from the history of logic in the early part of the twentieth century that we sometimes need to make such subtle distinctions in order to avoid

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self-­contradiction. The main point is that something can be knowledge without being true and that apparent contradictions deriving from (E) can be avoided by being careful with our language. Unhappily, in his later years, Popper moved away from this revolutionary conception of theoretical rationality. Instead, sliding back toward the traditional authoritarian conception, he decreed that the aim of science is truth and that progress in science should yield theories that have greater verisimilitude, that is, closeness to truth (Popper 1972, chap. 10, sects. vii–xiv). He offered a formal definition of verisimilitude but it was shown to be untenable (Miller 2006, chap. 11 and references therein). His lamentable concession to authoritarian rationalism was also untenable, for the reasons expounded in this section.

3.4 Deciding How to Act What an agent ought to do in a particular situation depends upon the facts of that situation. In no situation does what an agent ought to do depend upon all of the facts, because there will always be an infinity of facts that are not relevant to the agent’s decision. For example, whether I should attend a friend’s wedding depends upon where it is, whom he is marrying, how close a friend he is, and what other commitments I have; but it does not depend upon the position of the moon or upon what Winston Churchill did on the fifth of April, 1932, or upon whether the house across the road from me is vacant, and so on. I am thus using ‘ought’ here in the sense of the so-called ‘objective ought.’ What distinguishes ‘ought’ from the so-called ‘subjective ought’ is that the latter is taken to depend, not upon the facts, but upon beliefs, representations or theories about the facts, usually those held by the agent. It is standard to make a distinction between decisions which involve risk, or objective probability, and decisions which involve uncertainty. The distinction is not a happy one, because all our knowledge is uncertain, so every decision-making situation, whether or not it involves risk, is one of uncertainty. Here, I use ‘risk’ strictly to refer to situations in which there are several alternative outcomes each of which has an objective probability of occurrence greater than 0 but less than 1 given the

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total current state of the entire world (what, in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2, I called an ‘absolute probability’). I divide what is customarily called ‘uncertainty’ into ignorance and uncertain knowledge. I use ‘ignorance’ to refer to situations where we lack some knowledge needed for us to be able to deduce what we ought to do. I ague that every practical decision is essentially a guess. I begin with a decision problem involving risk. I then consider two decision problems structurally similar to the first, but involving ignorance. One of those problems, involving some miners threatened by an impending flood, is much-discussed in the literature. I show that the usual tools of decision theory, namely, expected utility, the maximin principle, and an appeal to gambling temperaments, give no guide to what we ought to do in any of those cases or, by implication, in others. I then consider a decision problem where, apart from the inevitable uncertainty, the decision is apparently clear-cut; but I show that, in such cases also, the decision-maker has to make a guess. I go on to consider questions of blame in connection with a well-known case about a doctor with a choice of three drugs that will, respectively, kill, cure, or partially cure the patient. The case is structurally similar to previously discussed cases involving risk and ignorance and is itself a case of ignorance. I do not offer anything like a comprehensive treatment of decision theory here. That would require a large book; perhaps several of them. But I think I say enough to indicate that current approaches to decision theory should be scrapped.

Risk Consider the following decision problem involving risk. gambling and risk Poor Bill asks wealthy Anne for some money. Anne has been passing the time flipping an unbiased coin. She says that she will flip the coin and offer Bill three options: Heads, Tails or Neither. If Bill chooses Heads and the coin turns up heads, Anne will give him ten pounds, but if it turns up tails she will give him nothing. If Bill chooses Tails and the coin turns up tails, Anne will give him ten pounds, but if it turns up heads she will give him nothing. If Bill chooses Neither and the coin turns up heads, Anne will give

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him nine pounds, and if it turns up tails she will give him nine pounds. There are no further facts relevant to Bill’s decision apart from the one concerning which way the coin will turn up.

I assume that, in the case described, at the time of the toss, the unbiased coin has, given the entire state of the universe, an objective probability of 0.5 of turning up heads and an objective probability of 0.5 of turning up tails. Anyone who thinks that determinism reigns at the macro level can alter the example by substituting for the outcome of a coin toss the result of an indeterministic microphysical process with the same probability distribution. We may reason as follows. ( 1) Bill ought to choose the option that will get him most money. (2) If the coin will turn up heads, then Bill ought to choose Heads. (3) If the coin will turn up tails, then Bill ought to choose Tails. (4) Either the coin will turn up heads or the coin will turn up tails. Therefore, (5) Either Bill ought to choose Heads or Bill ought to choose Tails. No one can know beforehand what Bill ought to do, because no one can know in advance which way the flipped coin will turn up. In contemporary decision theory, it is standard when dealing with cases of risk to employ expected utility theory. We calculate the expected utility of each option open to us by summing the expected utilities of each of its alternative outcomes. The expected utility of an alternative outcome is the probability of that outcome multiplied by the utility achieved if that outcome is realised. So, if Bill chooses heads, there is a 0.5 probability that he receives ten pounds, which gives an expected utility of five pounds received, and a 0.5 probability that he receives nothing, which gives an expected utility of zero pounds received; and we add together those expected utilities of the two alternative outcomes to obtain a total expected utility of five pounds received. Similar computations are performed for the other options, as shown in the following Table 3.1.

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Table 3.1  Gambling and risk; expected utility Action Heads Tails Neither

Expected utility Coin heads

Coin tails

Total

0.5 × 10 = 5 0.5 × 0 = 0 0.5 × 9 = 4.5

0.5 × 0 = 0 0.5 × 10 = 5 0.5 × 9 = 4.5

5 5 9

According to expected utility theory, (6) Bill ought to maximise expected utility. Consequently, on expected utility theory: (*)  Bill ought to choose Neither. However, (*) contradicts (5). That should not be surprising because in arriving at (5) we assumed (1), whereas expected utility theory assumes (6), and the norms (1) and (6) conflict. If we adhere to (1), which is the commonsensical norm in the situation, we must reject expected utility as a theory concerning what we ought to do. It might be objected that, if this scenario were enacted innumerable times, consistently choosing Heads would tend to yield an average of five pounds a time, as would consistently choosing Tails, whereas consistently choosing Neither would yield nine pounds each time; so, if Bill ought to choose the option that will get him most money, then over the long run he ought consistently to choose Neither, as expected utility theory entails. But it may justly be replied that Bill will not face this choice innumerable times. If Anne offers the gamble to Bill once only, Bill may get ten pounds by choosing either Heads or Tails. Indeed, the laws of probability allow that if Anne offered the gamble to Bill many times in succession, Bill could choose Heads each time and receive ten pounds each time. That is not very likely, but it is possible; and, as even very unlikely things sometimes happen, Bill could be lucky. Of course, he might not be lucky. No one can know beforehand what Bill ought to do. Game theory contains a popular norm that may be applied to the decision problem in gambling and risk, namely, the maximin principle:

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(7) we ought to choose the option the worst alternative outcome of which is better than the worst alternative outcome of each of the other options. Like expected utility theory, maximin implies (*), because if Bill chooses Neither, the worst he can do is to obtain nine pounds, whereas with the other options he might end up with nothing. However, maximin overlooks the fact that with either of the other options Bill might get ten pounds. The question is: is it worth gambling nine pounds for a 0.5 chance of getting ten? In the case of a one-off decision, we cannot know beforehand. It will turn out to be worth it if the gamble pays off, but not otherwise. In advance of the outcome of the coin toss, there is no objective answer to the question of whether the gamble is worth it, because in advance of that outcome it is objectively undetermined how things will turn out. Notoriously, people have different gambling temperaments. Some would choose Neither as the most reasonable bet, perhaps saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Others would take a punt on Heads or Tails to be a reasonable bet, perhaps saying “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” However, although varying gambling temperaments have often, legitimately, been raised as a difficulty for expected utility theory (Allais 1979; Buchak 2013, 2016; Hansson 1988; Sowden 1984; Watkins 1970, pp. 182–191; 1977), that is not the difficulty we are considering here. Even if gambling temperaments were uniform, so that everyone chose Neither, or no one did, that would be just a psychological fact that would not alter the objective fact that, at the time of the decision, it is objectively undetermined whether it is worth gambling nine for the sake of ten in this case.

Ignorance Consider now a modification of the decision problem. gambling and ignorance

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Anne flips the coin and covers it up before asking Bill to choose one of the three options. Anne noticed that the coin turned up heads. She now knows that Bill ought to choose Heads.

It is an objective matter of fact that, if Bill foregoes the nine pounds guaranteed to him by choosing Neither and instead chooses Heads, he will get ten pounds. But Bill does not know that: he is no wiser than he was in the gambling and risk case. For him, choosing Heads is still a gamble because, so far as he knows, it may yield him nothing, in which case he would have lost the nine pounds he could have had by choosing Neither. Thus, gambling does not require risk: ignorance is enough. In this case, choosing Heads is, objectively, a gamble worth taking; but whether Bill finds it a reasonable bet depends upon his gambling temperament. The following case has been discussed by Derek Parfit (1942–2017) and, previously, by Donald Regan (Kolodny and MacFarlane 2010, p. 115). trapped miners, two shafts Ten miners are trapped either in shaft A or in shaft B, but we do not know which. Flood waters threaten to flood the shafts. We have enough sandbags to block one shaft, but not both. If we block one shaft, all the water will go into the other shaft, killing any miners inside it. If we block neither shaft, both shafts will fill halfway with water, and just one miner, the lowest in the shaft, will be killed. So, if we block shaft A, we will save ten if the miners are in shaft A, but save none if the miners are in shaft B. If we block shaft B, we will save ten if the miners are in shaft B, but save none if the miners are in shaft A. If we block neither shaft, we will save nine if the miners are in shaft A and save nine if the miners are in shaft B.

Provided that the following assumption holds, (A) there are no further facts relevant to the decision apart from the one concerning which shaft the miners are in, then the case is structurally similar to the previous cases, so we may reason as follows.

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(1’)  We ought in this situation to maximise lives saved. (2’)  If the miners are in shaft A, we ought to block shaft A. (3’)  If the miners are in shaft B, we ought to block shaft B. (4’)  Either the miners are in shaft A or they are in shaft B. Therefore, (5’)  Either we ought to block shaft A or we ought to block shaft B. The reason that we need (A) is that the addition of some further relevant facts could easily transform the situation. For example, if the following were a fact (F) shaft A contains twenty schoolchildren on an educational tour of the mine, all of whom will be killed if the shaft fills halfway with water, it seems that (3’) would be false. In a curious article Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane (2010, p. 115) “take it as obvious” that in trapped miners, two shafts “the outcome of our deliberation should be” (*’)  We ought to block neither shaft. They accept that it seems natural to accept (2’), (3’), (4’) and (5’) but they find the incompatibility between (*’) and (5’) paradoxical (2010, pp. 115–116). They go on to discuss and reject a number of attempted resolutions of the putative paradox before suggesting that there is a problem with the rules of inference used to generate (5’). That requires them to reject the general validity of either disjunction elimination, or disjunction introduction, or modus ponens, which are three sound rules of inference in classical logic. They give reasons for favouring the rejection of modus ponens. However, Kolodny and MacFarlane are clearly mistaken in thinking that they have identified a paradox. The description of the case in conjunction with (A) and (1’) entails (2’), (3’), (4’) and thus (5’). But it does not entail (*’). Since (*’) contradicts (5’), we should reject (*’). There appears to be a paradox to Kolodny and MacFarlane only because they

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think (*’) to be obvious. Why do they think that? They offer some explanation in a footnote: We take this conclusion [i.e., (*’)] to be largely independent of one’s background moral views. Although it is obviously ratified by consequentialist norms, which advise us to act so as to maximize expected utility, it seems to us that most reasonable deontological and virtue theories will also ratify it. We acknowledge, however, that there may be some extreme moral views that would reject it. (2010, p. 115, footnote 2)

The most natural consequentialist norm for the case seems to be (1’). Yet, from (1’) in combination with the description of the situation, including the necessary assumption (A), we can validly derive (5’), which contradicts (*’). So, contrary to Kolodny and MacFarlane’s claim, it is not at all obvious (in fact it seems to be plainly false) that (*’) is ratified by consequentialist norms. Further, (1’), which leads to the rejection of (*’), hardly counts as an “extreme moral view.” It is a commonsensical one. It seems that the key to understanding Kolodny and MacFarlane’s curious claim that (*’) is ratified by consequentialist norms is the comma that they place after “consequentialist norms” in the quoted passage. They do not think that maximising expected utility is one among rival consequentialist norms; rather, their assumption is that consequentialist norms (in general) entail maximising expected utility. If we apply the norm that we ought to maximise expected utility to the case of the miners, and naturally identify the relevant utility as lives saved, we obtain the norm: (6’)  we ought in this situation to maximise expected lives saved. That, it should be evident, is different to (1’), so it is hardly surprising that we end up with an inconsistency by grafting expected utility theory on to the description of the situation and the propositions (A) and (1’), which are used to derive (5’). However, a conflict of norms is not the only difficulty in applying expected utility theory to the case. The application of expected utility theory to the miners case involves an assignment of probabilities, which is accomplished as follows. Given our knowledge, it is as plausible that the miners are in shaft A as that they

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Table 3.2  Trapped miners, two shafts; expected utilities Action Block shaft A Block shaft B Block neither shaft

Expected utility Miners in A

Miners in B

Total

0.5 × 10 = 5 0.5 × 0 = 0 0.5 × 9 = 4.5

0.5 × 0 = 0 0.5 × 10 = 5 0.5 × 9 = 4.5

5 5 9

are in shaft B. We convert that equal plausibility, or equal ‘degree of belief,’ into equal probability and say that there is a 0.5 probability that the miners are in shaft A and a 0.5 probability that they are in shaft B. We then calculate the expected utility of each option open to us by summing the expected utilities of each of its alternative outcomes as shown in the following Table 3.2. Consequently, we maximise expected lives saved if and only if we block neither shaft. So, given (6’), (*’) follows. It would, of course, be quite wrong to suppose that the extent to which one finds something plausible (‘likely’ in one sense) is tantamount to how objectively probable given all the relevant facts (‘likely’ in another sense) one thinks it is. That we find it as plausible that the miners are in shaft A as that they are in shaft B, does not imply that we think that, in the total current state of the world, there is a 0.5 objective probability of the miners being in shaft A and a 0.5 objective probability of the miners being in shaft B. We know that, given all the relevant facts, the objective probability of the miners being in shaft A is not 0.5; rather, it is either 1 (if that is where they are) or 0 (if they are in shaft B). Similarly, we know that, given all the relevant facts, the objective probability of the miners being in shaft B is either 0 or 1. In neither case do we think that the objective probability is 0.5. Indeed, it would be absurd to think that, given all the relevant facts, there is a 0.5 objective probability of the miners being in shaft A and a 0.5 objective probability of their being in shaft B. Where in the world would they be if that were the case? The application of expected utility theory to the miners case, therefore, interprets ‘probability’ in a way different to that in which we interpreted it in the case of decision problems involving risk. Typically, it is given a subjective interpretation. It seems equally plausible to us that the miners are in shaft A as that they are in shaft B, so the two states of affairs have

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the same degree of plausibility or degree of belief. The claim is then that degrees of belief behave like probabilities, so that the probability calculus can be applied to them. The resulting subjective probability values of different degrees of belief are then employed in expected utility calculations. One may have doubts about the numerical measurement of degrees of belief and also about whether numerical degrees of belief behave like probabilities (Howson and Urbach 1989, pp.  56–76; Watkins 1970, pp. 195–196). But we can leave those doubts on one side because there is a bigger difficulty. Our decision problem is to discover what we ought to do in the miners case; and what we ought to do depends upon the facts, and crucially upon the fact concerning which shaft the miners are in. The miners being in shaft A and the miners being in shaft B are the same with regard to our subjective probabilities. But with regard to what we ought to do they are crucially different, because one is a fact and the other is not. It would be a fluke if the recommendation we derived from computations conducted using our subjective probabilities turned out to coincide with what we ought to do. In summary, the application of expected utility theory to the miners case employs a norm that conflicts with the commonsense norm that allows us to derive (2’), (3’) and (5’); and, for the missing fact of the case, it substitutes irrelevant facts about our degrees of belief. The recommendation thus derived, namely, (*’), is therefore irrelevant to the decision problem concerning what we ought to do in the actual situation we confront; and it is hardly surprising that (*’) is inconsistent with the conclusion, (5’). But the case of trapped miners, two shafts, by itself, generates no paradox. That dissolution of the Kolodny and MacFarlane’s ‘paradox’ might seem to be too quick, because it is not only expected utility theory that makes (*’) seem true. The maximin principle of game theory, that is, (7), above, does so too. Thus, it may be said, if we block shaft A, there are two alternative outcomes: we save ten lives or we save none. The same applies to blocking shaft B. If we block neither shaft there is only one outcome: we save nine. Since the worst outcome of blocking neither shaft (nine lives saved) is far better than the worst outcomes of each of the other

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options (no lives saved in each case), (7) implies (*’), which contradicts (5’). However, while the maximin principle can be applied to cases of risk, like that considered in the case of gambling and risk, above, its application to cases of ignorance, like the trapped miners, two shafts case, depends upon falsehoods. It is false that blocking shaft A has two alternative outcomes; and the same applies to blocking shaft B. If the miners are in shaft A, there is only one outcome of blocking shaft A, namely, ten lives saved. If the miners are in shaft B, there is only one outcome of blocking shaft A, namely, ten lives lost. Either the miners are in shaft A or they are in shaft B. Either way, there is only one outcome of blocking shaft A, though we do not know what it is. To apply the maximin principle to the case of the miners we must convert our ignorance of what the unique outcome of an action is into a range of supposed alternative outcomes of that action. However, only one of the supposed alternatives is real. It may be easier to see that if we take a ‘God’s-eye view.’ God knows which shaft the miners are in. Suppose that He can see the miners in shaft A. He can also see us deliberating about what to do. We ask ourselves: ‘what happens if we block shaft A?’ God, of course, knows that there is only one outcome: the ten miners are saved. We, in our ignorance, say: ‘if we block shaft A, there are two alternative outcomes: ten lives are saved or no lives are saved.’ God winces. It would be a fluke if we derived from arbitrary falsehoods a truth about what we ought to do. It is worth noticing that, although maximising expected utility and maximin both yield (*’) in the trapped miners, two shafts case, there are other cases of ignorance in which those two consequentialist norms diverge (Allais 1979, pp. 84–95; Watkins 1977, pp. 368–376). Here is an example. trapped miners, ten locations There is a different mine that is about to be flooded. What we know about it is as follows. It contains ten miners. The mine has one shaft branching off into ten different locations. The miners work as a team so they will all be together, but they could be in any one of the ten different locations. If we do not block the shaft, then, no matter which of the ten

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locations the miners are in, the lowest three miners will be killed. If we do block the shaft, the sandbag wall will eventually collapse but, because of the way the resulting debris will divert water within the mine, only the lowest two miners will be killed if the miners are in any of the first nine locations, but all ten miners will be killed if the miners are in the tenth location. We ought to save as many lives as we can. There are no further facts relevant to the decision apart from the one concerning which location the miners are in.

Our options are represented in the following Table 3.3: If the miners are in the tenth location, we ought not to block the shaft; but if the miners are not in the tenth location, we ought to block the shaft. As we do not know which location the miners are in, we do not know what we ought to do. Since it is equally plausible that the miners are in any of the ten locations, the expected utilities of the two options are as follows (Table 3.4): Thus, if we ought to maximise expected utility, we ought to block the shaft. However, the outcome of not blocking the shaft is seven saved, whereas, so far as we know, the option of blocking the shaft may lead to none saved. So, according to the maximin principle, we ought not to block the shaft. This divergence between maximising expected utility and maximin, both of which are consequentialist norms, is worth noticing because it further highlights the falsity of Kolodny and MacFarlane’s assumption that consequentialist norms (in general) entail maximising expected utility. Returning now to the original case, trapped miners, two shafts, it might seem that we have still not dispelled the apparent paradox. After rejecting expected utility theory and the maximin principle, it might still seem that (*’) is true. For, if we block neither shaft, we will save nine, whereas if we block one of the shafts we will either save an extra one life or lose all ten; and it may seem unacceptable to gamble nine lives for the Table 3.3  Trapped miners, ten locations; options Action

Miners in 10th

Miners not in 10th

Do not block the shaft Block the shaft

Seven saved None saved

Seven saved Eight saved

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Table 3.4  Trapped miners, ten locations; expected utilities Action

Expected utility

Do not block the shaft Block the shaft

0.1 × 10 locations × 7 lives = 7 (0.1 × 9 locations × 8 lives) + (0.1 × 1 location × 0 lives) = 7.2

sake of an additional one. However, as we saw earlier, whether or not that seems acceptable depends upon one’s gambling temperament; and, even if gambling temperaments were uniform and everyone would choose not to gamble nine lives for the sake of an extra one, that would be just a psychological fact that would not alter the objective facts that, if the miners are in shaft A, it is worth gambling nine lives by blocking shaft A to save an additional one, and if the miners are in shaft B, it is worth gambling nine lives by blocking shaft B to save an additional one. Of course, since we do not know which location the miners are in, we do not know whether it is worth gambling on blocking shaft A or blocking shaft B, so we do not know what we ought to do. The prevalence of a timid gambling temperament seems to be what explains why many people, even if they do not endorse either expected utility theory or maximin, think it obvious that we should accept (*’) in the trapped miners, two shafts case and (*) in the gambling cases. But it is not obvious; it is false. In those cases, what ought to be done is one of the other two options, but we do not know which. That does not change just because most people, having a timid gambling temperament, would in the face of such ignorance avoid gambling nine for the sake of an extra one. Kolodny and MacFarlane raise an objection to an objectivist dissolution of their putative paradox. They say that the objective ought seems useless in deliberation because “in deciding what we ought to do, we always have limited information, and are in no position to determine what is the best course of action in light of all the facts” (2010, p. 117). However, as we noted earlier, what an agent ought to do depends only on the relevant facts. In the original miners case, the facts that the moon is not a million miles away from the earth, that it is not two million miles away from the earth, and so on, as well as an infinity of other facts about

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a multitude of things, are entirely irrelevant to our decision about what we ought to do. It is true that we can infer validly nothing about what we ought to do in the case without (A), that is, the assumption that, apart from the fact about which shaft the miners are in, there are no further facts relevant to our decision. But, as should be clear from our discussion of the case, that applies to Kolodny and MacFarlane’s subjective ought in (*’), as well as to the objective ought in (1’), (2’) and (3’). If their objection had any force it would apply to their own position as well as to the objectivist one. The conclusion about how we ought to act depends on an assumption (which is not provable but which may have survived testing) that there are no further relevant facts. That is parallel to the situation in physics, where a conclusion about how a body will move depends upon an assumption (which is not provable but which may have survived testing) that there are no further relevant forces acting on the body. Kolodny and MacFarlane offer the objectivist a reply to their objection. Their reply speaks of what we are “justified in judging or asserting,” where such ‘justification’ is explained in terms of subjective probabilities. Since their objection has no force, we need not consider their proffered reply to it, though we can note that it is difficult to see how a consistent objectivist could have any truck with a reply in terms of subjective probabilities. In rejecting their own reply, Kolodny and MacFarlane say “we know with certainty that leaving both shafts open is not the best course of action in light of all the facts” (2010, p. 118). That statement is doubly hubristic. First, they object to objectivism by claiming that we cannot have knowledge in light of all the facts, then they reject their proffered objectivist reply to the objection by claiming to have knowledge in light of all the facts. Second, they deny that even the logical law of modus ponens (which they reject) can be known with certainty, yet they claim that empirical knowledge about the best course of action in the miners case can be known with certainty.

Uncertain Knowledge Consider now a modified version of the original miners case.

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trapped miners, two shafts, additional information One of the mine managers has arrived on the scene. He informs us that he instructed the miners to work in shaft A today, that it is part of the miners’ contract of employment that they obey such an instruction from him, and that there has never been any past occasion on which they have failed to follow such an instruction from him. We carry out some checks to test the theory that this man is who he says he is and that what he has said is true; and the theory passes the tests.

We now reasonably accept-as-knowledge (which, recall Sect. 2.3, is not to accept-as-true) that the miners are in shaft A. We thus infer: (5”)  we ought to block shaft A. However, we realise that our knowledge that the miners are in shaft A is uncertain. There could, for instance, be some unforeseen problem that the miners encountered in shaft A on this day that persuaded them to move into shaft B. Perhaps that is very implausible, but it cannot be ruled out. So, although we reasonably take ourselves to know (5”), we also accept that it may, objectively, not be the case that we ought to block shaft A. We consider testing our knowledge further, but we must decide how to act now or else it will be too late. Of course, our action, whether we block shaft A, shaft B, or neither shaft, will be a test of (5”). If our purpose were simply to test (5”) we could choose any of those options. But here, testing our knowledge is subordinate to our aim of doing what we ought to do, and we would be held to account if we tested (5”) by acting in a way that is inconsistent with what we reasonably take ourselves to know. Indeed, we might be judged adversely by some people if we did not do what we reasonably take ourselves to know that we ought to do, even if, by failing to do what we reasonably take ourselves to know that we ought to do, we happened (because our uncertain knowledge was mistaken) to do what we ought to do and thereby saved the ten miners. In Sect. 2.5 of Chap. 2 we noted a peculiarity in Helen Steward’s defence of free will. She says that every decision is a free act in that we can choose the precise time at which we take it, perhaps a little sooner, perhaps a little later. But when we reasonably take ourselves to know which

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option is best, we have to take that option. She speaks of a “clear case” when she means a case in which, given what the agent reasonably takes himself to know, it is clear that he ought to perform an action of a specific type. In clear cases, it seems to me, we neither actually do have nor should wish to have the capacity to have made a decision opposed to the one we actually make, at any rate when this capacity is construed in the standard libertarian way. It is, I have suggested, questionable whether it is even coherent to suppose we might have such a capacity in a clear case, for it is not obvious on what basis we should regard the agent as having ‘decided’ anything in the alternative possible world, given that the so-called ‘decision’ by hypothesis bears no intelligible relation of any kind to any of the agent’s motivations, beliefs, deliberative trains of thought, etc. But even if it is coherent, it is hard to see how the capacity could be valuable. (Steward 2012, pp. 165–166)

As she insists, the agent is not prevented by antecedent causes from performing an action of an opposite type. So what is it, then, that she thinks prevents him? It seems to be something like the compulsion of Reason of old. But Steward is a contemporary philosopher; so she presumably accepts fallibilism. Why, then, does she accept the old authoritarian certainties? Perhaps because, like contemporary philosophers generally, her espousal of fallibilism (presuming that she does espouse it) has not been thought through. If we take fallibilism seriously (as we should), even when the agent’s knowledge makes a clear-cut case for a particular decision, the agent should recognise that what he counts as knowledge may be mistaken and might, indeed, be shown to be mistaken by the failure of his action in conformity with it. A rational agent always has the option of testing the currently best theory, that is, trying to falsify it. That option, far from amounting “merely to the freedom to go mad,” as Steward puts it (2012, p. 155), is highly valuable because it enables us to put so-far-successful theories to the test of experience. For example, although the most advanced optical theory indicated that it was impossible to construct a telescope, Galileo nevertheless succeeded in constructing one by trial and error (Feyerabend 1975, p.  105, footnote 21); and Thomas Edison’s

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(1847–1931) production of his electric light falsified the unanimous scientific opinion that such a light was impossible (Kuhn 1977, p.  238). Galileo and Edison did not “go mad.” They contributed to epistemic and technological progress by showing that the best available theories of their time were defective. However it would be wrong to describe their decisions as bearing “no intelligible relation of any kind to any of the agent’s motivations, beliefs, deliberative trains of thought, etc.” They wanted, amongst other things, to falsify a dominant theory. Given our fallibility, whatever the dominant theory is, it is always possible that it will eventually be falsified, so attempts to falsify it should not ipso facto be labelled “mad.” In a clear case, then, when one option is clearly the best given the state of our knowledge, a rational agent may nevertheless choose an alternative option. We must therefore reject the “principle of rationality” commonly accepted, in one version or another, by contemporary philosophers: Rationality requires of you that, if you believe you ought to do something, you intend to do it (Broome 2013, p. 34); Necessarily, if one is rational, then, if one judges ‘I ought to φ’, one also intends to φ (Wedgwood 2007, p. 32); perform the action judged best on the basis of all available relevant reasons. (Davidson 1982, p. 41)

A rational agent, recognising his fallibility, may decide to test his belief or judgement about what he ought to do or what action is best; that is, he may try to falsify it by acting against it.

Blame Peter Graham (2010, p. 96) discusses the following case: doctor Jill’s patient, John, has a very painful, nonfatal disease. Jill has three drugs: A, B, and C. A would completely cure him; B would only partially cure him; and C would kill him. But, though Jill knows that B would only

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partially cure John, her evidence leaves it open which of A and C would cure him and which would kill him.

The case, it should be noted, is structurally similar to the two cases of ignorance, gambling and ignorance and trapped miners, two shafts, discussed above. On the assumption that there are no further facts relevant to the decision, then Jill ought to prescribe A, but she does not know that. What she does know is that either she ought to prescribe A or she ought to prescribe C. So she knows that she ought not to prescribe B. Despite that, Graham contends that it is obvious that Jill would be morally blameworthy if she failed to prescribe B.  His reasons are as follows. The morally conscientious person has two aims: to do what she ought to do; and to avoid doing what she ought not to do. In situations in which she has more than two options, those two aims may pull in different directions. Some things that she ought not to do are far worse than other things that she ought not to do, so she will be more concerned not to do the former than she is not to do the latter. Jill does not know which option, A, B or C, will best satisfy her two goals. She knows that prescribing B does not best satisfy her two goals, because she knows that she ought not to prescribe B. But she also knows that prescribing B satisfies her two goals far better than does another option she would have to risk taking if she attempted to take the option that best satisfies both her goals. Thus, if Jill fails to prescribe B, she will not be morally conscientious; therefore she will be morally blameworthy. So, while Jill ought to prescribe A, she will be morally blameworthy if she does not prescribe B (2010, pp. 96–103). Graham’s reasoning can be applied to the original case of the miners, trapped miners, two shafts, as follows. We do not know which option will best satisfy our two goals, of doing what we ought and avoiding doing what we ought not, because we do not know which of the three options will result in ten lives being saved. We know that blocking neither shaft will not best satisfy our two goals, because we know that we ought not to do it. But we also know that blocking neither shaft satisfies our two goals far better than does an option we would risk taking if we attempted to do what we ought. Therefore, if we do not block neither

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shaft we will not be morally conscientious; we will thus be morally blameworthy. So the miners case involves no paradox but, while we know that we ought not to block neither shaft, we would nevertheless be morally blameworthy if we did not block neither shaft. Graham’s approach suffers from defects similar to those of the maximin principle, of which it is a variant. We know from the description of the doctor case that, if Jill attempts to cure John completely by prescribing A, then she will succeed: there is no risk that prescribing A will kill him. It is thus false that if Jill attempts to cure John completely, she risks killing him. So, if Graham follows most philosophers in assuming that knowledge implies truth, then his claim that Jill knows that, if she attempts to cure John completely, she risks killing him, is false. Perhaps Graham would claim only that Jill reasonably takes herself to know that, if she attempts to cure John completely, she risks killing him; and thus that she reasonably takes herself to know that prescribing B satisfies her two aims far better than does another option she would have to risk taking if she attempted to take the option that best satisfies both her goals. He may say that Jill would be morally blameworthy if she does not take the option that she reasonably takes herself to know to be the option that best satisfies her two aims. Unfortunately, it is not the case that Jill reasonably takes herself to know that prescribing A to John risks killing him. She has not tested that theory at all. She has merely posited a risk because she is ignorant of the outcome. Why does Jill not test her theory that prescribing A risks killing John? We have to assume, to maintain the integrity of the example, that she does not have the time or other means to carry out a test; otherwise she ought to do that and she would be held to account for not doing it. How could she test her theory, if she had the means? She could perform or commission a chemical analysis of drug A. That would show that there was no risk of A killing John. So, if she did test her theory, it would be falsified. Consequently, it is false that Jill reasonably takes herself to know that, by attempting to cure John completely, she risks killing him. Graham’s argument for his claim that Jill would be morally blameworthy if she failed to prescribe B is unsound. Graham’s reasoning fails in a similar way in application to the miners case. Recall the God’s-eye view (not available to us in the situation) that

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shows the miners to be in shaft A. It is not the case that we know that attempting to do what we ought (save ten lives) by blocking shaft A risks doing something that we ought not to do (losing ten lives) that is far worse than blocking neither shaft (which will lose one life). As God can see, blocking shaft A involves no such risk, and we have no hypothesis about the matter that has survived severe testing. We are simply ignorant of whether blocking shaft A will save ten or kill ten. Despite the failure of Graham’s argument for his claim about moral blameworthiness, is his claim nevertheless true? It does not seem so. If Jill prescribes A for John, she cures him. She has done what she ought to have done. She is not morally blameworthy for putting John’s life at risk, because there was no risk that drug A would kill John. However, given that she did not know whether drug A would kill or cure John, is she morally blameworthy for gambling John’s life for the sake of his improved health? It does not seem so, because the gamble was worth taking: it paid off. If Jill prescribes C for John, she kills him, so she does what she ought not to have done, and she does something that is far worse than only partially curing him. But it does not seem that she is morally blameworthy for killing him, because she was trying to cure him completely. Of course, given her ignorance, she was gambling John’s life for the sake of the difference between curing him partially and curing him completely. However, whether or not such a gamble seems reasonable depends upon one’s gambling temperament, which is a subjective matter, and which happens to vary from person to person. One cannot be morally blamed for having a different gambling temperament when each such temperament is as subjective as any other. Consequently, contra Graham, Jill is not morally blameworthy if she does not prescribe B.  Is she morally blameworthy if she prescribes B? In that case, she not only does what she ought not to do; she also knows that it is what she ought not to do. However, she does it because she does not want to gamble John’s life for the sake of his improved health. That is a judgement that many, but not all, reasonable people will share, given the prevalence of a timid gambling temperament. She is not morally blameworthy. The same applies in the case of trapped miners, two shafts: although two options are such that we ought not to take them, we will not be morally blameworthy whichever choice we make, so long as our intentions

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are good. If we block shaft A and save ten lives, we do not put the miners’ lives at risk; and although we gamble nine lives for the sake of saving an extra one, that is a gamble worth taking, because it pays off. If we block shaft B and kill the ten miners, we do something wrong. But we are not morally blameworthy, because we are trying to save all ten. If our bold gamble seems wrong to some people who have a timid gambling temperament, that is only because they mistakenly regard their subjective temperament as representing an objective fact. If we block neither shaft and thus let one miner drown, we do what we ought not to do; and we know that it is what we ought not to do. But we are not morally blameworthy if we do it to avoid gambling nine lives for the sake of saving an extra one. Many, but not all, reasonable people will concur in avoiding that gamble. It should not be concluded that no one is ever morally blameworthy for anything. If Jill had prescribed B to John because she did not want him to be fully cured, she would have done something wrong and been morally blameworthy; and similarly if she had prescribed C to John because she was trying to kill him. If Jill had prescribed A to John in hope that it would kill him, then she did not do something wrong, but she is still morally blameworthy. In trapped miners, two shafts, if we had blocked neither shaft because that way we could ensure at least one miner drowned, we would have done something wrong and been morally blameworthy. If we had blocked shaft B and killed ten because we were trying to kill ten, we would have done something wrong and been morally blameworthy. If we had blocked shaft A and saved ten but were trying to kill ten, we would not have done something wrong but we would have been morally blameworthy. Moral blameworthiness depends upon intentions. However, intentions are often difficult to discover. So we often hold people to account whether or not they are morally blameworthy. The cases just considered are ones in which the agents are ignorant of what they ought to do. There are plenty of cases in which agents reasonably take themselves to know what they ought to do, but they do not do it. Whether or not they are morally blameworthy, they will normally be held to account for adverse impacts upon other people. Consider again the case of trapped miners, two shafts, additional information, in which

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we reasonably accept-as-knowledge that the miners are in shaft A. Since our knowledge is not certain, it may be falsified when we act on it, resulting in ten dead miners. So, rationally, we have a choice between assuming our accepted knowledge is true and assuming that (despite having survived testing) it is false (Frederick 2013b, pp. 66–70). So we may, rationally, either block shaft A or not do so. But, socially, if we do not block shaft A, we will be held to account: there will be some social sanction, probably including a legal one. What we might call ‘legal blameworthiness’ is intended to impose on actions a uniformity that makes life more predictable and prevents wrongdoers escaping penalties by claiming to have had (publicly undiscoverable) intentions that would render them not morally blameworthy. In the original trapped miners, two shafts case we do not reasonably take ourselves to know what we ought to do, and neither does Jill in the doctor case; so neither we nor Jill we can be held to account for failing to do what we reasonably take ourselves to know that we ought to do. I would argue that, in both cases, whichever decision is taken, the agent should not face any social or legal sanction, for the same reasons that, assuming good intentions, none of the alternative decisions would be morally blameworthy. The agents should be given the benefit of the doubt concerning their intentions.

Arbitrary Decisions Implicit in the preceding discussion is a distinction between two quite different questions: (a) what ought we to do? (b) what shall we do? We have considered several cases in which we cannot answer question (a) but we still need to answer question (b). Accordingly, for such cases, we need some way of answering question (b) that does not presuppose, or supply, an answer to question (a). How can we answer (b) in such cases?

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We could flip a coin or roll some dice; and sometimes we do. Alternatively, we could make use of expected utility theory or the maximin principle and then decide to do whatever the chosen method recommends. But why should we pick one of those methods rather than another? As noted above, expected utility and maximin agree on trapped miners, two shafts but disagree on trapped miners, ten locations. Further, in more complicated cases, involving a number of different ‘utilities’ to be realised or many more relevant unknown facts, either of those methods may be applied to the case in a number of different ways, and the choice of one of those ways rather than its rivals is often quite arbitrary. So one may, in effect, end up rolling some dice to decide which method, or which of the many ways of applying a chosen method, to use (Simon 1997, pp. 264–265 and passim). The advantage of resorting in such cases to recognised methods to answer question (b), even though the choice of method is arbitrary, is that it enables us to give a reasoned and specious defence of our decision. That is an advantage worth having if we are liable to be held to account for our decision. But it is an advantage only because other people, particularly those who may hold us to account, are liable to be duped by such chicanery. It seems to be a characteristically human failing to project our ignorance on to the world as real possibilities, and to project relative plausibilities (given our background assumptions) on to the world as probabilities. So long as people generally are beguiled by such prestidigitation, its arbitrariness is disguised, and an answer to question (b) might even be passed off as an answer to question (a). In such circumstances, one who frankly admits in a particular case that there is no way of knowing what ought to be done, and that any way of deciding what shall be done is essentially arbitrary, is liable to be thought mad or bad. Why are people beguiled by such chicanery? The explanation is presumably complex; but perhaps cognitive dissonance is at least part of it. If we cannot answer (a) but still have to answer (b), then we will end up doing something that we do not know to be what we ought to do; indeed, it may even be what we know we ought not to do, as in the cases discussed above. Can we, obviously good people, be doing something even though we do not know whether it is what we ought to be doing? Can we, decent souls, be doing what we know we ought not to be doing? Surely not.

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There must be another sense of ‘ought’ in which what we are doing is precisely what we ought to do. Hence is born the ‘subjective ought.’ The subjective ought is especially important where we know that what we are doing is what we, objectively, ought not to do, as in trapped miners, two shafts, if we block neither shaft, or in doctor, if Jill prescribes B. So the essentially arbitrary methods that enable us to answer (b) with a reasoned case, rather than an undisguised roll of a die, are touted as ways of discovering the subjective ought and are important to us because they enable us to avoid admitting that, due simply to unavoidable ignorance, we often do what we know we ought not to do or, at least, what we do not reasonably take ourselves to know that we ought to do. To repeat what was said above, there are plenty of cases in which we can reasonably take ourselves to know what we ought to do. In the miners examples, if we had known which shaft or location the miners were in, we would have known what we ought to do; and similarly for Jill in the doctor case and Bill in the second gambling case. Most of the decisions we take are either habitual, or involve routine application of settled rules or policies, or require minimal information-gathering for us to discover what we ought to do. Further, where we are dealing with objective probabilities and are taking the same type of decision repeatedly, as with actuarial decisions in the insurance industry, then, although we might not know what we ought to do in any particular case, we may know that by maximising expected utility we are very likely to achieve better overall results in a long sequence of similar cases than by using any alternative method, which may make maximising expected utility a reasonable bet. Finally, as already acknowledged, even when we are mistaken or ignorant about what we ought to do we need not be morally blameworthy for doing wrong if our intentions are good, so long as our mistake or ignorance about what we ought to do was not a result of shoddy behaviour on our part. The gambling cases, trapped miners, two shafts, and doctor involve a decision between three options, one of which has a very good result, one of which has a very bad result and the other of which has a reasonably good result. We know which option has the reasonably good result. We ought to pick the option which has the very good result; but we do not know which of the other two options that is. Given our

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ignorance we have a choice between doing what we ought not to do but obtaining a reasonably good result, or gambling that reasonably good result in the hope that we end up doing what we ought to do, thereby obtaining the very good result, while fearing that we will end up doing something that we ought not to do, which will give us the very bad result. Which way we are inclined to choose depends upon our gambling temperament, though our actual choice may be different if we act out of character. There is no objectively correct gambling temperament. There is no further genuine guidance available. In consequence, in those types of cases, our decision about what we shall do is essentially arbitrary. So long as our ignorance is not due to our doing things that we ought not to have done, or to our failing to do things that we ought to have done, and so long as our intentions are good, we will not be blameworthy whichever of the three options we take. I guess that many, perhaps most, people are at ease with making arbitrary decisions from time to time. That does not, however, seem to be true of theorists. It is perhaps also not true of less intellectually inclined people in situations where the stakes are high, as in life-and-death cases like those of the trapped miners and Jill the doctor. Under such circumstances they are liable to look to the theorists for help. The theorists’ response to their own horror of arbitrary decision-­ making is to try to pull a rabbit out of the hat, to try to find a way of discovering what we ought to do in situations where we cannot know what we ought to do. They have come up with various techniques, two of which we surveyed above, namely, expected utility theory and the maximin principle. The techniques inevitably involve arbitrariness or falsehood, because they are trying to do what cannot be done. In cases of a single decision involving risk, expected utility theory offers a method which may give a reasonable solution to the different problem of making innumerable risky decisions of the same type; and the maximin principle offers an answer to the different question of how a person with a timid gambling temperament would be inclined to choose; both of which fail to answer the question of what we ought to do. In cases of a decision involving ignorance of a key fact, expected utility theory offers a calculation based on the plausibilities we assign to rival propositions, while the maximin principle offers a recommendation based on alternatives that

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are not real; both of which are irrelevant to the problem of what we ought to do, which depends on the facts of the case. Like the prestidigitators, the theorists are creating illusions; but unlike the prestidigitators, the theorists seem to be taken in by their own illusions. In the trapped miners, two shafts case, Kolodny and MacFarlane see that (*’), the recommendation of expected utility theory, contradicts (5’), which is logically implied by the facts of the case, given (A), that there are no further facts relevant to the decision, and given (1’), the commonsense consequentialist norm that we ought to maximise lives saved. However, rather than acknowledging the irrelevance of expected utility theory to the problem, they declare a paradox and propose to resolve it by giving up the central logical rule of modus ponens. Graham avoids going down that road because he avoids paradox by interpreting the maximin principle not as identifying which action ought to be done but, rather, as identifying the only action that would not be morally blameworthy. However, his argument that the alternative actions would be morally blameworthy itself depends upon taking falsehoods to be true, since that is what is required if the maximin principle is to be applied to the case; and his claims about moral blameworthiness seem false in any case. I recommend that subjective probability and the subjective ought be consigned to the dustbin. We must, however, make a place for the distinction between facts and opinions. First, we must not conflate objective probabilities with our theories about what the objective probabilities are. For example, in the gambling cases we assumed that Anne’s unbiased coin had, given the total current state of the world, an objective probability of 0.5 of turning up heads and an objective probability of 0.5 of turning up tails. It might have been, though, that the actual objective probabilities were a little smaller in each case because there was a small probability that the unbiased coin, when flipped, would land on its edge and stand upright. If that is so, then our view or theory about the objective probabilities of the unbiased coin were false. But false views about objective probabilities are not the same as subjective probabilities. The latter are an artefact intended to adapt expected utility theory to cases that involve ignorance or uncertainty. Second, we must not conflate what we actually ought to do and our theories about what we actually ought to do. If, in the original miners case, we had blocked shaft B because that is where we

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thought the miners were, we would have been doing what we thought we actually ought to do. Later discovering ten dead miners in shaft A, we would have learned that our theory about what we actually ought to do was false. But a false view about what we actually ought to do in no sense tells us what we ought to do; it therefore does not tell us what we subjectively ought to do. The subjective ought is a fiction about what we ought to do which is introduced even when we know that the action to which the fiction is ascribed is actually what we ought not to do.

3.5 Rationality in the Round We began this chapter by noting that rationality is connected with knowledge and reasoning. Aristotle divided reasoning between theoretical and practical; and he divided theoretical reasoning into deductive and inductive. That classification survived through the centuries and is still with us. Since ancient times there have been sceptical philosophers who employed reasoning for criticism; but the dominant trend in philosophy has been authoritarian. Reason (with a capital ‘R’) has been conceived either as a force which compels, provided it is not overridden by forces of irrationality, or as a set of clear commands to which agents, if they are rational, willingly submit. Further, reasoning has standardly been thought to be concerned with proof or justification; and the rational agent has been taken to be one who is justified in his commitments, whether those commitments are theoretical (theories, knowledge-claims or beliefs) or practical (actions, decisions or desires). We have seen that the traditional edifice, though still entrenched in philosophy, is a house of cards. Deductive reasoning is not a matter of being compelled by Reason or submitting oneself to Reason’s clear dictates. It is a matter of conjecturing what logically follows from what and then testing one’s conjecture or, at least, being willing to test the conjecture if queries arise. The laws of logic are not imprinted on our minds; they are to be discovered by us through conjecture and criticism. ‘Inductive reasoning’ is a misnomer. There is no valid form of reasoning from particular statements to universal ones, except in cases where the reasoning is deductively valid (as in cases where the number of

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particulars is known to be finite or in so-called mathematical induction). In cases that are described by philosophers as ‘inductive reasoning,’ the agent is not guessing what logically follows from a set of particular statements, so he is not reasoning at all. What he is doing is guessing what explains the phenomena described by the particular statements. If he is serious about trying to understand the world, he will then test his conjecture by subjecting it to criticism including, where possible, empirical criticism, that is, attempts to falsify the conjecture. It is only at that point of evaluating the conjecture that reasoning—deductive reasoning— comes into play. Aristotle’s examples of practical reasoning are curious. Some are examples of valid reasoning, except that he turns the conclusion into an action, such as, “every man ought to walk, one is a man oneself: straightway one walks” (Aristotle 2004, 7). The conclusion should be ‘one ought to walk.’ In other examples, the reasoning is not valid: “I ought to create a good, a house is good: straightway I make a house” (Aristotle 2004, 7). It is not the case that ‘I ought to create a house’ follows from the two premises. The argument would be valid if it contained the additional premise: ‘the only kind of good is a house.’ But that proposition is false. Aristotle’s agent seems to be acting impulsively: I ought to create a good, so I’ll create the first good that comes to mind. Perversely, it is that defective type of example that has been seized upon by recent philosophers as the paradigm of ‘valid’ practical reasoning (for example, Anscombe 2005, pp. 110–121, 134; Davidson 1982, p. 31). A piece of practical reasoning is valid if and only if it is deductively valid. Recognition that practical reasoning is deductive reasoning may seem to reduce practical reasoning to theoretical reasoning. But we must distinguish reasoning and arguments. An argument is an abstract entity consisting of a number of (abstract) propositions related as premises and conclusion. Reasoning is a process in which agents engage; it involves the use of arguments. A valid argument transmits truth from premises to conclusion, and it thus transmits falsity from conclusion to the conjunction of the premises. A piece of reasoning is valid if it employs only valid arguments. A practical argument is one that concerns how an agent should act. So we can distinguish between practical arguments and other

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arguments; and we might call the others ‘theoretical arguments.’ Practical arguments do not reduce to theoretical arguments, or vice versa. However, once we recognise that the process of deductive reasoning is not automatic or compelled or imperiously demanded, we see that theoretical reasoning is a species of practical reasoning. • In deductive reasoning we have an aim: to find out what logically follows from a set of premises. We try to achieve our aim by making a guess and then deciding whether to accept, reject or test it; and if we decide to test, we have some other decisions to take. • In our empirical attempts to understand the world, we set ourselves the aim of improving our theories. We try to achieve our aim by attempting to explain some things that are unexplained by currently accepted theories. We do that by conjecturing a new theory, deducing its consequences and checking whether they are consistent with themselves and with other statements, including observation statements, that we have decided to accept. If we discover an inconsistency between our conjecture and an accepted observation statement, we have to decide which to amend and how. We compare our conjecture with its currently accepted rival, and perhaps also with other new conjectures, and we construct an argument which logically implies a conclusion about the comparative merits of the theories. • In reasoning that employs practical arguments an agent is trying to decide what to do. If he has a normative principle and sufficient ­information about his situation he can deduce a conclusion about what he ought to do. Given our fallibility, he must then decide whether to act on his conclusion or to test it by acting against it. In situations in which there are some relevant gaps in his (fallible) knowledge, and in cases where there are genuine risks (objective probabilities), the agent cannot know what he ought to do, so he must decide what he shall do; and the decision cannot be anything other than a guess. Thus, all reasoning is practical reasoning in that it is geared to finding suitable means to our adopted aims; and it is practical reasoning in that it makes use of the abstract entities that are deductive arguments. However,

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while all reasoning is practical reasoning, we recently noted that it is not the case that all arguments are practical arguments. A valid (deductive) argument transmits truth from premises to conclusion but we can never know for sure that the premises are true, so no valid conclusion is ever justified by its premises. We cannot use arguments to justify or prove, because that involves an infinite regress; but we can use valid arguments to criticise by deriving from a proposition a conclusion that we find unacceptable. The unacceptable proposition may be a contradiction, as in a reductio ad absurdum, or it may be a proposition that contradicts another proposition that we are reluctant to give up, such as an accepted observation statement, or it may be a proposition concerning what we ought to do that we find abhorrent. Thus, a rational agent who is engaged in reasoning is engaged in criticism and comparative evaluation rather than justification (Frederick 2015). We therefore reject the proposition that a rational agent is one whose theories and actions are justified. We would, however, be mistaken in therefore inferring that a rational agent is one who has subjected all his theories and actions to reasoned criticism. We noted in Sect. 3.3 that we cannot reject all our inherited theories and then start from scratch: we can criticise any part of our inherited framework but only by presupposing (for the time being) other parts. That applies to action too. Much of our behaviour is habitual; and when we subject some of our habits to critical review, there are many other habits that go (for the time being) unquestioned. In addition, we often act unreflectively in a more or less arbitrary way because we do not have the time to think about what to do (Frederick 2010). That is especially so in emergency situations, where taking the time to reason would be irrational in that it would prevent one from achieving one’s aim. Indeed, it is actually impossible for us to reason about every act we perform because, as noted in Sect. 3.2, we would thereby be involved in an infinite regress, because reasoning itself involves decisions to act in one way rather than another. On the other hand, it seems to be instrumentally irrational to abjure reasoning about how to act. The Middle Ages were a period in which people were remarkably subservient to tradition and to that extent avoided reasoning about how to act; but it was also a period of enduring squalor. In contrast the progress of modern times is linked, amongst

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other things, to the readiness to challenge traditions and to consider and evaluate alternative options and their consequences in order to find better ways of acting (Popper 1966, vol. II, pp. 241–244). Thus, some inclination to reason about options does seem to be a requirement of instrumental rationality. Popper’s critical rationalism is summarised in the following principle: a rational person should hold all his views open to reasoned criticism and, if such criticism shows any of those views to be faulty, he should be prepared to replace the faulty views with better ones (Popper 1966, vol. II, pp. 224–240). That principle is itself to be held open to reasoned criticism and potential replacement (Popper 1966, vol. II, addendum I, sects. 7–11; Bartley 1984, pp. 96–107, 112–123). Since, on Popper’s account, the views we hold as a result of rational enquiry are views that are held as a consequence of decisions that we make, critical rationalism can be expressed in terms of acts. For example, Arthur Eddington’s (1882–1944) eclipse experiment in 1919 showed that general relativity was superior to Newton’s theory, so if we had retained Newton’s theory rather than accepting relativity theory, we would not have been acting appropriately to our aim of getting better theories. Instrumental rationality required that we replace Newton’s theory with general relativity. Unlike contemporary philosophers, Popper is concerned with theories rather than beliefs: when we accept a theory, we accept it tentatively (until we can replace it with a better one), so we might not believe it. Consequently, characterising theoretical rationality in terms of acts does not commit us to doxastic voluntarism (the claim that we can decide what to believe). I have argued in favour of doxastic voluntarism elsewhere (Frederick 2013a); but what I say here is independent of whether doxastic voluntarism is true. The formulation of theoretical reason in terms of acts allows us to subsume theoretical rationality under practical rationality. We can, then, affirm the following relationship between instrumental rationality and reasoning. An agent is instrumentally rational if and only if he holds all of his actual and potential acts open to reasoned criticism and is ready to revise his plans for action if criticism shows an actual or potential act of his to be defective. Thus, there is no requirement for a rational agent always to reason before he acts or even to subject all of his past acts to reasoned evaluation. But criticism of a past act of his that

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shows it to be worse than an alternative act that he could have performed will provide a lesson for the future and should thus influence his future policy. And criticism of an act he is considering performing that shows it to be less suited to his aim than an alternative act that is available to him should be taken into account in his decision about how to act. Therefore, a rational agent is one who acts appropriately to his aims and who is, in principle, ready to take account of, evaluate. and even seek out, argued criticism in revising his future plans. This applies to theoretical reasoning as well as to practical reasoning because the aim of the former is to improve our theories and thus to take action to revise our theoretical framework and to accept into it theories that can be shown by argument to be better than their currently available rivals. It applies to deductive reasoning because the aim there is to accept a conclusion as following from a set of premises, testing for validity as appropriate. It should be evident that the account of deductive reasoning that I offered in Sect. 3.2 is an extension or adaptation of Popper’s account of the growth of knowledge, summarised in Sect. 3.3. According to the latter, we guess a solution to a problem of explanation, then we test the guess in various ways, including how well it stands up to observation statements. We test rival guesses in similar ways. Our guessed explanatory theory, just like its rivals, is not a guess about what follows from a set of premises. So in making the guess we are not engaged in reasoning. Yet we inescapably make use of deductive reasoning in testing and evaluating the various guessed explanatory theories: we derive testable consequences from them (in combination with background knowledge); we infer, when we discover an inconsistency between a theory and an accepted statement (possibly an observation statement), that at least one of the conflicting statements is false; and we derive, from the results of our criticism and testing of rival theories, in conjunction with our identified properties of good theories, some conclusions about which theories are better than others in which respects. In carrying out our tests and evaluations we have to make numerous revisable decisions concerning which observation statements to accept, which theories to accept as background knowledge, which negative test results to regard as falsifications of a theory (rather than of background knowledge), and which theory, if any, to rate better than the others we have tested. And in our guesses and our

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decisions we make use of our fallible intuitions. Thus Popper’s account of the improvement of our theories, contains six elements: guesses, deductive reasoning, tests, fallible intuitions, decisions and values. In Sect. 3.2 we analysed one element, deductive reasoning, into a combination of some of the others, namely, guesses (specifically, guesses about validity, rather than guesses about explanation), tests, fallible intuitions and decisions. Popper did not offer this account of reasoning himself but it is a natural extension of his views on the growth of knowledge; and he took a step toward it when he said that a rational agent observes the rules of logic because he finds them to be successful (Popper 1972, p. 206). Thus, the rational agent freely submits to a set of norms for reasoning; but, unlike on the authoritarian view, he keeps the norms under review and is ready to replace them with better ones. Finally, a distinction is sometimes made between objective and subjective rationality. On the instrumental principle, an agent is rational if and only if he acts in a way appropriate to his ends. An agent’s objective ends are those that are assigned to him ontologically, by his nature; that is, they are his absolute needs (see Chap. 4). An agent’s subjective ends are those which he makes his aims. Given an agent’s fallibility, it is possible that his subjective ends are different to his objective ends and may even undermine them. An action is objectively an appropriate means to a given end (whether subjective or objective) if and only if it is in fact an appropriate means to achieving that end, whether or not the agent thinks it is. An action is subjectively a suitable means to achieving a given end if and only if the agent thinks the action is a suitable means to achieving that end. We can therefore distinguish four ways in which an action may be instrumentally rational: • • • •

it is objectively an appropriate means to the agent’s objective ends; it is objectively an appropriate means to the agent’s subjective ends; the agent thinks it an appropriate means to his subjective ends; the agent thinks it an appropriate means to his objective ends.

It seems that there will be little use for the first kind of instrumental rationality and even less use for the fourth kind; but there are many situations in which it is worth distinguishing the second and third kinds. I did not

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trouble to make the distinction within the above discussion, which was complicated enough without it. But there may be many situations in which it is helpful or necessary to distinguish between the second and third kinds of instrumental rationality when applying what is said above in the solution or discussion of problems.

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Russell, Bertrand. 1959. My Philosophical Development. London: George Allen and Unwin. Ryle, Gilbert. 1971. Knowing How and Knowing That. In His Collected Papers 2, 212–225. London: Hutchinson. Searle, John. 1980. Minds, Brains, and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417–457. Simon, Herbert. 1997. Administrative Behavior. 4th ed. New  York: The Free Press. Sowden, Lanning. 1984. The Inadequacy of Bayesian Decision Theory. Philosophical Studies 45 (3): 293–313. Steward, Helen. 2012. A Metaphysics for Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swift, Jonathan. 2005. Gulliver’s Travels. Ed. Claude Rawson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turing, Alan. 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 59 (236): 433–460. Watkins, John. 1970. Imperfect Rationality. In Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, ed. Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi, 167–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1977. Towards A Unified Decision Theory: A Non-Bayesian Approach. In Foundational Problems in the Special Sciences, ed. Robert E. Butts and Jaako Hintikka, 345–379. Dordrecht: Reidel. Wedgwood, Ralph. 2007. The Nature of Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Alfred, and Bertrand Russell. 1927. Principia Mathematica. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williamson, Timothy. 2006. Conceptual Truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 80 (1): 1–41. Zahar, Elie. 1973. Why Did Einstein’s Programme Supersede Lorentz’s? (II). British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24 (3): 223–262.

4 Persons and Animals

4.1 Persons In the view of Immanuel Kant, humans are distinguished from all other animals in that they have self-consciousness and rationality: The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person—i.e., through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. (Kant 2007, p. 239 [7: 127])

We must note in passing that the final clause does not state Kant’s considered view, which was that persons have an obligation to themselves not to treat animals cruelly because such treatment of animals weakens a person’s feelings of sympathy with other persons and thus risks undermining right behaviour (Kant 1996, pp. 192–193 [6: 443]). We must also take issue with the rest of the passage, on two counts. First, recent research has indicated that highly social animals, such as chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, and even magpies, do have at least a © The Author(s) 2020 D. Frederick, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2_4

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rudimentary form of self-consciousness, in that they seem able to recognise themselves in a mirror; and dolphins appear to have awareness of their own bodies, some level of introspection, a sense of agency, and awareness of the agency of others, as evidenced by their ability to imitate human actions when signalled to do so (Herman 2012). Human beings have a more highly developed capacity for self-consciousness; but at which point on the scale of self-consciousness does personhood emerge? Second, instrumental rationality, that is, choosing appropriate means to ends, is common amongst non-human animals, including those which lack self-consciousness, as shown by the range of animals, including fish, crustaceans and insects, that use tools (Visalberghi et al. 2017). Further, use of tools is not the only way in which instrumental rationality is evident in non-human animals. A dog may walk across the room to her sitting master and rest her head on his thigh. He knows that she wants a fuss, so he starts to stroke her. When he stops, she raises her paw and digs her claws quite gently into his thigh. He knows that she is asking for continued petting. So he obliges. The dog wants a fuss; her two forms of behaviour are her means to that end. She exhibits instrumental rationality. Similarly, when a cat is hungry it will search for food. Even a spider can try out alternative strategies to capture its prey. Helen Steward describes how a Portia spider, after failing to kill its prey (another spider) by different ways of creeping across the web of its prey, undertakes a lengthy detour, first moving away from her prey and around a large projection on the rock surface, losing sight of her prey along the way. About an hour later, she appears again, positioned now above the web on a small overhanging piece of rock. She now lowers herself down through the air, arrives level with the resident spider, and suddenly swings in to grab it, sinking her poison-injecting fangs into the victim. (Steward 2012, pp. 108–109)

How we should describe such cases is a difficult question. It seems that the animal’s need for something prompts a goal-directed behaviour that tends to secure what it needs. The behaviour may be instinctive or it may be learned; but the animal itself does not represent things as ends and means. For instance, it seems implausible that the dog entertains thoughts

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such as ‘laying my head on my master’s thigh will get me some petting’ or ‘digging my claws into his thigh will prompt him to stroke me.’ That seems implausible because it would attribute a high level of self-­ consciousness to dogs, cats and even spiders. Kant does not say explicitly what he means by ‘rationality’ but from what he does say it seems that he regards a rational agent as one who is not simply instrumentally rational but who also employs arguments in that she tests precepts for inconsistency and rejects those that she finds inconsistent (Kant 1948, pp.  67–68, 83–96 [4: 402–403, 420–434]). Thus, on the scale of rationality, it is, for Kant, the ability to use arguments that distinguishes persons from other beings that are capable of instrumental rationality. Kant thought that being a person also required moral responsibility: An action is called a deed insofar as it comes under obligatory laws and hence insofar as the subject, in doing it, is considered in terms of the freedom of his choice … [S]uch an action … can be imputed to him … A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. (Kant 1996, p. 16 [6: 223])

What Kant appears to be saying is that a person is a creature with an awareness of right and wrong and the ability to act freely in the one way or the other. She thus has the obligation to do what is right and to avoid doing what is wrong and she can be held to account for her actions. Since she has an apprehension of what she ought to do she will, as a consequence, have self-consciousness. Since she can do what she ought only by choosing appropriate means to that end she will, as a consequence, exemplify instrumental rationality; and since her capacity for knowledge of what she ought to do rests upon her ability to argue, she will also exemplify critical rationality. So, self-consciousness and rationality are properties of persons because they are implied by moral agency. That some non-human animals have self-consciousness makes them similar to persons. That non-human animals generally exemplify instrumental rationality makes them similar to persons. But neither of those attributes, and not even their conjunction, make non-human animals persons, because they lack moral agency and

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thus also the higher levels of self-consciousness and rationality that are implied by it. It would be cruel to hold non-human animals to account for violating the rights of persons, because they have no understanding of such things. Such understanding, it seems, is found only in humans, at least on this planet. Kant was, of course, an exponent of the dogmatic or authoritarian conception of rationality (see Chap. 3, Sects. 3.1 and 3.3). Although in his ethics he emphasised the use of critical arguments to falsify a proposal for action, he thought that the principal use of arguments is to justify. Indeed, he thought not only that we could have certain knowledge of right and wrong but also that he had proved the moral precepts commonly accepted in the European cultures of his time (Kant 1948, pp.  68–70 [4: 403–405]). Fallibilism enjoins us to reformulate Kant’s insight. A person is a being who has an appreciation that there are actions that she ought to perform and other actions from which she ought to refrain, even if she does not know which actions are which. She therefore has self-consciousness. Since ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ a person has free will, which means that it is up to her which actions, of those available to her, she performs. If she is rational, she will hold all her theories, including those about what she ought to do, open to question and she will be prepared to replace any of those theories with a contrary theory if reasoned criticism shows the latter to be better. Of course, she might not be rational, yet still be a person. Being a person entails only the capacity for rationality. That fallibilistic restatement of Kant’s theory of personhood seems to be open to objections. A person’s capacity for rationality enables her not only to question whether accepted moral theories are true but also to question whether any moral theory can be true. She may come to accept that all moral theories are false, because moral properties are not, or cannot be, exemplified in the real world (Mackie 1977; Joyce 2001). She may therefore deny that there are actions that she ought to perform, at least in any moral sense of ‘ought.’ However, that objection requires only a slight modification of the theory of personhood: a person is one who has a conception of actions that she ought to perform, whether or not she thinks that there are any such actions in reality.

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Another objection may be found in positivist philosophers who argued that all moral theories are cognitively meaningless, and thus neither true nor false (Ayer 1971, chap. 6). If that were so, talk of actions that one ought to perform would be cognitively meaningless, so it would be doubtful that a person could have a conception of actions that she ought to perform, as required by the proposed theory of personhood. The positivists’ claim that moral theories are cognitively meaningless depended upon the verification criterion of meaning, which asserted that a statement is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is verifiable, either formally (in logic and mathematics) or by observations (in science). However, that criterion is unacceptable. For one thing, with regard to some statements, the positivists produced arguments to show that those statements (and others like them) could not be verified. But we can demonstrate that a given statement cannot be verified to be true only if we first know what would have to be the case for the statement to be true. So a statement must have cognitive meaning if it is to be shown by argument to lack cognitive meaning on the verification criterion of meaning. For another thing, the verification criterion would make some statements meaningful and their negations meaningless because, for example, ‘there are no purple elephants’ is not verifiable, since our failure to observe a purple elephant does not rule out one turning up somewhere at some time; but ‘there is a purple elephant’ is verifiable, since it would be verified if we observed a purple elephant. However, the second statement is the negation of the first; so, according to the verification criterion, we can get a cognitively meaningful expression by negating a cognitively meaningless one, and vice versa, which is absurd. Further, the verification principle itself, which says that a statement is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is verifiable either formally or by observations, is not itself verifiable either formally or by observations, so it is, by its own lights, cognitively meaningless and thus not true. So, if it is true, then it is not true; therefore, it is not true. A third objection to our fallibilistic restatement of Kant’s theory of personhood is empirical. It is sometimes claimed that there are psychopaths who have no conception of right or wrong, or of things that they (morally) ought to do; yet such creatures are still, it seems, persons. However, the objection seems to mischaracterise the psychopath. It seems

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that the psychopath does have a conception of what she ought to do, her unusual behaviour being explained by psychological deficits with regard to empathy, remorse, fear and impulsiveness (Glannon 2008). Of course, the resolution of this question is a scientific matter, so it is possible that future discoveries will reveal that there are some persons, whether or not they are psychopaths, who have no conception of right or wrong. It is therefore possible that the fallibilistic version of Kant’s theory of personhood will eventually be falsified. But I suggest that it is the currently best available theory so that it should be accepted but held open to criticism. It seems, then, that there are two marks that distinguish a person from a non-person. First, a person has a capacity for critical rationality: she is able to hold all of her accepted theories open to question, to think up alternative theories, and to revise any of her accepted theories, or to replace it with a better theory, in the light of reasoned criticism. As discussed in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.5, critical rationality is instrumentally rational for a fallible being, in that it is the most appropriate means to improving her knowledge. Second, a person is a moral agent: she has a conception of actions that she ought to perform, she is able to perform or to abstain from such actions, and she is obliged not to violate the rights of others, whatever theory of morals she accepts. This second distinguishing mark entails that a person has the capacity for self-consciousness. Both distinguishing marks entail that a person has free agency. The second includes free actions explicitly. The first includes free agency because critical rationality requires reasoning, and reasoning requires decisions (Sect. 3.2 of Chap. 3), which are mental acts and thus free (Sect. 2.2 of Chap. 2). So, if we do not have free agency, including free will, then none of us is a person. As said in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.5, we cannot prove that we have free agency.

4.2 The Natures of Animals The nature of an animal comprises, amongst other things, its needs. Talk of needs can be contentious in philosophy, and in economics too. So before proceeding with our topic I must enter some prefatory remarks about the way in which I will be talking about needs.

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Some philosophers and economists maintain that needs are conditional on wants or aims. Typically, aims are identified with wants. The idea is that a statement of the form ‘A needs X’ is elliptical for a statement of the form ‘A wants Y, and A will obtain Y only if A obtains X.’ So, needs are necessary means to the satisfaction of an assumed want. It may be conceded that if someone is not aware of what she wants, then she may need what she does not (consciously) want, and that if she is mistaken about the means to what she wants, she may want what she does not need. Such theorists emphasise wants rather than needs because they are understandably concerned about the abuse of the concept of need by authoritarians who claim to know best what people need, or really want or ought to want, and who disregard what people say they want (Flew 1981, pp. 119–127). Still, their account of the concept of need seems deficient. First, there is a distinction between aims and wants. Returning to an example used in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.4, I get up in the morning, enter my kitchen, and pour and drink a glass of orange juice. I do not want to drink the juice and I do not value doing so; I do it purely out of habit. But my drinking the juice is intentional: it is something that I aim to do; and if, as I am about to do it, I am asked what I am going to do, I could say truly that I aim to drink the juice. Drinking the juice was an aim of mine but not a want of mine (Frederick 2010, sect. 3). Second, there is a distinction between conditional and absolute needs. Conditional needs are, as proposed in the preceding analysis, conditional on wants or on aims; but absolute needs are things needed for an animal to have a good life, quite independently of any aims or wants that the animal may have. There is still something conditional about absolute needs: they must be satisfied if the animal is to have a good life. But ‘A has an absolute need for X’ cannot be analysed along the lines of ‘A wants (or aims at) Y, and A will obtain Y only if A obtains X’ (McLeod 2014). One might try to save that conditional analysis by simply stipulating that there is a sense of ‘wants’ or ‘aims’ in which it is true that every animal wants or aims to have a good life. But that would be a pseudo-scientific manoeuvre (see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3). So we should accept the distinction between conditional and absolute needs.

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There is something problematic even in the conditional analysis according to which absolute needs are those that must be satisfied if the animal is to have a good life. For, it suggests that an animal’s absolute needs are dependent on what is a good life for it. But, in fact, the dependence goes the other way. What is a good life for an animal is ontologically dependent upon the absolute needs of that animal. The absolute needs of an animal are part of the nature of that animal. We cannot know what a good life for an animal is without knowing its absolute needs. An animal has a good life to the extent that its absolute needs are satisfied. There is no attempt here to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ If the animal’s absolute needs are met, then it has a good life. That is a fact. But that fact does not imply that it is a good thing that the animal has a good life or that anyone ought to make it the case that the animal has a good life. Consider, for instance, that a predator has a good life only if it devours its prey. That is good for the predator but not for its prey. Whether or not it is a good thing overall, or something that a person ought to facilitate or prevent, is a further question. In what follows, when I speak of the needs of an animal I am speaking of its absolute needs. Consequently, I will hereafter drop the adjective ‘absolute.’ An animal has a set of physical characteristics, such as eyes, legs, internal organs and so on; a set of needs for things such as food, water, procreation and company; a set of capabilities, that is, capacities for actions that it may perform; and a set of inclinations to perform actions. People tend to think, generally, that an animal, given appropriate circumstances, is inclined to exercise its capabilities in ways that tend to satisfy its needs; and, if it is successful in meeting its needs, it has a good life. However, the animal is not always able to find appropriate circumstances, in which case its needs may go more or less unsatisfied and its life will not be so good. Consider two hens. Hen A lives on a farm. She is one of ten hens in a hierarchy or ‘pecking order’ established by fighting between the hens. There is also a rooster, who is at the top of the flock hierarchy. These chickens live in a large coop, which is a wooden structure that has roof and walls made of wire mesh, so the chickens get fresh air and sunshine and they have space to run around on the grass, to scratch up the debris and to bathe in the dust, as chickens and some other birds instinctively do. Part of the area is

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shaded by trees so the chickens can avoid the sun when it gets too fierce. Feeders and drinkers in the coop are replenished every couple of days. The coop contains a ventilated wooden house which is off the floor, where the chickens can keep dry and sleep. The house has space enough for the chickens to be comfortable but not so much space that they freeze in winter. The house has roosts and nest boxes and the farmer cleans it every week. The farmer also checks regularly for ectoparasites, infections and injuries and takes remedial action where necessary. The rooster mates with the hens very regularly. Every day, except in winter, the hens lay eggs, some fertilised, some not. The eggs are removed by the farmer and some of the fertilised eggs are incubated and chicks are hatched. Male chicks are normally killed. Some female chicks are sold but, at intervals, some are added to the flock, as Hen A herself had been, to replace hens in the coop that are slaughtered for meat, at around the age of three years, when their egg production tapers off. The new chicks are introduced to the flock gradually, to prevent them being attacked by the older birds. Hen B was incubated at a large hatchery. When she hatched she was conveyed into a room where female chicks were separated from male ones. The male chicks were destroyed in a shredding machine. Hen B, along with the other female chicks, was vaccinated. The chicks then had the front of their beaks cut off by a heated guillotine, without anaesthetic. Hen B still suffers chronic pain as a result of that procedure. When they were about sixteen weeks old the birds were sent to a factory farm where they now reside. Hen B is in a wire cage with nine other hens. The cage is surrounded by similar cages of hens, above, below, and besides. The cages have a trough for feeding, nipple drinkers, and a sloped wire floor so that the eggs can roll onto a conveyor. Over a hundred thousand hens are in cages in the same windowless shed as Hen B. The dense packing of the hens facilitates the emergence and spread of avian diseases, which is why the birds were vaccinated at the hatchery. The hens have no access to the outside, no fresh air, no natural light. The cages have a wire floor and no nest boxes or perches. The hens are consequently prevented from engaging in instinctive behaviours. That, together with the intensive confinement, causes the hens stress, which makes them aggressive, which is why they had their beaks trimmed at the hatchery, to prevent widespread injuries amongst the flock. The stress causes Hen B and many of the other

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hens to lose feathers. Standing on wire floors all day has damaged the feet of Hen B. The large amount of faeces and urine produced by the birds in the shed generates high levels of toxic gasses which cause some of the hens eye, respiratory or viral infections. After a little over a year in the cage, Hen B is exhausted and unable to produce further eggs, so she is sent for slaughter. We must resist the natural tendency to anthropomorphise non-human animals, which is why I distinguished the two hens as ‘A’ and ‘B,’ rather than by giving them names. Hens are not human and they are not persons. Still, they are (so it seems) living and sensate creatures that often exemplify agency and instrumental rationality. It seems doubtful that we can speak literally of a hen living a happy or a fulfilled life. Still, a hen does have a life; and it makes sense to say that some kinds of life are better for a hen than other kinds of life. In particular, it seems unobjectionable to say that hen A lives a much better life than does hen B, and even to say that hen A lives a good life but hen B a bad or defective one. A hen’s natural behaviours, the ones that she has an inclination to perform, are usually means to satisfying her needs, even though she may not see the connection between end and means. Preventing her from engaging in those behaviours seems to cause her suffering, as evinced in the physical and psychological deterioration of hens in the factory farm. That seems to be so even when the needs, for which the behaviours are means, are being satisfied in some other way. For instance, a hen’s dust bathing helps to reduce the number of ectoparasites but keeping hens in wire cages off the floor has a similar effect; and hens scratch the ground not only to dust bathe but also to find food (insects), but in the factory farm food is provided for them. Still, the hen has inclinations to scratch the ground and to dust bathe and her inability to indulge them causes her stress. There are also environmental factors that cause suffering and ill health as seen in the maladies of the hens in the factory farm. Hen A lives in an environment that is propitious for her living a good life; but hen B does not. We may summarise this by saying that a hen has a particular kind of nature and that, as a consequence, there are specific activities and environments that enable her to thrive, that is, to live a good life. Without a suitable environment that enables a hen to engage in activities implied

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in its nature, that is, its natural activities, and to satisfy its needs, a hen cannot live a good life. Neither hen A nor hen B experiences motherhood, either as giver or as receiver. That, it may be thought, will be an important part of a good life for any hen; and, if that is so, then even hen A lives a life that is substantially less good than it could be. However, that seems not to be the case. In wild jungle fowl, from which our domesticated chickens have evolved, the hen incubates her eggs and looks after her chicks when they hatch, keeping them together, protecting them from predators, teaching them how to drink and keeping them warm at night. In contrast, in some egg-­ laying breeds, the hens are generally not broody: even when provided with a clutch of eggs, they will be disinclined to sit on the eggs and look after them until they are ready to hatch. Thus, it may be that the nature of hen A and hen B is such that mothering is not one of their natural activities. Even if they were provided with an environment that is propitious for mothering behaviour, they would not behave that way. It seems then that, given their evolved nature, a good life for hen A or hen B does not involve raising chicks. We may obtain a better understanding of these issues by taking a critical look at a theory propounded by Philippa Foot (1920–2010). Foot says that animals have a natural goodness or defect independently of the needs or wants of any other species of living thing (Foot 2001, p. 26). That goodness or defect derives from the “life form” of the species to which the individual animal belongs. The life form includes development, self-maintenance and reproduction in a particular kind of habitat; and it may include defence, rearing of the young and, for social animals, various forms of co-operation. The life form of the species determines how the individual should be. A good deer, for instance, is one that is well fitted to the life form of its species; and what is good for a deer is to live according to that life form. Whether or not an individual animal has a good life depends not only upon its qualities and its habitat but also on chance. It may, for example, be struck down by disease or caught in a trap (Foot 2001, pp. 32–35, 41–42). … what counts as flourishing for a member of the species to which it belongs … [is] to instantiate the life form of that species, and to know

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whether an individual is or is not as it should be, one must know the life form of the species. (Foot 2001, p. 91)

It seems that Foot is taking a pre-evolutionary view of species, as her repeated references to Aristotle suggest. For instance, the “life form” of a hen in its natural habitat will, it seems, include rearing chicks. But hens A and B, and others of their breed, are not inclined to rear chicks because they have been divorced from their natural habitat and have adapted to an environment in which an inclination to motherhood, if they had it, would go unsatisfied, perhaps thereby causing them frustration and stress. We may wonder how the adaptation came about. Here is an amateur speculation that may make a biologist blanch; but it will be an adequate makeshift for our purposes. Many years ago, domesticated egg-laying hens had an inclination to rear chicks; but a mutation produced such a hen without that inclination. In her environment, in which there was no opportunity to rear chicks, that made her less stressed than the other hens. The stress in the other hens produced some physical signs, such as poorer plumage, that were absent in the mutant; and the absence of those signs made her more attractive to the rooster. He mated disproportionately with the less-stressed hen which lacked the inclination to rear chicks, so the mutation was passed on and spread. The hens with the mutation are defective hens with regard to the standard of the life form of the species in its natural habitat; but that is an inappropriate standard. Hen A, and also hen B at birth, before it was mutilated, is a good hen with regard to the standard of the life form of its particular breed. That second standard is more relevant than the first in answering the question of whether the hen lives a good life. Foot seems to miss this sort of point entirely when she says: Even in a zoo a fleeing animal like a deer that cannot run well is so far forth defective and not as it should be, in spite of the fact that, as this particular individual is by chance placed, this may be no disadvantage for defence or feeding or mating or rearing the young. (Foot 2001, p. 34) … animals cannot be said to be flourishing if they are not living anything like a natural life. An animal is not benefited by being kept alive by artifi-

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cial feeding and induced to breed by artificial means, because such a life would be too far from its life form. What fitted such an unnaturally fixed­up animal for survival, such as extreme docility, might not be goodness but perhaps defect in a thing of its kind. (Foot 2001, p. 93, footnote 16)

It seems that Foot sees species as fixed ‘natural kinds.’ There are two problems with her account. First, Foot’s contrast of natural and artificial environments suggests that the deviation from fixed natural kinds is a result of domestication; but that is not so. In the wild, in its natural habitat, mutations occur which mean that an individual animal of a species may be defective with regard to the life form of that species. Second, some mutations turn out to be adaptive to some feature of the environment, possibly a new feature, thereby enabling the individual to thrive and to reproduce more successfully than the members of its species that are not defective with regard to the life form of that species. As the new individual is better adapted to the environment, labelling it ‘defective’ because it fails to meet the standard of instantiating the life form of its species shows that standard to be inappropriate. The reproductive success of the mutant may in time lead to the development of a new species or sub-species, with a different life form; and the new species may eventually replace the old species. Foot’s approach of rating individuals as good or defective with regard to the life form of a species seems simply mistaken once we acknowledge evolution. A better approach will, it seems, refer not to the life form of a species but to the nature of the individual animal. A particular animal is naturally good, independently of the needs or wants of any other living thing, to the extent that it has capabilities, and inclinations to exercise them, that enable it to meet its needs in its environment. To the extent that the animal is successful in meeting its needs it has a good life. Success depends upon many factors including competition for resources (within and between species), escaping predators and diseases, avoiding accidents and other dangers. An animal will be defective if, in its environment, its capabilities or inclinations are not suited to the satisfaction of its needs. It will be defective because it will be incapable of living a good life, which depends upon the satisfaction of its needs, or at least its most important

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needs. The defect may pertain to capabilities. For instance, the animal might be born blind and without any compensating capability that enables it to find food and avoid dangers. The defect may pertain to inclinations. For example, an animal may have the capability to drink but no inclination to do so. The defect may pertain to needs, if the animal has needs that could not be satisfied in its environment even if its capabilities were enhanced. Consider again hen A. She has no inclination to incubate eggs. It was implicitly assumed above that she has no need for motherhood, in which case her inclinations and needs are to that extent well-matched. However, that implicit assumption might be false. If she does have a need for motherhood, her inclinations are not apt for that need and she is to that extent defective. Since her need for motherhood, if she has it, seems likely to be an important one, she will be incapable of living a good life. Perhaps she is also lacking in the capabilities required for motherhood. In that case, even if she could be trained to incubate eggs, when the chicks hatch she might not be able properly to teach the chicks to drink, to keep them together, to protect them from predators, or to keep them warm at night. Her chicks would probably die and her need for motherhood would again go unsatisfied; so again she will be incapable of living a good life and will thus be defective. Foot applies her faulty theory, with some modifications, to humans, with the same unhappy results. She says that a human is defective if she is unable to talk or to understand language or lacks imagination or humour (Foot 2001, p. 43). But while those are shortcomings if we take typical humans as a standard, they need not be such as to prevent the human from satisfying her needs. Her nature is untypical for a human. She may, indeed, not be a person. But her needs may be such that she is capable of acting in her environment to satisfy them, especially if her environment contains other more typical humans who will help her. Her defects, as compared to the standard of a typical human, need not prevent her from finding fulfilment; they just prevent her from being many things that it is open to more typical humans to be, things that she may have no need to be. As with regard to non-human animals, Foot’s relation of goodness and defect to the life form of a species appears to give a wrong result. The good of an animal, including a human, must be related

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to the nature of the individual, which is not tied to the life form of a species. We can find out what a particular animal’s capabilities and inclinations are by observing what it does, particularly in experimental set-ups that are designed to find answers to those questions. We have no such direct access to the animal’s needs. As mentioned earlier, we tend to assume that capabilities and inclinations are tailored to needs, so that we can discover the latter by discovering the former. However, that assumption seems bound up with religious or quasi-religious theories of design, as if creatures have been well-designed to live in ways that meet their needs. In the light of evolutionary theory, with its random mutations and selection that favours reproductive success, that type of view seems untenable. Evolution may produce an animal that has important needs that cannot be met in its environment or that the animal cannot satisfy given its capabilities and inclinations, even though it reproduces successfully, thereby creating further animals that live without any chance of satisfying their important needs. There is a temptation to dismiss such thoughts by saying that, since we do not have direct access to an animal’s needs, we have to read them off from the animal’s capabilities and inclinations. Indeed, it may be said, an animal’s needs are simply defined in terms of its capabilities and inclinations; any other use of the term ‘needs’ is meaningless. However, such positivism is anti-scientific. The fact that we have no direct access to a phenomenon does not mean that the phenomenon is not real. The developed sciences consist of theories that posit phenomena to which we have no direct access; but the logical implications of the theories, in conjunction with our background knowledge, are falsifiable (testable against observation statements). Atomic theory, for instance, posits atoms, to which we do not have direct access. It is only quite recently that powerful microscopes have been invented that enable us to see atoms, indirectly; but even using such equipment the claim that what we see are atoms depends upon abstract theories that explain how the equipment works as well as general theories about electricity, atoms and other particles. We understand intuitively what needs are and how they differ from inclinations and capabilities, so we understand the possibility that an animal may have needs that its inclinations and capabilities are not apt to satisfy.

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We do not yet have theories about needs, so understood, that are falsifiable and that have withstood attempts to falsify them; but the life sciences are not yet as advanced as physics. Further development of theory may in future give us scientific theories about an animal’s needs. Animals that lack self-consciousness are not capable of having theories about their own needs. Even those animals that do have a degree of self-­ consciousness might have little conception of their own needs. For instance, they may be inclined to eat when hungry without being aware that they have a need for food. The dog may lay her head on her master’s thigh when she wants petting without having any awareness that she wants petting. Animals of different species often seem to appeal to humans for help when they have suffered an injury, which does suggest a consciousness of need; but they may just have an inclination to behave in such ways when in pain. Even if, with regard to some species, it seems plausible that conscious of a need for pain relief prompts their behaviour, that does not imply that they have anything like a general theory of their own needs in anything like the way that humans typically do. Foot says that humans are different from other animals in that human lives are diverse. For instance, while inability to reproduce is a defect in a human, a choice of childlessness need not be a defective choice if it was made by the person to enable her to satisfy the demands of work (Foot 2001, pp. 42–43). However, there is also a diversity of lives within other animal species. For example, in a bee hive the queen is the only female that produces offspring. The other females, though capable of laying eggs, are worker bees that collect pollen and nectar and do all the work in the hive, including feeding the larvae when they hatch. The males do no work; they try to mate with the queen, though only a few of them succeed. Of course, the workers do not choose not to reproduce: they are rather controlled by pheromones of the queen. Somewhat similarly, where a male does not procreate it is due to failure rather than choice. So it is not simply the diversity of human lives that distinguishes them from other animals but perhaps the much greater diversity and the role of choice in bringing it about. In summary, an animal that is not a person has a set of physical characteristics, capabilities, inclinations, and needs. That constellation of properties makes up its individual nature. It is good, in the sense of

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‘non-­defective,’ if its capabilities and inclinations enable it to satisfy its needs in its environment, provided that nothing else interferes. Such interferences are, however, common; perhaps the most common being competition from other animals, whether of the same or of different species. Recall that most male bees fail to satisfy their need for procreation because they lose in the competition with other males. To the extent that an animal is unable to satisfy its needs, its life is defective. What is a good life for an animal is given by its nature; but it is not the case that an animal is given a good life by nature. Whether an animal lives a good life, even if it is not defective and inhabits a propitious environment, is largely a matter of chance.

4.3 The Natures of Persons A person, like other animals, has a set of physical characteristics, capabilities, inclinations, and needs which make up her nature, and she will live a good life if her exercise of her capabilities results in the satisfaction of her needs, or at least of her most important needs, for she will then achieve fulfilment. Unlike an animal that is not a person, she has a self-­ consciousness that enables her to reflect on her own needs, to form hypotheses about them, and to set out to pursue aims that she thinks will satisfy her hypothesised needs. Many animals have primitive languages that allow them to express an inner state, such as anger or pain, and to signal to others the appearance of a danger, such as a predator, or even to describe some state of affairs, as when a bee dances to tell other members of the hive where they can find nectar. But a person has command of a language that permits the expression not only of descriptions but also of arguments (Popper and Eccles 1983, pp. 57–59). It is only the expression of arguments that makes reasoned criticism possible. Thus, the critical rationality that is a distinguishing mark of persons depends upon the mastery of a language with an argumentative function. The only persons we know are humans. A human is born into a social matrix, typically a family embedded in a community of other humans organised in an array of social structures. The institutions of a society

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offer a variety of roles in which persons can pursue and achieve goals in relationships with other persons, as well as making a living, though not every role is available to every member. The community has its traditions, comprising customs and conventions. It is also a repository of a set of theories about the world, nature, society and persons. These traditions and theories are generally passed down the generations, though with more or less substantial modifications being made along the way. A human child is taught about the community’s traditions and theories but she gains much of her knowledge about them without being taught explicitly: she learns by looking for regularities and by observing other humans and imitating what they do and say. By the time she has grown up and is acknowledged as an adult person, she has acquired a massive body of theory about the world and persons and how they work. All animals, including persons, have needs for food and water to survive. One might describe those as ‘basic animal needs.’ But persons, like other animals, are individual products of nature. There is no life form of humankind such that any human person is defective if she does not align with it. There are, consequently, no basic human needs, that is, needs that are specifically human rather than common to all (or most) animals. There is, however, a set of needs that seem to be fairly common to persons who are human beings. The needs are perforce specified at a high level of generality and they include such things as: to achieve things, to have goals to strive for, to be closely or meaningfully connected in some appropriate way to some other persons, or to be in some other way part of something bigger than oneself to which one makes a significant contribution (Frankl 1959; Nozick 1981, pp. 594–600, 610–613, 1989, pp. 167–169). Each of these needs may be satisfied in innumerable ways, though some ways would be fulfilling for some persons but not for others. For instance, some persons may find sufficient satisfaction of all of those needs in family life, while some other persons may be such that they could find sufficient satisfaction of all of those needs outside of the family of which they are a part. Further, satisfaction of the fairly common human needs for goals and achievements will be found by some people, but not by others, in computer programming, or people management, or political activism, or military service, or painting, or perhaps some previously unthought-of occupation. Some persons seem to lack some of the needs in the set of

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fairly common human needs, and perhaps some persons lack all of them. Some persons seem indifferent to achievements and goals; some loners or hermits seem indifferent to interpersonal connection and perhaps also to being a part of something bigger than themselves. One may wonder whether such persons are fulfilled; but it cannot be ruled out a priori. The theories that a person inherits from her community will include, or enable her to formulate, theories about her needs and where she is to fit into the social structure(s) if she is to satisfy those needs; though some of her theories on such matters may be tentative or vague. Her capacity for critical rationality enables her to criticise and test her theories. She can criticise them by checking for inconsistencies with other theories that she or others accept. For instance, sometimes our closest friends or relatives know us better than we know ourselves, in some respects. However, the crucial test of a theory is the empirical one. A person can test empirically a theory about her nature and its fulfilment only by living as the theory recommends and then seeing whether she is fulfilled. I have described this process of self-discovery by conjecture and refutation briefly elsewhere (Frederick 2014, 2016). Here I will summarise, correct and develop the earlier accounts. A person should consider the theories that she currently holds about her capabilities and needs, and those she holds about what sort of life she should live to satisfy those needs and achieve fulfilment. These theories will largely be ones that she inherited from her culture but she should also try to envisage rival possibilities. She should then exercise her critical rationality in evaluating those theories. First, she must try to get clear about what her needs are. At whatever stage of life she happens to be, she will have experienced a range of different ways of filling her time, some of which she found exciting or interesting or pleasurable, others of which she found boring or irritating or uncongenial. That will provide some indication of what her needs are. She can also obtain the opinions of people who know her well, such as close friends and relatives. Second, she must acquire knowledge about the different options for kinds of life that exist and what those options involve. Career advisors, biographies, autobiographies and even novels may provide useful information, as well as historical and anthropological studies that describe options that exist, or existed, in other societies. Third, in the light of the information she has

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gathered on options and her needs, she should attempt to rate options for kinds of life as better or worse with respect to how likely they are to provide her with fulfilment. The information she has gathered may be sufficient to rule out some options and to enable her to put the remaining options into a loose order. However, the crucial test of any theory about the kind of life that will suit her is for her to live a life of that kind, or one that approximates to it, and then to see how she fares. That is particularly the case if the kind of life she has envisaged is one that has not so far been lived by anyone else. Ultimately, only the person herself can judge whether a particular kind of life is fulfilling for her or not. Making a judgement about whether one finds a kind of life fulfilling may sometimes be straightforward: a person might simply hate the kind of life she has chosen and want to be rid of it; or she might love it so much that she does not want to consider an alternative; though even in such circumstances it may be difficult for her to say what exactly it is about the life that she hates or loves. At other times, however, it will be a difficult judgement for her to make because the life has a mix of advantages and disadvantages and it may be doubtful whether any rival life will be better on balance. If her experiment with a kind of life is unsuccessful, she must try to understand why. It might be that the environment was unfavourable, for example, if she began a career in asset management shortly before a major recession, or if she joined the army in a prolonged period of peace, or if the man she married was soon killed in an accident. In such cases, she may continue or repeat the experiment with that kind of life and hope for more propitious circumstances. On the other hand, it might be that her hypothesis about the kind of life that would suit her has been falsified. There seem to be three kinds of ways in which that may be so. First, it might be that she lacks the capabilities required to live that life or to perform that function competently. Second, it might be that she was mistaken about what a life of that kind involved and that it turned out to be mismatched with her needs. Third, it might be that she was mistaken about her needs; so that, even though she was competent in the role she had chosen to perform and the environment was favourable—so she was performing successfully in her chosen role—and even though she had

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understood correctly what the role involved, still, living in that way did not turn out to fulfil her. If she can work out why her experiment failed, that will enable her to learn lessons that can assist her in thinking up or in evaluating other theories about kinds of life that may fulfil her. That will inform the selection of the next kind of life to be trialled. Through such a process of conjecture and refutation she will, if she is lucky, discover the life that fulfils her and thereby discover her nature. For, each theory about the kind of life that will fulfil her is a theory about her nature; and she hopes to find the true one by refuting the others. Of course, things are not always straightforward. Sometimes a person might simply feel that something is amiss with her current life without being able to identify the problem. In such a case, she may take her anxiety to falsify the theory she currently holds about her nature but find it difficult to come up with an appealing alternative. Experimenting with particular kinds of life is risky and costly. In cases where the risks or costs are great, it is sensible to look for safeguards. For instance, a person may choose to experiment with a less risky or less costly approximation to the kind of life that she suspects will suit her. That substitute may yield her information that enables her to decide whether or not pursue the real thing. More generally it is sensible to have an exit strategy, a way of disengaging, honourably, from one’s chosen path without too great a loss or discomfort. Prenuptial agreements are an example. In what Karl Popper calls a “closed society” (Popper 1966, vol. I, pp. 171–174) the institutions and customs are rigid, persons are divided into groups, or castes, usually based on the family into which they were born, and the institutions, or roles within an institution, that are open to a person often depends largely upon her caste or on other facts about her birth. For instance, Cambodia before the French colonised it in the nineteenth century was a strictly hierarchical society in which everyone had her place. People were expected to serve those in authority; and those in authority were expected to protect those who served them (Dunlop 2010, pp.  30–31). The traditional literature encouraged the fatalistic conformity expressed in the proverb: “Do not reject the crooked road and do not automatically take the straight one; instead, take the one travelled by

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the ancestors” (Dunlop 2010, p. 42). Tradition demanded that, in poorer families, the eldest daughter stayed at home to help run the household (Dunlop 2010, p. 34). An eldest daughter in a poor family who thought that her needs for achievement and for making a contribution to something greater than herself could best be met by playing a role in the institutions of government had no opportunity for discovering whether she was mistaken. She was denied the means of discovering her nature. In contrast, in what Popper calls an “open society” (Popper 1966, vol. I, pp.  173–175) persons are allowed to separate themselves from their current social groups and to enter freely into relationships with others irrespective of the accidents of birth. The various roles within the institutions of the society are open to any persons who have the capabilities required to carry out the obligations of the role successfully. Recruitment to particular positions is often by open competition. Further, it is open to any individual person to define for herself a new role and to seek to earn a living thereby. An open society is therefore conducive to human fulfilment in that it enables persons to experiment with kinds of life to test theories about their nature and how best to find fulfilment. This theme will be taken up in more detail in the following two chapters. There are some qualifications that need to be borne in mind. It seems that a person is not given her nature full and complete at birth. She is given a nature that contains potentialities for different kinds of development. That seems obvious for capabilities and even to some extent for physical characteristics. It seems that a person’s environment, especially in her early years, can have a substantial impact on how her capabilities and physical characteristics develop, both in extent and direction. However, a person’s environment depends partly upon her choices. A person may choose to develop some specific capabilities or characteristics, in part by selecting activities or environments that tend to favour their development. For example, a person may learn to drive by obtaining instruction and a person may become more refined by choosing refined company. A person may, by choosing to inhabit particular environments, inadvertently develop capabilities and characteristics that she never intended to acquire, some of which she might not even like. For instance, a person who joins an organisation in order to earn some money may end up developing a range of social skills that she did not previously have; and

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by joining a cycling club a person may develop muscular legs that she finds unappealing. Similarly, a person’s needs will change over time. Partly that will be due to growing up and, later, growing old; partly it will be due to changes wrought in herself by what she does and by environmental impacts. However, although a person’s nature changes, there seem to be limits to how far it can change. For example, most people can improve their mathematical capabilities through study; but relatively few people, it seems, are able to develop the capabilities required for competence in advanced mathematics. Somewhat similarly, a highly gregarious person may diminish her need for company by discovering an absorbing solitary activity, though she could never become a loner. Different individual persons have different natures. When a person adopts a theory about what her nature is and sets out to test it, it will normally be the case that she has a lot to learn and some new capabilities to develop, before she can be what she takes her nature to cut her out for being. If her research suggests that she will find fulfilment in being a management accountant, she cannot simply start living the life of a management accountant. Before that, she has to get qualified and she has to gain experience. There is an apprenticeship to serve. Throughout that apprenticeship her theory about her nature is being tested and it may be falsified, for example, if she keeps failing the exams or if she finds the work futile. Even if she qualifies and enjoys the work she still has to convince others, by the quality of her work, that she is worth hiring as a management accountant. If potential clients or employers decline her services because of the poor quality of her work, again her theory about her nature will be falsified. Of course, there may be other reasons why her services are declined, such as her sex or race. That may make it difficult or impossible for her to earn a living as a management accountant even though her theory of her nature is correct. Recall the Cambodian eldest daughter who was confined to helping to run the household. Discovering oneself means finding where, or how, one fits into a human society, though the society in question may be different from the one in which one was formed and perhaps different from any that already exists. We should distinguish fulfilment from happiness. The concept of happiness is mercurial, sometimes related to enjoyment or pleasure,

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sometimes related to a more amorphous notion of contentment. However, as Foot says, some lives that are not happy may nevertheless be good ones (Foot 2001, pp. 82–90). A life of achievement, service to others, family and friendship may be full of worries and anxieties, speckled with anguish and disappointments, often demanding and exhausting, and marked only sparsely with episodes of pleasure, enjoyment or elation; yet it may be a fulfilling life that gives its possessor a feeling of contentment when she looks back on it, even though it was lack of contentment that kept driving her on and that made the successes possible. Similarly, someone in France during World War Two who had the opportunity to leave for America and pursue happiness may have stayed in France in order to fight the Nazis, realising that she was choosing hardship, possible torture and probable early death, as well as the near certainty of losing close friends in the struggle. Yet, despite the horrors, she may afterwards insist that she had a fulfilling life, and even that she would make the same choice again, in the same circumstances, despite it involving much unhappiness. For probably most persons, satisfaction of the need for happiness does not make a great contribution to personal fulfilment.

4.4 Identity and Authenticity When a person is testing a theory about a kind of life that will fulfil her, she is trying to discover what her nature is, particularly, what her needs and capabilities are. It is common to equate a person’s nature with her identity, so that a person’s theory about her nature may be described as her theory about who she is. That sort of identity is what we may call her ‘type-identity,’ not her individual identity. No person can have the same individual identity as any other; for that would make them the same person, not different persons. But any number of persons may have the same type-identity. Everyone knows her own individual identity: it is the referent of ‘I’ (or its counterpart in other languages) when she uses it. But when a person is testing a theory about who she is, she is not testing a theory about her individual identity; she is trying to find out what type of person she is.

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It is an objective fact that a particular person has a nature, or type-­ identity, of a specific kind. Her nature consists of physical characteristics, capabilities, inclinations, and needs. At any particular time, each of those things is a particular way. Her theory about her identity says that her nature is such that she will find fulfilment in, say, being a website designer who is also a wife and mother. After trying out that kind of life she may learn that her theory is false: that kind of life does not fulfil her. Her needs or capabilities are different to what she hypothesised. A person may choose any identity with which to experiment. But she will find fulfilment in living a life in accord with that identity only if that kind of life is suited to her nature. To put the point another way: she may choose any theory about her identity; but the theory will be false unless she has a nature that matches it. Thus, her simply identifying as something does not make her that something. However, because a person’s nature contains potentialities, it is possible for her to become something that she currently is not, provided that the something in question is within the range of the potentialities of her nature. It is possible for any man to identify as feminine and it seems possible for some men to be or to become feminine and to find fulfilment that way. It is possible for any man to identify as a dog; but it is not possible for any man to become a dog. It is possible for anyone to identify as a nuclear physicist and it is possible for some people to be nuclear physicists and to find fulfilment that way; but there are some persons for whom it is not possible that they be a nuclear physicist; and there may be some persons for whom it is possible to be a nuclear physicist but not to find fulfilment that way. Our account of empirical self-discovery by conjecture and refutation contrasts with philosophical theories of authenticity. For Charles Taylor self-discovery, “contact with myself, with my own inner nature” (Taylor 1994, p. 30), is a matter of listening to an “internal voice” and engaging in dialogue with significant others (Taylor 1994, pp.  30–35), such as friends, relatives, a lover, or perhaps a therapist. However, a person may be “authentic” in those sorts of ways without discovering who she is. A human person is brought up in a culture and imbibes its dominant theories and traditions. Her understanding of the world—physical, metaphysical, and moral—is moulded by those inherited theories. Her theory of who she is, at least in her earlier years, is similarly largely or wholly a

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product of her inherited culture. Her internal voice will be the voice of that culture. The people with whom she confers may also be from the same culture and they may offer largely the same view of her type-identity as does her internal voice. Such was probably often the case with many an eldest daughter in the old Cambodia who never questioned the role she had been assigned by tradition. But it may well be that her nature is very different to what her culture says it is. Simply heeding her internal voice and engaging in dialogue with her significant others will prevent her from finding out. If she is to discover her nature, she must subject her internal voice and the views of her significant others to criticism and consider possible alternative views. The point is illustrated by Tony Summer’s case study of his self-­ deception about his own homosexuality (Summer 2018, chaps. 4 and 7). He was brought up in a culture in which it was generally thought that homosexuals were “comical, contemptible, disgusting or evil.” Accordingly, he held the theory that he was not homosexual. The people closest to him did not impugn that theory. However, despite being attractive to women and having innumerable opportunities to pair off with attractive women, he remained aloof. He fabricated excuses for why he did not take the opportunities, such as that the women were nasty or that they were not really interested in him despite their apparent interest. The excuses were needed to assure his friends and, more pressingly, himself that he was not a homosexual, that his culturally inherited theory about himself was true. He was aware of homosexual desires but he explained them away as “tics” due to maternal mistreatment. Thus, it seems, he was living authentically by Taylor’s lights. His internal voice (a product of his culturally inherited taboos) told him emphatically that he was not homosexual. His self-analysis also told him that he was not homosexual, that the deviant desires he had were not really part of him but were due to his mother’s nefarious influence, and that his apparent opportunities for sex with women were not real ones or not desirable ones. In his dialogues with friends the assumption that he was heterosexual was never seriously challenged (Summer 2018, p. 56), perhaps because of his overt expressions of interest in females and his explanations (or pseudo-explanations) for his enduring lack of a girlfriend. In short, Summer’s internal voice told him that he was not homosexual and his dialogues with significant

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others generally reinforced that view. That appears to count as self-­ discovery on Taylor’s theory; yet Summer was, in fact, homosexual. He was deceiving himself and he was unfulfilled despite his authenticity. For Michael Lynch: Intuitively, what I most deeply care about helps to constitute my [type-]identity. (Lynch 2004, p. 123) Intuitively, to live an authentic life, you must identify with those desires that effectively guide your action. You identify with a desire when it reflects the kind of person you wish to be, what you care about. You identify with not smoking when you begin to realize that kicking the habit matters to you, or at the very least, is required by what does matter to you, such as not worrying your loved ones. I am then true to myself, when I identify with my effective desires … a lack of authenticity is linked to a lack of self-­ control. (Lynch 2004, p. 125)

Lynch’s claim that the authentic person, so characterised, is true to herself is mistaken. Consider again the case of Summer. His desire to avoid homosexual activity effectively guides his action and he identifies with that desire because it reflects the kind of person he wants to be, namely, a heterosexual. That is what he most cares about because, he thinks, homosexuals are “comical, contemptible, disgusting or evil.” He also exhibits self-control by avoiding homosexual activity, despite experiencing desires for it. He is, on Lynch’s account, living authentically; yet he is living in a way that suppresses his true identity. According to Lynch, “our lives go better when they are lived authentically” (Lynch 2004, p. 120). But Summer was unable to find fulfilment and his twisted behaviour caused upset for numerous women as well as for himself and led him eventually into a psychological crisis of depression and acute anxiety (Summer 2018, p. 56). Despite his identification with his desire not to be homosexual, and the fact that that desire effectively guided his action, he was not true to himself; he was mistaken about his identity; what he cared most deeply about was at variance with what he was. His theory about himself was false; he could not find fulfilment until he replaced it with a better one and then lived in accord with the new theory.

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Lynch recognises that a person may be self-deceived concerning what she cares about (Lynch 2004, p.  122). What is important, he says, is “knowledge of what matters to us, what we care about” (Lynch 2004, p. 121). He adds: “knowing what matters to you is partly constitutive of authenticity” (Lynch 2004, p. 126). Since he subscribes to the common view amongst philosophers that knowledge implies truth (Lynch 2004, p. 121), then a person who holds a false theory concerning what she cares about, whether through self-deception or mistake, does not know what she cares about, she does not know what matters to her, even though she thinks she does know. Authenticity, then, demands that the agent’s theory about the desires or needs that matter to her is true. But Lynch does not say how a person can discover whether her theory concerning what she cares about is true. What he does say is false: the nexus of my various commitments and projects determines my identity in the sense of determining the kind of person I am. They form what Susan Wolf has called my deep or real self. These are the things that I most care about, that I am most (perhaps figuratively, possibly literally) willing to fight for. They give my life meaning. Without them, I would find myself at a loss, “no longer the same person.” By determining what actions, choices, and possibilities I most identify with, they determine who I am. (Lynch 2004, p. 123, footnote suppressed)

On that account, a person’s theory about what matters to her is true if it is implied by, or is at least consistent with, her various commitments and projects. But that will not do because the self-deceiver will be involved in the commitments and projects necessary to maintain her self-­deception. For instance, Summer made attempts to pick up women, though the attempts were usually inept and, even when they were not, he never followed through; and he paid for sex with a number of prostitutes, allowing his friends to see him enter the prostitutes’ premises, even though he found the sex unsatisfying and was sometimes unable to get an erection (Summer 2018, pp. 28–32). His various commitments and projects, the ones he was convinced that he cared about, were those that helped him to maintain his false theory that he was not a homosexual. They did not

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determine who he was; they were obstacles in the way of his self-discovery. It seems that the grain of truth in Lynch’s theory of authenticity is what we have already stated above: a person who holds a true (or ‘true enough’) theory about her nature and who lives in accord with that theory will, in propitious circumstances, find fulfilment. Lynch’s verbiage about identifying with “desires that effectively guide your action,” “my deep or real self,” “what I most care about,” and my identity being determined by “the nexus of my various commitments and projects,” can be dispensed with, as it is confusing, misleading or mistaken. We also answered the question, which Lynch leaves unanswered, about how a person can improve her knowledge of her nature: she can test how good her theory of her nature is by living in accord with it and seeing whether she finds fulfilment. If she does not find fulfilment, and that cannot be explained in terms of an unfavourable environment, then her theory about her nature is falsified and she should think up a different theory to be tested. The process of conjecture and refutation must be conducted critically if it is to yield results. In Sect. 3.3 of Chap. 3 we noted that Popper specified norms to prohibit pseudo-scientific ways of protecting a theory from falsification. If we ignore those norms, we can fall into self-deception. Summer was deceiving himself that he was not homosexual. He had mounting evidence that that theory was false; but he protected his theory from falsification by either ignoring the evidence or explaining it away with pseudo-scientific manoeuvres, that is, manoeuvres that dispose of counter-evidence without explaining anything new (Summer 2018, chap. 3). Had Summer exercised his critical rationality, he would have been on the lookout for pseudo-scientific manoeuvres and desisted from employing them. He would have checked whether his stratagems to explain away counter-evidence also explained something new; and when he found that they did not he would have rejected them. He would then have had to acknowledge that his theory of his nature was inconsistent with the evidence. He might then have accepted that his theory about his nature was false, accepted his homosexuality and pursued a different kind of life that offered him the chance of fulfilment (Summer 2018, pp. 57–58).

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It may be claimed that, if a person’s theory of her identity is accepted as true by others, then it is true. I have not found a clear statement of that claim anywhere, but it is suggested, perhaps unintentionally, by the literature on mutual recognition (Honneth 1995; Mead 1934; Taylor 1994). The claim would need to be articulated to exclude successful confidence tricksters: they affirm an identity that they do not have, even though it is accepted as true by their victims. Other persons who should be excluded are those who are experimenting with an identity but are worried that the experiment will not work. Even if the experimenter’s theory of her identity is accepted as true by others, she may end up rejecting her theory of identity for a different one. However, the claim seems false even in some cases in which a person’s theory of her identity is accepted as true by herself and also by others. Suppose that, after reflecting on her needs, her capabilities and the potential social roles that she could play, Prudence adopts the theory that she will fulfil her needs by living the life of an accountant. She gets a job as a trainee accountant and she studies, on day release, for an accountancy qualification. In every exam her mark is just below the pass mark but, in each case, the examiner is charitable and gives her a pass. She completes the course in the standard four years. Shortly after qualification she resigns from her job and sets up in business as a high-street accountant, selling her services to small businesses. Her clients are satisfied with her work and recommend her to their business associates. Her accountancy practice thrives. However, her work is poor and full of errors. Many of her clients would have gone out of business as a consequence of Prudence’s poor work had it not been for unsuspected fortunate events that outweighed the bad decisions that were informed by Prudence’s advice. Many others which had success after implementing recommendations that Prudence made would have been far more successful had they made a contrary decision informed by sound financial advice. Prudence thinks she is a good accountant. Prudence’s clients think she is a good accountant. Everyone who knows Prudence thinks she is a good accountant. But none of that makes her a good accountant. She is a bad accountant; and, since she has the qualification only because the examiners were feeling charitable when they marked her failing papers, she is not really an accountant at all. Prudence thinks she has discovered

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that she is an accountant and that she is fulfilling her needs; but she is mistaken, even if, through a continuing series of lucky events, her incompetence is never discovered by her or by anyone else. It might be conceded that Prudence’s theory about her nature is false but objected that her living in accord with it nevertheless provides her with fulfilment. Her theory is false because, despite appearances, she does not actually have the capabilities required of an accountant. Further, while she may be correct in maintaining that she has a need to be engaged in work which is both analytical and numerical, she is mistaken in thinking that accountancy is a kind of work that will satisfy her need. She is not much good at accountancy; and if that came to light she would find accountancy frustrating and disappointing. She should look for a different kind of analytical and numerical work that she can do competently. She would recognise that herself if she knew that she was incompetent at accountancy. However, given that she thinks she is a good accountant, and that all the people close to her think so too, as shown by the fact that she makes a good living as an accountant, she will think her life as an accountant fulfilling—indeed, just as fulfilling as she would think her life if she were in fact a good accountant. The example has similarities to Robert Nozick’s (1938–2002) “experience machine” thought-experiment that has been much discussed in the philosophical literature. Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they “feel from the inside.” You can program your experiences … for the rest of your life … You can live your fondest dreams “from the inside.” Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? … Upon entering you will not remember having done this; so no pleasures will get ruined by realizing they are machine-­produced. (Nozick 1989, p. 104, footnote suppressed)

Nozick thinks that few people would choose to enter the experience machine (Nozick 1989, p. 105). “We care about things in addition to

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how our lives feel to us from the inside” (Nozick 1989, p. 104). However, as Nozick also says (1989, p. 107), what people would choose or even what people care about does not tell us what the facts are. Someone who lives life in the experience machine is living a life of delusion. Her experience of fulfilment is delusive. She is not in fact fulfilled, she just seems to herself to be so. Similarly, Prudence in our example is not fulfilled: she is deluded that she is fulfilled, she is deluded in thinking that her needs are satisfied, she is deluded about her nature. Like Summer, she holds a false theory about herself and she is living in accord with that theory. Unlike Summer, she has no contrary evidence to her theory: her delusion is not a result of self-­ deception. Unlike Summer, she has no symptoms of her lack of fulfilment: it seems she is unlikely to fall into depression and severe anxiety, because things seem fine to her. If Summer had properly criticised and tested his theory of his nature, he would soon have discovered its shortcomings; but Prudence’s theory, though false, might never be falsified. Conjecture and refutation is our only available method of discovery; but it provides no guarantee of reaching the truth.

4.5 Conclusion Every animal has an individual nature, comprising physical characteristics, capabilities, inclinations and needs. An animal is good, in the sense of ‘non-defective,’ if its capabilities and inclinations enable it to satisfy its needs in its environment, provided that nothing else interferes. An animal has a good life to the extent that its needs are met. Social animals live in groups that have a social structure in which different animals have different roles which contribute to the life of the group and the reproduction of its genes. A bee hive has a queen that lays eggs, female workers that do all the work and male drones relatively few of which mate with the queen. Animal social structures are generally hierarchical. The hens in a coop are subordinate to the rooster and they establish a pecking order amongst themselves by fighting. An animal group may also have a culture, that is, a learned way of behaving that has been

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advantageous to the group and that is passed down, via imitation, from older to younger members. Some, but not all, animals are persons. A person has a capacity for critical rationality, which means that she can imagine alternatives to given propositions and she can use arguments to criticise the rival propositions and to rate them as better or worse. She therefore has a developed language with descriptive and argumentative functions. A person also has a conception of actions that she ought to perform, even if she denies that there are any actions that she ought to perform. She is therefore a moral agent who is obliged not to violate the rights of other persons. A moral agent has the capacity for a high level of self-consciousness. That enables her to reflect on her own nature, to form hypotheses about it, and to set out to pursue aims that she thinks will fulfil her hypothesised nature. Her capacity for critical rationality enables her to subject her hypotheses about her nature to criticism and to test them empirically by living in accord with them to find out whether she is thereby fulfilled. Humans are the only animals we know who are persons. Each human is born into a community with an institutional structure of greater or lesser complexity and with shared knowledge and traditions, which she absorbs. Her hypotheses about her nature come initially from the knowledge and customs that she acquires from her community; but her critical rationality enables her to subject those hypotheses to criticism and to entertain alternatives. A person’s hypotheses about the different means of satisfying her needs also come initially from her community, which offers her a range of potential social roles that she may find fulfilling. In a closed society, she will have few options, perhaps only one. An open society will offer more options and a greater latitude of choice between them; but it also offers a person the opportunity to define a new role for herself and perhaps to try to make a living thereby. In an open society a person has not only the capacity to consider different theories about her nature and the best way of finding fulfilment; she has also scope to test the most plausible of those theories by living in accord with them, taking precautions to reduce risks and costs, where prudent. She can avoid self-­ deception by exercising her critical rationality to avoid pseudo-scientific stratagems. Even so, finding fulfilment is partly, perhaps largely, a matter

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of luck. Philosophical theories of authenticity not only obscure all of this, they also give wrong results. Some persons seek, and perhaps find, fulfilment in a solitary life away from other persons. But typically a person expects to find fulfilment in connection with other persons, usually involving an occupation, a long-­ term sexual partner and a family. For some persons, the occupation or vocation dominates. For some it is family that is most important. For others it is a long-term relationship, probably sexual but not necessarily so. As Jack Sparrow said of Jeremy Wolfenden, “he found himself in the best way—by finding someone else” (Faulks 1997, p. 297). All of a person’s relationships with other persons have moral dimensions. A person is a moral agent who is obliged not to violate the rights of other persons. That topic is the subject of the next chapter.

References Ayer, A.J. 1971. Language, Truth and Logic. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dunlop, Nic. 2010. The Lost Executioner. London: Bloomsbury. Faulks, Sebastian. 1997. The Fatal Englishman. London: Vintage. Flew, Antony. 1981. The Politics of Procrustes. London: Temple Smith. Foot, Philippa. 2001. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frankl, Victor. 1959. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Frederick, Danny. 2010. Unmotivated Intentional Action. Philosophical Frontiers 5 (1): 21–30. ———. 2014. Voluntary Slavery. Las Torres de Lucca 4: 115–137. ———. 2016. Freedom: Positive, Negative, Expressive. Reason Papers 38 (2): 39–63. Glannon, Walter. 2008. Moral Responsibility and the Psychopath. Neuroethics 1: 158–166. Herman, Louis. 2012. Body and Self in Dolphins. Consciousness and Cognition 21: 526–545. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MS: MIT Press. Joyce, Richard. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kant, Immanuel. 1948. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. H.J. Paton. In The Moral Law, Ed. H.J. Paton, 53–123. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. and Ed. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In Anthropology, History, and Education, Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden, Trans. Robert Louden, 227–429. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, Michael. 2004. True to Life. Cambridge, MS: MIT Press. Mackie, J.L. 1977. Ethics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McLeod, Stephen. 2014. Absolute Biological Needs. Bioethics 28 (6): 293–301. Mead, George. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. Charles Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1989. The Examined Life. New York: Touchstone. Popper, Karl. 1966. The Open Society and its Enemies. 5th revised ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Popper, Karl, and John Eccles. 1983. The Self and its Brain. London: Routledge. Steward, Helen. 2012. A Metaphysics for Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Summer, Tony. 2018. Self-Deception: A New Analysis. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing. Taylor, Charles. 1994. The Politics of Recognition. In Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann, 25–73. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Visalberghi, Elisabetta, Gloria Sabbatini, Alex H. Taylor, and Gavin R. Hunt. 2017. Cognitive Insights from Tool Use in Nonhuman Animals. In APA Handbook of Comparative Psychology, ed. Josep Call, vol. 2, 673–701. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

5 Freedom and Constraint

5.1 Self-Interest and Morality We saw in the previous chapter that a person is distinguished from other animals in having the capacity for critical rationality and an appreciation of moral obligation. As a consequence he has a high level of self-­ consciousness that enables him to formulate and to criticise theories about his nature and how it may best be fulfilled. He also has the ability to test those theories empirically by trying to live in accordance with them and seeing how he fares. As a moral being, however, his activities are subject to moral constraints. In particular, when testing a theory about his nature by experimenting with a kind of life he is morally obliged to ‘do right by others.’ There is, then, a potential conflict between a person’s self-interest and morality. We may distinguish two ways in which a person’s self-interest may conflict with his moral obligations. First, a person lives a fulfilled life to the extent that he satisfies his needs; but satisfaction of needs requires resources; and resources are scarce. A resource that is consumed by one person is not available for others. A person is morally obliged to consume only those resources to which he is entitled; but his experiment with a kind of life, and perhaps his © The Author(s) 2020 D. Frederick, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2_5

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fulfilment, may be facilitated by consuming resources to which others are entitled. Thus, his moral obligations place limits on his experimentation. His observance of those obligations may thereby obstruct him from engaging in the experiments in living that will help him to discover his nature and find fulfilment. Second, a person may suspect, perhaps correctly, that his nature is such that he will find fulfilment only in activities that are morally prohibited, because they are morally prohibited. He may, for instance, find great satisfaction in acts of cruelty or in using other persons to satisfy his needs against their wills, either by force or by fraud. That is, his default on his obligations to others is related to his fulfilment not contingently, but necessarily. His fulfilment does not just depend upon his transgression of his moral obligations but is, at least in part, constituted by it. The possibility that a person may successfully pursue fulfilment through immoral action troubles Philippa Foot because it seems to her to imply that rationality may on occasion demand what virtue forbids (Foot 2001, p. 82). She argues that there is no such possibility (2001, pp. 92–97; see also pp. 99–115). Unfortunately, it is difficult to make out what her argument is. Premises and conclusions are not clearly identified and the content seems to be a mishmash of examples, rhetorical questions and suggestions. She gives examples of people who could not have chosen evil and also have lived a life that was good for them (2001, pp. 95–96). But such examples are irrelevant since the question concerns whether there are (other) people with a nature such that an evil life would be what is good for them. Foot thinks that an apparent conflict between practical rationality and morality is a product of the identification of rational action with egoistic action and she tries to dissipate the apparent conflict by viewing morality as a constraint on rational action, to that extent absorbing morality into practical rationality, so that “one who acts badly ipso facto acts in a way that is contrary to practical reason” (2001, p. 62). However, practical rationality is not especially bound up either with egoism or with moralism. Practical rationality is instrumental rationality, which requires that an agent act appropriately to his aim, whether that aim is self-interest, or the right and the good, or something else. The answer to the oft-raised question ‘Why be moral?’ is not that it serves self-interest or that it is rationally demanded; it is simply that one

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(morally) ought to be moral, even though doing so sometimes clashes with self-interest. My assumption here is that there are objective moral truths, so it is an objective fact that one ought to do what those truths say that one ought to do, and thus it is an objective fact that one ought to do as morality demands, that is, that one ought to be moral. A person who ignores moral demands may be practically rational in pursuing his ends efficiently despite being at fault for defaulting on his obligations. The struggle that contemporary philosophers have with the question ‘Why be moral?’ seems to be a product of a subjectivism that tries to account for moral values in terms of persons’ attitudes. This point is reiterated in the next section. Throughout this chapter, as in the rest of the book, ‘permissible,’ ‘obligatory’ and their cognates always mean morally permissible, obligatory and so on.

5.2 Evaluating Moral Theories We must make and observe an important distinction the neglect of which is responsible for much befuddlement in moral and political philosophy. The distinction is between moral theories and moral facts. A moral theory is constituted, primarily, by a set of rules assigning moral properties and relations, such as obligations and rights, to persons. What makes a moral theory true is that the world is as the theory says it is. Put another way, a moral theory is true if and only if it corresponds to the moral facts. If a person affirms the moral theory that every man has the right to spank his wife and daughters, what he says is false if, as a matter of moral fact, it is not the case that every man has that right. For then, the moral theory that he affirms states a moral rule that does not correspond to an objective moral rule. The widespread conflation of moral facts and moral theories seems to have three sources. The first is the dogmatic conception of rationality that still dominates the universities. When a person thinks that a theory can be established as true, with certainty or near certainty, it is easy for him to slide between talking of the theory and talking of the facts. If a theory is true, it corresponds to the facts; so, if we are mouthing the theory, we

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are stating the facts. So, if we knew the true moral theory, then, when we spoke of a moral rule, we would not need to be careful to distinguish between the rule stated in the theory and the rule that is an objective fact. However, once we acknowledge our fallibility, we must insist on that distinction. The second source of the conflation seems to be subjectivism. On that view, there are no objective moral facts; there are only moral attitudes, though we may be able to construct some more or less plausible substitute for moral facts out of our attitudes and thereby speak as if there are moral facts (Hume 1975, appendix 1; Blackburn 1993, pp. 182–197). The third source appears to be cultural relativism. On that view the statement that every man has the right to spank his wife and daughters may be true in one culture but false in another. Contra those views, I assume that there are objective moral rules that are not culturally relative and that our theories about those rules may always, so far as we can ever know, turn out to be mistaken. Thus, either it is in objective fact that every man has the right to spank his wife and daughters, or it is an objective fact that it is not the case that every man has the right to spank his wife and daughters. Suppose that it is the latter that is an objective fact. Then, no matter what is said in a theory that is generally accepted in some cultures, and independently of what our attitudes are or might have been, and despite what our currently favoured theory might state, it is not the case that every man has the right to spank his wife and daughters. Thus, in speaking of moral rules we must be careful to distinguish between moral rules as stated in some or other moral theory, and objective moral rules which make up part of the moral facts and are thus part of the real world. Of course, whenever we say what (we think) the objective moral rules are, we are stating what our favoured theory says; but as fallibilists we must accept that our favoured theory may turn out to be false. It would be tedious to add that proviso to each of our statements, so it should always be taken as read. When I speak about the objective moral rules I am not claiming authoritative knowledge, I am talking about what is said by the theory that I expound and defend in this book. A person inherits a set of moral views from the culture of his community. He may exercise his critical rationality in subjecting those inherited moral views to criticism. He may be spurred to do that by noticing

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inconsistencies within his inherited body of moral theory or by noting inconsistencies between that body of moral theory and the moral theories accepted in other communities, either contemporary or historical. His criticisms of these theories may inspire him to propose new moral theories of his own, which he may criticise in turn. His critical evaluation may enable him to formulate a moral theory that is self-consistent and plausible; but it seems almost inevitable that it will enable him to formulate several such theories that are inconsistent with each other. Further, some theories that, though apparently self-consistent, seem implausible to him, may seem plausible to others, particularly to others who belong to communities with a different cultural inheritance. The question then arises as to which of these theories is true. Many philosophers have taken up the theory of rule consequentialism, which was propounded by Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) and endorsed by David Hume, according to which the true moral theory is the one that states a system of rules which, if universally acted upon, would tend to produce the best results for the well-being of persons in general (Berkeley 1953, paras. V–XI, XIII, XV, XXV, XXXI–XXXII; Hume 1888, book III, pt. II, sect. ii, pp. 497–498, and sect. vi, pp. 531–533; 1975, sect. IV, and appendix III, pp. 304–307). There is, however, a problem with Berkeley’s formulation. Suppose (for the moment) that we agree with Berkeley that (*)  if the true theory of moral rules were universally acted upon, the well-being of persons in general would tend to be secured (Berkeley 1953, para. VIII). It does not follow that (#)  the true theory of moral rules is that one which, if it were universally acted upon, the well-being of persons in general would tend to be secured (Berkeley 1953, para. XV). The reason is that the true moral theory must include, in addition to its primary rules, also secondary rules concerning what is permissible or obligatory when the primary rules are broken. Secondary rules

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• oblige wrongdoers to compensate their victims so that the latter are no worse off and so that the former do not profit from their wrongdoing; • permit punishment of wrongdoers, to deter those who think they have a good chance of committing a wrong without being detected, and to deter persons from committing wrongs for which compensation is not possible, such as murder (Nozick 1974, chap. 4); • permit victims, or other persons acting on their behalf, to claim compensation or to exact punishment. A moral theory that is just like the true moral theory except that it contains no secondary rules would not be the true moral theory, that is, it would be false. Yet if it were universally acted upon, the well-being of persons in general would tend to be secured; because, if it were universally acted upon, its failure to include secondary rules would not matter. Thus, the truth of (*) does not imply the truth of (#). The problem with a theory of moral rules that does not include secondary rules is that it fails to take proper account of the conflict between self-interest and morality which makes it a near-certainty that the primary moral rules will not be universally acted upon. That suggests that (#) should be replaced with the following: (‡)  the true theory of moral rules is the one that is permissibly enforceable and that, if it were universally enforced, the well-being of persons in general would tend to be secured. Persons are agents and thus have free will, which means that their actions are undetermined, so the only way of enforcing a set of moral rules upon persons is by imposition of penalties for transgression. A moral theory that does not include secondary rules cannot permissibly be enforced, according to its own rules, because it comprises no rules specifying rectification or punishment; indeed actions of rectification or punishment would typically be prohibited by the theory. For instance, the theory would prohibit the non-consensual removal of property from persons even when such acts are performed to rectify a theft, because the moral theory has no rules concerning rectification. An attempt to enforce the theory would be a violation of it. Henceforward, to avoid

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circumlocution, all talk about moral theories will be about permissibly enforceable moral theories. Since we cannot discover whether any theory is true (Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3), we cannot discover which moral theory is true. That leads us immediately to the substitute question as to how various rival moral theories can be evaluated as better or worse, so that the one that appears best can be accepted as a guide to moral conduct. Rule consequentialism suggests that we might be able to evaluate a moral theory as better or worse than others according to the extent to which it seems plausible that the well-­ being of persons in general would be secured if it were universally enforced. Further, the fact that there exist communities that differ with respect to the moral theories that they hold offers the prospect of empirical evidence that can help to rate moral theories as better or worse, depending on how their enforcement contributes to the well-being of persons in general in those communities (Hayek 1978a, p. 9). There are, however, a number of difficulties. The first concerns what counts as the well-being of persons in general. Widespread prosperity or happiness may seem obvious suggestions. However, as we saw in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.3, for many people, happiness seems to play a rather small part in achieving fulfilment; and some people seem to find fulfilment despite suffering hardship or being less prosperous than other people in their community. The general well-being of persons in a community, it seems clear, should be identified with the fulfilment of its members. The more members who achieve fulfilment, the greater the general well-being; the greater the fulfilment of the members, the greater the general well-being. However, that raises questions about the trade-offs between the fulfilment achieved by different members of the community. For instance, is the general well-being better achieved in a community in which everyone has a moderate degree of fulfilment or in a community in which a few persons attain fulfilment that falls significantly below that level while numerous other persons attain fulfilment that is significantly above that level? The second difficulty concerns the measurement of fulfilment. In discovering whether a person is fulfilled, great weight must be given to the person’s own assessment of whether he is fulfilled, since he is normally best-placed to make a judgement about it. That suggests that surveys may

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be useful. Yet we saw in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4, that persons may be self-­ deceived or deluded about whether they are fulfilled. They may also mistakenly think that they are fulfilled simply because they have never experienced anything better than the relatively unfulfilled existence that they have heretofore lived. They may, in Stoical fashion, have adjusted their expectations to their circumstances. So an appropriate corrective to the surveys would need to be added, if it could be discovered. The third difficulty is that it would be simplistic to assume that how a community fares depends only upon what moral theory is enforced in the community. It may be that there is not just one moral theory enforced in the community but, rather, a number of rival moral theories enforced in different sections of the community. It may be that the natural environment in which the community lives is particularly harsh or dangerous, being subject to recurrent earthquakes or tsunamis or hurricanes or contagious diseases which shorten the lives or afflict the capabilities of many persons. None of those three difficulties show that it is in principle impossible to test moral theories empirically according to how persons fare when the theories are generally enforced. But individually and together the difficulties do show that such testing is not a straightforward matter. There is, however, a more serious difficulty. The fourth difficulty is that whether a person finds fulfilment, or to what extent, is partly a matter of luck. Fulfilment depends upon self-­ discovery, which depends on trial and error. A person may inhabit a material, social and moral environment that is the best available for self-­ discovery yet fail to discover himself, not for want of trying, and not because of deficiencies in his exercise of his critical rationality, but because his conjectures about his nature repeatedly turn out to be wide of the mark and the lessons he draws from his failures turn out similarly to be mistaken. As a result, through no fault of his own, he spends his whole life ‘barking up the wrong tree.’ That fourth difficulty may be illustrated by the history of science. Aristotle propounded the intuitively plausible conjecture that, in the absence of interference, heavier bodies fall more rapidly than lighter bodies (Aristotle 2016, p.  6). Galileo Galilei offered a thought-experiment that provided an a priori refutation of Aristotle’s conjecture (Galileo 2008,

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pp. 301–302). He proposed instead the rival conjecture that freely falling bodies travel with constant acceleration, no matter what their mass (Galileo 2008, pp. 335–336). Isaac Newton invented the conjecture that bodies in free fall have increasing acceleration caused by a force of gravity acting at a distance, which implied that Aristotle was wrong because the rate of fall does not vary with mass, and that Galileo was wrong because the acceleration is not constant (Popper 1973, pp. 199–200). Newton’s conjecture was considered outlandish by most scientists at the time who assumed that physical changes are to be explained in terms of bodies colliding with one another and who derided action at a distance as “occult” (Koyré 1957, chaps. VII–XII; Kuhn 1957, pp. 258–259). Yet Newton’s theory of gravity, in conjunction with the rest of his theory, turned out to be remarkably successful in explaining and predicting bodily motions; it was the leading scientific theory for two centuries. However, according to Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory, there is no force of gravity, and Newton, Galileo and Aristotle were all mistaken about the acceleration of freely falling bodies (Coleman 1969, pp. 105–107; Russell 1969, pp. 17, 87, 136–144). Despite their extraordinary intellectual gifts, their dedicated work and their exemplary exercise of critical rationality, neither Aristotle, nor Galileo, nor Newton was lucky enough to discover the truth about the nature of free fall. Perhaps Einstein will eventually be shown to be mistaken, too. What the fourth difficulty shows is that testing a moral theory according to how persons fare in communities in which the theory is enforced is quite mistaken because our fallibility means that the achievement of fulfilment is always partly a matter of luck. Given the fallible nature of every person’s quest for fulfilment, no set of prior conditions is such that it will tend to secure the best outcome for the fulfilment of persons in general. Thus, contrary to my defence of it elsewhere (Frederick 2016b), rule consequentialism is mistaken, as I explain in a little more detail in Sect. 6.6 of Chap. 6. The true moral theory is related not to the achievement of general personal fulfilment, but to the conditions that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. We should evaluate moral theories not according to the sorts of outcomes that are in fact achieved, or even that are expected to be achieved, but according to the opportunities for good outcomes that are provided, whatever

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turns out to be achieved. To some extent such evaluation is an empirical matter, as we will see below in Sect. 5.5 and in Chap. 6, Sect. 6.2; but because the focus is on possibilities rather than actualities we can make some progress in rating moral theories a priori. This proposal to rate moral theories as better or worse according to the opportunities for general personal fulfilment that their enforcement would provide is, of course, a proposal to be held open to criticism and possible replacement by a better proposal. The critical rationalist, recall (Chap. 3, Sect. 3.5), is one who holds all of his views open to criticism (including his critical rationalism) and who is prepared to replace any of his views with a different one that can be shown by argument to be better. I have argued that my proposal is superior to the proposal of rule consequentialism, which I take to be the best alternative. In Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5, I also consider and reject another rival proposal. I will stick with my proposal until I am shown or can discover a better proposal to replace it. Achieving fulfilment depends upon self-discovery. Self-discovery requires experimentation with different kinds of life. Such experimentation requires freedom. The true moral theory, then, assigns to persons an entitlement to freedom. How extensive does that entitlement to freedom need to be in order to provide the conditions that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment? To put it another way: what constraints must be put on a person’s entitlement to freedom in order to provide the conditions that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment? One answer to that question is suggested by a contention of Immanuel Kant: Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity. (1996, p. 30 [6: 237])

The answer suggested by Kant’s contention is that the conditions that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment require that the only limit to the entitlement to freedom

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of a person is every other person’s equal entitlement to freedom. However, that seems problematic. Children in their early-teens normally have an appreciation of moral obligations as well as the ability to be critically rational. They are therefore normally persons (Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1). Yet it is generally thought that their entitlement to freedom is more limited than that of adults. Allowing that some persons are entitled to a lesser degree of freedom than some others does not conflict with Kant’s stipulation that moral rules have the form of a universal law. The statement of a universal moral law is one that applies to all persons and that contains no expressions identifying specific individual persons: to each person it assigns a general property on condition that he has some other general property. Compare an example of a statement of a simple universal law of nature, taken from Newton’s physical theory: (a) every body is such that, if it is not acted upon by a net force, then either it remains at rest or it moves without acceleration in a straight line. So, one schema for a statement of a simple universal moral law assigning entitlement to freedom to persons is: (b) every person is such that, if he satisfies the condition C, then he has the degree of entitlement to freedom F, where neither ‘C’ nor ‘F’ may be replaced with an expression containing a reference to a specific person. Thus, it is not a statement of a universal moral law that every person is such that, if he is Bill Clinton, then he has a greater degree of entitlement to freedom than anyone else. However, there may be a consistent set of different statements of universal moral law which together assign different degrees of entitlement to freedom to persons of different types. For instance, pretending that ‘F1’ and ‘F2’ are descriptions of different degrees of entitlement to freedom: (c) every person is such that, if he is an adult, then he has F1; (d) every person is such that, if he is a child, then he has F2.

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Note that (c) and (d) concern persons only, so babies and infants too young to have acquired the capacity for critical rationality are not ascribed F2 by (d). But (d) is a simplification because children develop into adults gradually, so ‘F2’ will need to cover a range of different degrees of entitlement to freedom. Children are not the only persons to whom we fail to ascribe the degree of entitlement to freedom that we ascribe to typical adults. Adults with some significant mental impairments are not accorded the freedom to marry or to take out a mortgage, for example. It is often contended that there are also other adults who are entitled only to a diminished degree of freedom. Suppose that ‘F1,’ ‘F2’ and ‘F3’ represent, in order, descriptions of descending degrees of entitlement to freedom. According to Aristotle (1955, book 8, chap. 10; 1962, book I, chaps. 2, 4–7, 13 and 14): (e) every person is such that, if he is an adult male Greek, then he has F1; (f ) every person is such that, if she is an adult female Greek, then she has F2; (g) every person is such that, if he is a Greek child, then he has F3; (h) every person is such that, if he is a barbarian, then he lacks entitlement to freedom entirely. Aristotle attributes the variations in entitlement to freedom to variations in the capacity for deliberation: “the deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave [in this context, a barbarian (Aristotle 1962, book I, chap. 2)]; in a female it is inoperative, in a child undeveloped” (1962, book I, chap. 13). Aristotle’s description of barbarians (natural slaves) seems to deny that they have the capacity for critical rationality, and thus to deny that they are persons, in which case (h) would be better expressed thus: every barbarian lacks entitlement to freedom entirely. Aristotle did, though, ascribe to barbarians an understanding of moral obligations, since he thought that an enslaved barbarian had the obligation to obey his slaveholder (1962, book I, chaps. 5 and 13). Aristotle’s assignment of different grades of entitlement to freedom to persons and other humans according to the social category to which they belong is not idiosyncratic. In some Islamic and other societies governed by traditional religious norms adult women are assigned a lower grade of

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entitlement to freedom than are adult men; and the same was true of Western societies until quite recently. In many historical societies the level of entitlement to freedom that was assigned to a person depended on that person’s religion; and the same holds of some contemporary societies. For instance, in much of Europe, for centuries, there was a wide range of occupations that it was deemed impermissible for Jews to enter. Similar discriminations have been based on a person’s race, most notably in the United States of America and South Africa. When they are offered, defences of moral theories that assign differential levels of entitlement to freedom to individual persons depending upon the category to which the person belongs seem to take one of two forms. The first form contends, as Aristotle did, that persons (or humans) in specific social categories have intellectual disabilities. Such claims can be tested empirically. With regard to the most common forms of such claims (concerning, sex, race and religion) I assume that it is uncontroversial, in the current state of our knowledge, that the claims fail the empirical test. Some adult humans do have intellectual disabilities which bear on the freedom to which they are entitled; but those humans are identified by tests of their mental impairment, not by means of their sex, race or religion. In the second form of defence of such discriminatory moral theories, lower levels of entitlement to freedom are connected to wrongdoing. A person who defaults on his obligations to another person may be punished by having his entitlement to freedom diminished, temporarily or permanently, by means of incarceration, bondage, exclusion from some areas of life, or execution. Once the punishment is over, the wrongdoing is expiated and the perpetrator (if still alive) returns to his previous level of freedom. Here, again, is Kant (1996, p. 104 [6: 329–330]): Certainly, no human being in a state can be without any dignity… The exception is someone who has lost it by his own crime, because of which, though he is kept alive, he is made a mere tool of another’s choice. (either of the state or of another citizen)

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It should be noted that this quotation qualifies or amplifies (depending on what Kant meant by an “original right”) what Kant said in the previous quotation from him. In some moral theories whole classes of people are held to have lower than standard levels of entitlement to freedom because they have committed crimes, or perhaps because they are (more than normally) inclined to commit crimes. Sometimes the crimes are ancestral. For example, in some Catholic communities Jews have been deemed to have a diminished entitlement to freedom because ancient Jews (allegedly) persecuted Christ or Christians. I assume here that such theories should be rejected. A person is responsible for his own actions. The fact that he bears a salient resemblance or relationship to some others who have committed crimes does not render him responsible for their crimes. We have noted three grounds on which an individual person’s entitlement to freedom may fall short of that which is standard for persons: immaturity; mental impairment; unexpiated wrongdoing. It is tempting to connect the first two with deficiencies in critical rationality. Indeed, we saw above that Aristotle seems to do so when he links inferior grades of moral standing to defects in the deliberative faculty. I think we should resist that temptation. In Chap. 4, Sect. 4.3, we noted that the capacity for critical rationality requires the command of a language that permits the expression not only of descriptions but also of arguments. So I suggest that the ability of a creature to produce arguments, the ability to argue for or against a proposition, shows that the creature has critical rationality. A child is normally able to exhibit critical rationality even before he becomes a teenager. So long as he also has an appreciation of moral obligation, he qualifies as a person. Yet we think that he is not yet entitled to the same freedom to direct his own life as is a normal adult. The reason seems to be, not deficits in his capacity to reason or deliberate, but deficits in his knowledge and experience. He knows too little of how the world works and of how people behave to be competent in exercising his critical rationality effectively in deciding what to do with regard to momentous matters. In people without serious mental impairment, deficits in knowledge and experience are usually alleviated over time but they are never eradicated. A person aged eighteen typically has greater competence in making

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momentous decisions than he had as a ten-year-old; but as a thirty-year-­ old he typically has greater competence still; and as a fifty-year-old even more. Thus, it may seem that entitlement to freedom typically increases through a person’s life until an old age, from when it typically decreases. Alternatively, there may be a specific level of minimum competence at which full entitlement to freedom is attained and which, when lost, replaces full entitlement to freedom with some diminished level of entitlement. It is the second view that is generally accepted even though it involves a degree of arbitrariness in identifying the level of competence at which full entitlement to freedom is attained. It is that view that I endorse, too, for the following reasons. The quest for self-discovery typically involves a range of momentous decisions, such as choosing a career, deciding whether or not to get married and to whom, whether or when to start a family, whether to buy a house, and others. But life is short. If one were unable to take such decisions for oneself until late on in life, one would be prevented from engaging in the experiments in living that are needed to find fulfilment. The level of competence required for full entitlement to freedom must therefore be set quite low if persons in general are to be allowed the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. Indeed, a person’s exercise of his entitlement to freedom enables him to acquire the knowledge and experience needed to make decisions about momentous matters more competently: the competence is acquired through trial and error. The arbitrariness of exactly where to set the level of knowledge and experience required for full entitlement to freedom is reflected in the custom common to diverse cultures of having a general “age of majority,” rather than an assessment of each person, and in the fact that societies differ concerning which age that is. There are numerous kinds of mental impairment but only some of them are related to degree of entitlement to freedom to direct one’s own life. Some of the impairments concern an inability to construct or evaluate arguments, and thus an absence of critical rationality, in which case the humans are not persons. Others concern an inability to acquire or retain the knowledge and experience needed for competence in deliberation concerning momentous matters. The level of freedom, if any, to which such humans or persons are entitled depends upon the degree of impairment.

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We therefore arrive at the following proposal. Let us call a ‘competent adult’ any person who has reached or passed the age of majority, and who is without a mental impairment that impinges on his competence to make decisions on momentous matters. Let ‘F1, F2 … Fn’ stand in for descriptions of levels of entitlement to freedom, with ‘F1’ standing in for a description of a higher level than ‘F2’ and so on down, and ‘Fn’ standing in for a description of the zero level of entitlement to freedom (that is, no entitlement to freedom). Then we have the following schema for a statement of a universal moral law: (i) every person is such that, if he is a competent adult who has committed no unexpiated wrong that is punishable by loss of liberty, then he has F1, otherwise he has one of F2 … Fn. It seems that both Aristotle and Kant could assent to (i). Kant would, it seems, maintain that the only constraints on a person’s entitlement to freedom are the entitlements to freedom of other persons, so that (j) all competent adults who have committed no unexpiated wrongs that are punishable by loss of liberty are equally entitled to the greatest amount of freedom that is consistent with the entitlements to freedom of other persons. However, here are two reasons to doubt that (j) is true. The first is that, if persons in general are to have scope for the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment, then some options that a person is able to take may be impermissible, not for the sake of the freedom of others, but for his own sake. Of course, that has already been recognised in the case of children and some persons with a mental impairment. What we are considering now is whether it should also be recognised for competent adults. Given that fulfilment depends upon self-discovery which in turn depends upon freedom, and given our fallibility, which implies that no one can know for sure what will fulfil another person, it may seem difficult to conceive how a competent adult’s freedom to experiment could be limited for his own sake.

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Suppose, however, that a person conjectures that his nature is such that he will find fulfilment in giving up his freedom and becoming a slave to another. Many philosophers have claimed that voluntary slavery is conceptually impossible; but I have shown elsewhere that their claims are mistaken and confused (Frederick 2016a). Suppose now that voluntary slavery is permissible. Then, Guy may offer to obey Dolly in all things, though without defaulting on the obligations that he owes to other persons. If Dolly accepts the offer, then Guy becomes her slave, voluntarily. However, Guy may be mistaken in thinking that he is a natural slave and he may discover his mistake after experiencing a period of slavery. As a slave, however, he will not be entitled to revoke his submission. He may ask Dolly’s permission to leave, but she might not grant it, in which case Guy will have discovered that he is not a natural slave but it will be impermissible for him to terminate the experiment and search for fulfilment in a rival way. So, if it were permissible for persons to choose the option of slavery, then the scope for persons in general to engage in experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment would be impaired. So, it is impermissible for persons to choose the option of slavery. Voluntary slavery, if permissible, is impermissible; therefore, it is impermissible (reductio ad absurdum). However, there is a counterpart argument for the opposite conclusion. Assume that voluntary slavery is impermissible. Then, persons who are slaves by nature are not entitled to choose to become slaves. They are consequently denied fulfilment. So, if voluntary slavery were impermissible, then the scope for persons in general to engage in experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment would be impaired. So, it is permissible for persons to choose the option of slavery. Voluntary slavery, if impermissible, is permissible; therefore, it is permissible. The resolution of the paradox is to distinguish two kinds of voluntary slavery, one permissible, the other impermissible. Permanent voluntary slavery is impermissible because it may prevent persons who mistakenly thought that they were natural slaves from disengaging from their experiment with slavery. Renewable fixed-term voluntary slavery is permissible, provided that reasonable safeguards are in place (Frederick 2014), because it allows natural slaves to find fulfilment while permitting those who mistakenly thought that they were natural slaves to rectify their error at the

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end of the fixed term. However, that does mean that persons are, for their own sake, that is, for the sake of their own scope for self-discovery, not entitled to the freedom to give up their freedom permanently. Somewhat similarly, since suicide prevents future self-discovery, thus precluding finding fulfilment, it is normally impermissible, for the sake of a person’s own scope for self-discovery. Yet it is permissible in those exceptional circumstances in which fulfilment is already precluded, as in the case of someone suffering unbearably from a terminal illness. The second reason to doubt that (j) is true is provided by animals that are not persons. If it is impermissible to treat such creatures cruelly, then it seems that the entitlements to freedom of other persons is not the only restriction on the entitlement to freedom of competent adults. We take up this issue in Sect. 5.5 below. In light of our discussion we must modify (j). It is not the case that all competent adults who have committed no unexpiated wrongs that are punishable by loss of liberty are equally entitled to the greatest amount of freedom that is consistent with the entitlements to freedom of other persons. We have instead arrived at the following. (k) Every competent adult has the same entitlement to freedom as every other competent adult, unless he has given up part of that entitlement voluntarily or forfeited part or all of it by his wrong actions. Every competent adult’s equal entitlement to freedom is restricted, not only by his obligations to respect the entitlements to freedom of all other persons (whether or not they are competent adults), but also by some constraints that are required for the sake of his own scope for self-discovery and—maybe—by some constraints on his treatment of animals that are not persons.

Technical Note: ‘Ought’ and ‘Is’ Before spelling out (k) in more detail, and more clearly, we should consider an objection to the approach taken in this section. It may be objected that the position expounded involves deriving ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’

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statements. Let ‘T’ stand for a moral theory. Then it seems that we are committed to the validity of the following derivation (or something like it). (i) Moral theory T is true if and only if: if T is universally enforced, the conditions will be realised that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment [Premise]. (ii) If T is universally enforced, the conditions will be realised that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment [Premise]. (iii) Moral theory T is true [Derived from (i) and (ii)]. (iv) Moral theory T affirms that no person ought to submit to interminable slavery [Premise]. (v) No person ought to submit to interminable slavery [Derived from (iii) and (iv)]. The derivation of (iii) from (i) and (ii) is valid in standard propositional logic. The derivation of (v) from (iii) and (iv) follows, given Tarski’s T schema (exemplified by: ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white). The conclusion, (v), is an ‘ought’ statement. So, if the premises (i), (ii) and (iv) are purely factual statements, then we have derived an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ It may be questioned whether we are committed to that derivation. The conditional that constitutes the right-hand-side of the biconditional in (i) is a counterfactual, not a material conditional, so propositional logic cannot be relied upon in deriving inferences from (i). However, it is the same counterfactual that appears in both (i) and (ii), so we can represent it in propositional logic as simply ‘p’ (rather than as a conditional), which evades the objection. It seems clear that (ii) and (iv) are purely factual premises. However, while the right-hand-side of the biconditional in premise (i) is purely factual, the left-hand-side is not. To affirm that a moral theory is true is equivalent to affirming that moral theory; the affirmation therefore implies all the ‘ought’ statements that the moral theory implies. Consequently, (i) is not purely factual; so the above argument does not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’

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The objection may be turned, more simply, on to premise (i) itself. If that premise is true, it seems it must be a necessary truth. It is not claimed that (i) is true in the actual world but not in some other possible worlds. The claim is, implicitly, that (i) holds in every possible world. Of course, it is a fallible claim; but necessary truths are not known with certainty. Indeed, we discovered empirically that water is H2O, yet that proposition is, if true, a necessary truth (Kripke 1980, pp. 126–129 and passim). In contrast, (i) is not an empirical truth because the left-hand-side of the biconditional implies ‘ought’ statements. Therefore, (i), if true, is a necessary truth and, if known, is known a priori. But if we thus accept (i) as an a priori necessity, then we accept that we can validly derive either side of the biconditional from the other. For, the necessary truth of (i) means that it is not possible that one side of the biconditional should be true while the other side of the biconditional is not. Since we accept that a priori, we accept that we can validly infer one side of the biconditional from the other; and, since one side of the biconditional is purely factual while the other side is moral, we accept that we can validly derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ Of course, the inference is not formally valid: it does not depend only on the logical forms of premise and conclusion. It depends upon what the two statements mean, though not in the trivial way in which the validity of deriving ‘John is unmarried’ from ‘John is a bachelor’ depends upon the definition of ‘bachelor’ as ‘unmarried man.’ A better parallel would be the valid inference of ‘this object is extended’ from ‘this object is red.’ It is a priori plausible that there is a necessary connection. I suspect that any lingering suspicions about this sort of way of deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ are a hangover from positivism. It has long been noted that there are formally valid arguments in which an ‘ought’ is derived from an ‘is’ (Prior 1960). But in such cases the inferences are in a way vacuous, such as the inference from ‘tea-drinking is common in England’ to ‘either tea drinking is common in England or all New Zealanders ought to be shot,’ or the inference from ‘undertakers are church officers’ to ‘undertakers ought to do whatever all Church officers ought to do.’ But there are no formally valid arguments in which ‘ought’ conclusions are inferred from purely factual premises in a non-vacuous way. What we have recently noted is that there are some non-vacuous

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inferences, which are informally valid, in which ‘ought’ conclusions are derived from ‘is’ premises. There is a tendency amongst positivistic philosophers to restrict validity to formal validity (Quine 1976, pp. 137–143). If an argument is formally valid, its validity can, in principle, be shown in a finite number of mechanical steps; but if its validity is informal it can be discovered only by a priori evaluation, which positivistic philosophers tend to abhor. However, as we argued in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.2, the acceptance of formal methods itself depends, ultimately, upon a priori evaluation of their soundness. Further, we cannot employ formal methods until informal sentences have been put into logical form. That often requires care, creativity and technical skill, and it is easy to make mistakes, especially, for example, with regard to the scope of connectives or quantifiers (Quine 1960, pp.  157–190). But, as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) pointed out, whether or not the conversion to logical form is correct can be judged only by an a priori evaluation of logical equivalence (in all relevant respects), that is, of whether or not the informal sentence entails its formal counterpart and vice versa (Leibniz 1982, p.  479). So we cannot dispense with informal validity.

5.3 Rights and Freedoms So far we have been speaking of a person’s level of entitlement to freedom and his obligations to avoid encroaching on the entitlement to freedom of other persons. That talk is vague because there are different kinds of entitlements and obligations. To proceed farther, we need to differentiate some of the different kinds. For that purpose I utilise the work of Wesley Hohfeld (1879–1918), which has been developed in some detail by Judith Thomson (Hohfeld 1919; Thomson 1990). There are alternative accounts of these central moral and legal notions (Reinach 2012); but I assume that what I say here can, without much distortion, be transposed into the alternative terms. There is a hierarchy of rights and correlative obligations. On the ground level we have claim-rights, liberty-rights and obligations. Let ‘T’ stand in for a description of a type of action or omission, and let ‘x’ and

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‘y’ stand in for designations of any persons. A claim-right is correlative with an obligation: (1) x has a claim-right against y that y does not perform an action of type T if and only if y has an obligation to x not to perform an action of type T (Hohfeld 1919, pp. 36–38). A liberty-right is correlative with an absence of a claim-right. Thus, for any persons, x and y, (2) y has, with respect to x, a liberty-right to perform an action of type T if and only if x has no claim-right against y that y does not perform an action of type T (Hohfeld 1919, pp. 38–50). In light of (1), an alternative formulation of (2) is: (3) y has, with respect to x, a liberty-right to perform an action of type T if and only if y has no obligation to x not to perform an action of type T. Consider some examples. If Alf promises to pay Betty five pounds, then Betty has a claim-right against Alf that Alf pays her five pounds, and Alf has the correlative obligation to Betty to pay her five pounds. Alf has a claim-right against Betty that she does not punch him on the nose, so Betty has the correlative obligation to Alf not to punch him on the nose. If Alf has no claim-right against Betty that she does not walk past his front door, then Betty has, with respect to Alf, a liberty-right to walk past Alf ’s front door; that is to say, Betty has, with respect to Alf, no obligation not to walk past Alf ’s front door. If Betty has no obligation to Alf to sweep Alf ’s drive, then Betty has a liberty-right, with regard to Alf, not to sweep Alf ’s drive; that is to say, Alf has no claim-right against Betty that she sweep his drive. On the next level there are rights to alter, and obligations not to alter, other rights and obligations. Let ‘M’ stand in for a description of a right or an obligation. As before, ‘x’ and ‘y’ stand in for designations of any persons. An immunity-right is correlative with a moral disability:

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(4) x has an immunity-right against y that y does not alter a right or an obligation, M, of x if and only if y has, with regard to x, a moral disability to alter M of x (Hohfeld 1919, pp. 60–63). An authority-right (sometimes called a ‘power’) is correlative with an absence of an immunity-right: (5) y has an authority-right, with regard to x, to alter a right or an obligation, M, of x if and only if x has no immunity-right against y that y does not alter M of x (Hohfeld 1919, pp. 50–60). In light of (4), an alternative formulation of (5) is: (6) y has an authority-right, with regard to x, to alter a right or an obligation, M, of x if and only if y has, with regard to x, no moral disability to alter M of x. It can thus be seen that an immunity-right is parallel to a claim-right, a moral disability to perform an action is parallel to an obligation not to perform that action, and an authority-right is parallel to a liberty-right (though Hohfeld 1919, p. 60, assimilates an authority-right to a claim-­ right, and an immunity-right to a liberty-right). Consider some illustrations. Alf has a claim-right against Betty that Betty does not use Alf ’s car, so Betty has an obligation to Alf not to use Alf ’s car. Alf also has an immunity-right against Betty that Betty does not alter his claim-right; so Betty has, with regard to Alf, a moral disability to alter Alf ’s claim right. If Alf exercises his authority-right, with respect to Betty, to make a promise to Betty to give her his car, then Alf gives Betty a claim-right against him that he gives her his car and he gives himself an obligation to Betty to give her his car. However, Betty has an authority-­ right, as regards Alf, to release Alf from his promise, thereby giving up her claim-right and depriving Alf of his obligation; so Alf has no immunity-­ right against Betty that Betty does not annul his obligation (and Betty has no immunity-right against herself that she does not annul her corresponding claim-right). In other words, Betty’s authority-right against Alf to annul Alf ’s obligation means that she has no moral disability, with

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regard to Alf, to alter that obligation. If Alf offers the ownership of his car to Betty for a hundred pounds, he thereby exercises his authority-right with regard to Betty to create in Betty an authority-right with regard to him. Betty’s new authority-right entitles her (by accepting Alf ’s offer) to create in Alf a new obligation to her to give her his car, and to create in herself a new obligation to Alf to pay Alf one hundred pounds. Betty has no immunity-right against Alf that he does not bestow upon her a new authority-right by offering to sell her his car. But she does not have to exercise her new authority-right. If she does, then her authority-right disappears. If she does not, her new authority-right will lapse after a time and Alf ’s offer will be taken to be withdrawn if it is not explicitly withdrawn. If Alf places an advertisement for the sale of his car at one hundred pounds, then he exercises his authority-right with regard to everyone else to create in everyone else an authority-right with regard to Alf to give Alf the obligation to him to hand over Alf ’s car and to give himself the obligation to Alf to pay Alf one hundred pounds. That is to say, by exercising his authority-right, Alf gives up his immunity-right against each other person that that person does not impose on Alf an obligation to sell his car to that person. When philosophers in the liberal tradition speak about freedom, they often mean ‘negative freedom’ (Berlin 1969, p.  122), that is, freedom from interference by other persons using physical force or the threat of physical force (Rothbard 1998, chaps. 27–28). A person’s entitlement to negative freedom tends to increase with his rights and decrease with his obligations. A person’s obligations, including his moral disabilities, make some options impermissible for him: if he tries to take those options, the persons to whom he owes the obligations may be entitled to use force to interfere. A person’s liberty-rights and authority-rights make some options permissible for him: no one is entitled to employ or to threaten force to prevent him from taking those options. A person’s claim-rights and immunity-rights make it impermissible for others to curtail some of his options: no one is entitled to employ or to threaten force to take those options from him. So, if there is to be equal entitlement to negative freedom for competent adults who have not forfeited part or all of their entitlement to freedom by their wrong actions, then all such persons must have the same rights and obligations.

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However, that would make the demand for equal entitlement to freedom absurd. Consider a few examples. It would require that whenever a competent adult who has committed no unexpiated wrong makes a promise to another such person, he must make the same (or corresponding) promise to every other such person, and also that each of those persons must make the same (or corresponding) promise to him. It would require that, whenever such a person waives his claim-right against molestation by a sexual partner, he must also waive that claim-right against molestation by all other such persons, so that it becomes permissible for them also to have sex with him; and all other such persons would also have to waive their claim-rights against molestation against all others. It would require that, if such a person gives up his claim-rights to most of his possessions to live an ascetic life, then all other such persons must also give up their claim-rights to most of their possessions too. The equal entitlement to freedom in which we, as well as Aristotle, Kant and other philosophers, are interested, does not mean equal rights and obligations. That is, when we speak about an equal entitlement to freedom, the freedom in question is not negative freedom. The freedom in which we are interested is freedom for persons in general to experiment in quest of personal fulfilment, that is, the freedom to experiment with kinds of life, or the freedom to direct one’s own life. In terms of the types of rights and obligations that we have just considered, it seems that the entitlement to such freedom requires the following four kinds of rights: (A) authority-rights to • impose on himself obligations to others by means of promises, • waive or abandon or give away his claim-rights, authority-rights and immunity-rights, • release others from their obligations to him, • give others authority-rights to impose obligations upon him and upon themselves by means of agreements; (B) immunity-rights corresponding to the moral disability of others to impose new obligations upon him;

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(C) liberty-rights to act in ways that do not contravene any of his obligations; (D) claim-rights against others impinging on his body. The idea is that when a person reaches the age of majority, provided he has committed no unexpiated wrong, all other persons have the moral disability to impose obligations upon him, unless either he consents to it or he commits a wrong. But he is in a position to acquire new obligations and new rights by engaging with others in mutually agreeable ways. He must therefore have the liberty-rights to engage with others and, more generally, to make use of his body without interference from others, providing that he meets his obligations to others. I guess that (A), (C) and (D) are all intuitively acceptable; but (B) may seem doubtful. It should help to resolve such doubt if we consider some potential mistaken objections to (B). First, suppose that Alan and Bill is each entitled to the freedom to direct his own life. They do not know each other. Alan is walking down some concrete steps into an underpass when, a little way in front of him, Bill trips and falls down the steps. There is no-one else around and Alan is not in a desperate hurry on some important business. Consequently, Alan now has an obligation to Bill to help Bill. So, Bill has by his actions assigned to Alan a new obligation. Since Alan and Bill is each entitled to the freedom to direct his own life, (B) is false. However, the objection misconstrues (B). Bill did not assign a new obligation to Alan by means of an exercise of an authority-right: Bill has no such authority-right, that is, he has a moral disability to do any such thing. Bill’s unintentional action of tripping and then falling down the steps, in the circumstances, created a new obligation for Alan. Even for competent adults who have committed no unexpiated wrongs, who are therefore entitled to the freedom to direct their own lives, new obligations can be foisted on them out of the blue, not by the exercise of authority-rights by other persons, but simply by the vicissitudes of human life. A standard example is a man walking past a lake who notices a boy having difficulty in the water who is in danger of drowning. The man can save the boy’s life at relatively small opportunity cost to himself. He therefore has the obligation (of beneficence) to save the boy. The reason for

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that obligation is that the scope for persons in general to experiment with kinds of life will be enhanced if a person suffering a serious adversity is helped by another in the vicinity at little marginal cost to that other. It is the marginal cost to the agent that determines whether the obligation exists. For instance, if the man is just killing time by taking a walk around the lake (he has time to spare), he will have the obligation to save the drowning boy (barring unusual circumstances); but if he encounters drowning boys numerous times a day, every day, he may have an obligation to save some of them, but not all of them, and perhaps not many, because the marginal cost to him of saving a boy will typically rise, at an increasing rate, with the number of boys previously saved. Obligations of beneficence exist for the sake of the freedom of persons in general to experiment with kinds of life; but persons who spend their whole time, or most of it, saving drowning boys will lack opportunities to discover their own fulfilment, except in the special case of a person who conjectures that he will find his fulfilment in saving drowning boys to the exclusion of almost everything else. Consider a different type of case. A doctor rushing to the scene of an accident where he can save several lives notices a drowning boy in a lake as he races past. If the marginal cost to the doctor of saving the boy is small, then he has the obligation to save the boy as well as the obligation to get to the scene of the accident as soon as possible; but, in the circumstances, the first obligation may be overridden by the second obligation (Frederick 2015, p. 259). For the second type of putative counter example to (B) we suppose that Alan, Bill and Carl is each entitled to the freedom to direct his own life. If Alan attacks Bill he confers upon Bill a new liberty-right to injure Alan (in self-defence): by defaulting on his obligation to Bill not to injure Bill, Alan removes Bill’s obligation to Alan not to injure Alan. So far, no one has exercised an authority-right to impose a new obligation on another. However, suppose that Carl is nearby and feels obliged to defend Bill against Alan’s attack. Then Alan, by his actions, has assigned to Carl a new obligation to Bill to restrain Alan. So, Carl is entitled to the freedom to direct his own life but (B) is not true of him. That objection is doubly mistaken. Despite Carl feeling that he has an obligation to intervene, it is not the case that Carl has that obligation, at least on the assumption that intervening would be highly risky to Carl

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(and thus not required by a obligation of beneficence). Alan’s actions have assigned to Carl a new liberty-right, with regard to Alan, to restrain Alan; but Carl has no obligation to Bill to endanger himself by intervening. Such intervention would be commendable but supererogatory. Thus (B) holds. But even had it been the case that Alan, by his action, conferred upon Carl a new obligation to Bill, Alan would have done so by acting wrongly. Therefore, (B) would still hold: Alan had the moral disability to assign the new obligation to Carl; if he did manage to assign a new obligation to Carl, he did so by acting beyond the scope of his authority-rights. Here is the third type of putative counter example to (B). Suppose that Alan, Bill and Carl each has the entitlement to the freedom to direct his own life. Alan offers his car to Bill for one hundred pounds. Bill now has the authority-right with respect to Alan to give Alan an obligation to Bill to hand over the car to Bill and, with respect to himself, to give himself an obligation to Alan to hand over one hundred pounds to Alan. However, if Bill accepts Alan’s offer, he also changes Carl’s obligations. For Carl will lose the obligation to Alan not to use Alan’s car but gain an obligation to Bill not to use Bill’s car. Therefore, (B) is false. It seems clear that this objection is a ‘technical’ one rather than a substantive one. Carl’s obligations have not changed substantively: he has just had one obligation replaced by another which is in substance the same. Before the transaction between Alan and Bill, Carl could not use Alan’s car; after the transaction, he cannot use Bill’s car; but it is the same car. We can avoid the objection by understanding ‘new obligations’ in (B) to mean ‘substantially new obligations’ or something like that. The qualification will be assumed in what follows. It might be protested that there are cases in which it does make a substantial difference when the person to whom one owes an obligation has been changed. For example, if Carl owes money to sweet-natured Dolly, it could make a substantial difference to Carl if Dolly sells the debt to Eric Bloodaxe. However, that makes no substantial change to Carl’s obligation: Carl still has an obligation to pay a sum of money and the sum is the same amount as before. Admittedly, Carl’s well-being may be affected if he is having financial difficulties and Eric is fond of using immoral means to

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secure prompt payment. But that does not conflict with (B): despite his skill with the axe, Eric has the moral disability to assign new obligations to Carl unless Carl invites him to do so. A fourth type of putative counter example to (B) is the following. Alan and Carl each has the entitlement to the freedom to direct his own life. Alan rents his bungalow from Carl. Carl now wants to sell the property, so he gives Alan two months’ notice to leave. As a consequence, Carl makes it the case, by exercising an authority-right of his, that in two months, Alan will have a new obligation to Carl to keep out of the bungalow. So (B) is false. However, Alan’s obligation to Carl to keep out of the bungalow is one that he had before he rented the bungalow. The rental contract specified notice periods, amongst other things, and Alan and Carl agreed to the contract. Alan thereby consented to accept the re-imposition of the obligation to Carl to keep out of the bungalow two months after receipt of notice to leave from Carl. There is therefore no conflict with (B). We may understand better what it is to be a person who is entitled to the freedom to direct his own life if we look briefly at persons who are not so entitled. We noted in Sect. 5.2 that very young children are not persons as they cannot reason and they cannot understand moral obligations. We noted also that even children in their early teens who do recognise moral obligations and who can argue are not entitled to the same level of freedom as a competent adult who has committed no unexpiated wrongs. The reason is their lack of knowledge and experience. Their entitlement to freedom to direct their own lives is deficient as compared with the competent adult with regard to each of (A), (B), (C), and (D). There are many activities in which an early teenager is not entitled to engage because his immaturity disqualifies him from having the required authority-rights. For example, he cannot get married, have sexual intercourse, take out a mortgage, open a bank account, or join the army. Other activities, such as driving a car, are not open to him because he lacks the required liberty-rights. Many, perhaps all, of the liberty rights he has are granted to him by his parents or guardians who may rescind them by imposing upon him, at their discretion, new obligations: he lacks the immunity rights of the competent adult. He even lacks some of the claim-rights that the competent adult has against other persons impinging on his body. For instance, he may undergo medical procedures without his consent. When children

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reach their late teens they begin to acquire new authority-rights, immunityrights, liberty-rights and claim-­rights that their parents or guardians cannot rescind. For instance, in Britain, the age of majority is eighteen, but children of sixteen have the authority-rights to engage in sexual relations, get a full-time job and join the army, as well as the liberty-right to drive a moped; and they also have the immunity-rights against their parents taking those rights away, and the claim-right against receiving medical treatment. Similar things are true of people with a some mental impairments. It may be debated whether British law is correct about the authority-rights, immunity-­rights, liberty-rights and claim-rights of teenagers who are below the age of majority. I use British law only to illustrate the point. That consideration of teenagers might prompt a new objection to (B). Suppose that, at the age of sixteen, Gary began a full-time job as an employee at Harry’s factory. When Gary turns eighteen, he is a competent adult. According to (B), all other persons have a moral disability to impose new obligations on Gary. However, Harry has the authority-right to terminate Gary’s employment, thereby imposing on Gary a new obligation not to enter Harry’s factory; so (B) seems false. However, while it is true that the obligation is not one that Gary has agreed to accept since reaching the age of majority, it is one that he agreed to accept when taking on the job, which is something that he had the moral authority to do. So (B) stands. A person’s entitlement to the freedom to direct his own life is not the same thing as his freedom to direct his own life. If his rights are not respected by others, if his entitlements are disregarded, his freedom to direct his own life will be impaired. A competent adult who has committed no unexpiated wrongs might be abducted and treated as a slave. If so, he still has the same entitlement to freedom to direct his own life as other competent adults who have committed no unexpiated wrongs, but he lives with very little freedom to direct his own life: his abductors might grant him some restricted freedom but they might also rescind it. He may plead with them that he is a free man. He is obviously not. What he means is that he is entitled to freedom which he is currently being unjustly denied. I have given a conceptual analysis of this type of situation elsewhere (Frederick 2016a, sect. II); though that analysis could be improved in light of the discussion here.

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Some philosophers may be concerned that this account involves a ‘moralised’ conception of freedom. Bader (2018, pp.  59–60) says that whether a conception of freedom is moralised depends upon whether non-moral (“descriptive”) facts are sufficient for characterising freedom or whether moral facts are also required. In the latter case, he says, freedom is characterised in such a way that it is presumed to be a moral good. He thereby conflates two very different ways in which a conception of freedom may be moralised. The account given above of the freedom to direct one’s own life makes use of moral notions; but it may appear at first that those moral notions could be stripped out. For what is explicated in terms of the rights specified in (A)–(D) is a person’s entitlement to the freedom to direct his own life. A person has the freedom to direct his own life if he has the rights specified in (A)–(D) and those rights are enforced. Consequently, a person has the freedom to direct his own life only if he is not prevented by other persons from performing the actions that (A) and (C) say that he has rights to perform. Instead of explaining a person’s entitlement to freedom in terms of rights, we can explain his freedom in terms of the types of action he can perform without interference. The trouble is, though, that those types of action are themselves described using moral notions. They include things like making a promise, transferring some (legitimately owned) property, releasing someone from an obligation, making agreements that create new reciprocal obligations, and acting in a way that does not violate the rights of other persons. Any account of freedom that says nothing of such ‘moralised’ types of action will be inadequate as an account of the freedom of persons, given that persons are beings who stand in moral relationships to other persons which they can modify. Consequently, an account of freedom that omits all moral facts, such as the fact that a person will not be obstructed from making a promise, cannot be an account of the freedom of persons. However, a characterisation of freedom that is moralised in that it involves reference to moral facts need not be moralised in the question-­ begging way that presumes that freedom is a moral good. Our account of the freedom to direct one’s own life is not moralised in the questionbegging way. A person’s entitlement to the freedom to direct his own life is explicated in terms of the rights specified in (A)–(D). So, a person who

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has those rights is entitled to freedom. But whether a person does have those rights is not thereby settled. We argued earlier, in Sect. 5.2, in favour of persons’ entitlements to the freedom to direct their own lives as a condition for the fulfilment of persons in general. Thus, to be free to direct one’s own life is to have a specific set of rights and to have them enforced; but the question of whether persons are entitled to be free to direct their own lives, the question of whether persons actually have the relevant moral rights, is a substantive moral question which cannot be decided by simply cashing out the notion of the freedom to direct one’s own life. Our conception of freedom is moralised in the sense that it employs moral notions but not in the sense that it begs some moral questions. It is not moralised in an objectionable way. A recurring objection to moralised accounts of freedom is that they imply that a legitimately imprisoned prisoner is free because his imprisonment, being legitimate, does not violate his rights (Bader 2018, p. 69). The objection does not apply to our account. A legitimately imprisoned prisoner lacks the entitlement to the freedom to direct his own life, specifically, because he lacks (B): he has had imposed upon him a new obligation to remain in prison and his gaolers can impose further new obligations upon him at their discretion, though within limits. Since his lack of such entitlement is enforced, he also lacks the freedom to direct his own life.

5.4 Private Property In pursuit of his goals a person exercises his liberty-rights to act permissibly (item (C) in the previous section). He must also make use of resources that are scarce and have alternative uses. If he uses them in one way at a particular time, he usually forsakes using them in another way at that time; and if he uses them up in one way, he forsakes using them at all in alternative ways. Further, when one person uses a resource it is typically unavailable for other persons to use. So there is competition for resources not only between alternative aims that an individual person may pursue but also between the aims of different persons. That raises the

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question concerning persons’ entitlements to use resources that are outside of the bodies of persons. Since morality requires that competent adults who have committed no unexpiated wrongs have equal freedom to direct their own lives, it may seem that morality enjoins that all competent adults have equal liberty-­ rights to use all resources that are outside of the bodies of persons. However, that cannot be so. Suppose that Alan conjectures that he will find fulfilment in being a builder. He gathers the resources needed to make a house and he begins construction. Meanwhile, Bob guesses that his life will go best if he devotes himself to carving ornamental items out of wood. He sees that Alan has put some large timber beams into the house that he is building. Since Bob has the liberty-rights to use any resources outside of persons’ bodies, he removes the timber from Alan’s part-constructed house and begins carving. Chas is convinced that the only way he can live a fulfilling life is by devoting a substantial part of his time to smashing up bricks. Alan’s partly-built house would provide much material for Chas’s pastime. Since Chas has the liberty-rights to use any resources outside of persons’ bodies, he takes a sledgehammer to Alan’s construction. Dick, needing some wood for his fire, gathers up Bob’s carvings and consigns them to the flames; and so on. If all competent adults had equal liberty-rights to use all resources that are outside of the bodies of persons, persons would be unable to execute their plans for their experiments in living, so the conditions for the fulfilment of persons in general would be undermined. It seems evident that, if persons are to be able to discover themselves, they must be able to acquire claim-rights over resources external to their bodies so that other persons have obligations not to remove or otherwise impinge upon those resources. In addition they will need the liberty-­ rights to make use of the resources to which they have acquired claim-­ rights. In other words, they must be able to acquire for themselves property in resources that are outside of the bodies of persons (Schmidtz 2010, pp. 79–80). Property that belongs to persons, that they can use or dispose of on their own initiative, is private property. It contrasts with public property, which belongs to the state, which persons can use only with the permission of the state and only in ways that the state permits (Friedman 2002, chap. 1). We noted in Sect. 5.3, items (C) and (D), that a person’s

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entitlement to freedom to direct his own life requires that he have liberty-­ rights to use his own body and claim-rights against others using it. It therefore entails that a person has private property in his own body. What we have just noticed now is that a person’s entitlement to freedom to direct his own life also entails his entitlement to acquire private property in resources that are external to the bodies of persons. That raises the question concerning the permissible ways in which persons may acquire private property. Some of those ways were discussed in the previous section: abandonment, waiving, gifts and exchange. Those are all ways in which one person’s private property may be acquired by another person. There has been much debate about acceptable ways of turning into private property those resources that are not currently anyone’s property. Despite the disagreements it seems usually to be agreed that it should be done equitably (Friedman 2011, pp.  34–38; Locke 1924, book II, chap. V; Lomasky 1987, chap. 6; Mack 2010; Nozick 1974, pp.  174–182). It also seems clear that, wherever practicable, it should be done. The example of Alan, Bob and company, above, showed that private property is required to enable persons to conduct their experiments in self-discovery. The more resources that are available for such use, the greater the scope for persons in general to engage in experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. In addition, when resources are not property, that is, when persons have liberty-rights to make use of resources but no claim-rights to exclude others from using them, those resources tend to be depleted rather than conserved or enhanced—a problem known as ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968). When resources are made into public property, there is a similar effect, because officers of the state who make decisions about the uses of public property lack the incentives and the knowledge required to use resources efficiently (Hayek 1949, pp.  77–91, 1978b; Tullock et  al. 2002 and references therein). Thus, although there may be a small class of exceptions (see Chap. 6, Sect. 6.2), when unowned or state-owned property is converted to private property, persons obtain greater, and increasing, resources to employ in their quests for fulfilment. Alf may acquire a resource that is the private property of Betty by giving in exchange for it, not another external resource, but a service that he provides to Betty by using his private property, including his own body;

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for instance, by fixing her leaking pipe. In fact, Alf may make a living by providing plumbing services to many others under agreed contractual terms. In order to focus on the plumbing work, which is his speciality, Alf may employ Clive as an administrator, to advertise Alf ’s services, answer queries, arrange meetings between Alf and potential customers, raise invoices, check receipts and such like. Alf provides services to customers for money. Clive provides services to Alf for money. But whereas Alf is an independent contractor, Clive is an employee. Alf provides services for his customers; but his customers do not employ him. The difference is that Alf is not subordinated to the customer. The two relate as equals: they agree what is to be done under what terms; then Alf manages the provision of that service himself without the customer supervising him. Clive on the other hand is an employee of Alf and takes instructions from him about what to do and when (Batt 1929, p. 6; Coase 1988, p. 39). The contract of employment gives the employer the authority-right to impose new obligations upon the employee. For instance, Alf may direct Clive to cease checking receipts and call a customer to arrange an appointment with Alf; in which case Clive has the obligation to comply. Clive’s right to direct his own life is to that extent diminished. Before the contract of employment was made, Alf and Clive had equally the right to direct his own life, neither subordinate to the other; but through that contract Clive gave Alf the authority-right to impose obligations upon him, until such time as Alf or Clive gives notice to terminate the contract. If Alf had had the authority-right to assign new obligations to Clive independently of Clive agreeing to give him that authority-right, then Clive would have been at least a partial slave of Alf, with diminished or no right to direct his own life. If Clive had given Alf the authority-right to assign new obligations to Clive without Clive having the option to terminate the arrangement, then Clive would have been a voluntary slave (total or partial) who had given up (all or some of ) the right to direct his own life. But since Clive agreed to become an employee and may decide for himself whether he wants to continue that way, he is a subordinate rather than a slave. Ronald Coase (1910–2013) has supplied part of the answer to the question of why some persons give up part of their entitlement to direct their own lives by becoming employees rather than independent

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contractors (Coase 1988, pp. 6–7 and chap. 2). When someone hires an independent contractor, he incurs transaction costs. For each job that he wants done, he has to specify in some detail what it is that needs doing, search for a suitable contractor who might do the job, negotiate with the contractor and agree terms, and then monitor and inspect the work to ensure that the contract has been fulfilled. But he can avoid many of these transaction costs if he employs someone who will do whatever jobs he is given, within the limits loosely specified in a job description, for a regular payment, the terms of which are negotiated once, rather than separately for each job. If contractors are reluctant to subordinate themselves to another person, the employer can use part of his saving on transaction costs to induce them, via a higher, or at least more secure, income. If employment contracts exist because organisation costs are lower than transaction costs, why do firms also have contracts with independent contractors and other firms? Why not employ them all? The answer is to be found in the law of diminishing returns. As firms get bigger, the marginal costs of organising eventually get bigger: the more employees a firm has, the more tiers of management and administration it needs. Beyond a particular point, organisation costs incurred exceed transaction costs saved and the economic limit of the size of the firm is reached. It seems unlikely, however, that that is the whole story. While some persons prefer to earn less as contractors than they could earn as employees, because it enables them to retain their independence, other persons seem to prefer being subordinates even if they may perhaps be able to earn more as independent contractors. Some persons, it seems, prefer to avoid the uncertainties and management responsibilities of independence; and some of them may even prefer being told what to do. A person who has private property in a particular resource has the authority-right to waive his claim-rights against others that they not use that resource. In so doing, he may stipulate the conditions under which some other persons, or perhaps any persons, may use the resource. For instance, the owner of a public house may permit anyone to enter and to purchase and consume drinks on the premises provided that he dresses and behaves decently (no swearing, no fighting, no singing, and so on). Similarly, the owner of a shopping mall will typically permit anyone to enter provided that he complies with the regulations set by the owner

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concerning dress and behaviour. Different public houses may have different regulations with which customers are required to comply, so the customers can choose which regulations they find most congenial. Where regulations are too lax or too onerous, fewer customers will frequent the public house, unless it has some compensating features such as sought-­ after entertainment, low prices or desirable ambience. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to shopping malls and all manner of private properties that are open to the public in general or open to members of a club or open to some other restricted group. Similarly, residential developments will have some regulations concerning decorum and neighbourliness which are set by the developer with a view to making residence there attractive, thus enabling higher prices to be charged for living there; and there may be a residents’ association with the authority-right to impose additional regulations as the need arises. Thus, private property in real estate also permits competition and consumer choice in regulation, rather than a ‘one-size fits all’ approach. So long as a person fulfils his obligations to others, he can use his private property as he pleases, including exchanging it for some other property by agreement with others, or destroying it, or giving, lending or selling it to others. He may also pool it with the private property of some other persons to create joint private ownership, as in marriage, a business partnership, or a commune.

5.5 Animals That Are Not Persons The true moral theory, we have said, is the one such that, if it were universally enforced, then persons in general would be allowed the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. It would not be surprising if evolutionary mutation produced some persons who are so constituted that the only way that they can find fulfilment is through torturing animals that are not persons. A person with such a nature could, it seems, pursue a life devoted to such torture without impinging at all on the entitlements to freedom of other persons. It is through no fault of his own that he has such a nature, so his freedom to act in ways that fulfil his nature cannot be restricted on grounds of his having perpetrated an

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unexpiated wrong. He has just one life and his fulfilment in that life depends upon him torturing animals that are not persons. It therefore seems permissible for him, and also for other persons, to seek fulfilment through torturing animals that are not persons. That apparent consequence of the theory of morals propounded here conflicts with a strong moral intuition that most of us seem to have, namely, that it is impermissible to treat cruelly animals that are not persons. There are, broadly, three strategies for resolving such a conflict: • render the intuition consistent with the theory by replacing a background assumption with a new hypothesis; • introduce a new hypothesis to explain why the intuition is false but seems to be true; • replace the theory of morals with a new hypothesis which explains the intuition and also explains why the replaced moral theory is false but seemed true. We illustrated those options in Sect. 3.3 of Chap. 3 with the examples of Le Verrier, Newton, and Einstein, respectively, where we also showed that such a strategy is pseudo-scientific unless the new hypothesis not only eliminates the inconsistency satisfactorily but also explains something additional. Kant (recall Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1) adopted the first strategy of replacing a background assumption with a new hypothesis. The derivation of the conflict between our theory and the intuition assumed that a person can torture animals that are not persons without defaulting on his obligations to persons. Kant replaces that assumption with a new hypothesis: that a person who practises cruel treatment of “irrational animals” weakens his feelings of sympathy with other persons, thereby increasing the risk of his wronging other persons. Kant’s hypothesis has seemed plausible to many; but not to all. Why should a person who treats cruelly animals that are not persons be unable to distinguish clearly between such animals and persons, and to limit his cruel treatment to the former? “Do butchers commit more murders?” (Nozick 1974, p. 36). However, Kant’s hypothesis can be tested empirically. If it passes the empirical test, it will not be pseudo-scientific, because it will then explain the empirical data as well as

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explaining away the conflict between our moral theory and the pre-­ existing intuition. There does seem to be much empirical evidence of a correlation between a propensity to mistreat animals that are not persons and a propensity to wrong persons. But it may be that causation runs in the opposite to the Kantian direction; that is, it may be that a person who is inclined to, or does, wrong other persons will also be inclined to mistreat animals that are not persons. That may account for the correlation even if a proclivity for torturing animals that are not persons does nothing itself to produce a proclivity for wronging persons (Petersen and Farrington 2007). We therefore have to await the results of further empirical research before we know whether Kant’s resolution of the conflict is acceptable. The second strategy for resolving the conflict between our theory and the intuition that it is impermissible to treat cruelly animals that are not persons is to reject the intuition but explain why it seems true. We can do that by proposing the hypothesis that, to the extent that animals that are not persons resemble persons in pursuing ends and suffering pain, fear, joy and sadness, we have a mistaken tendency to treat them as if they were persons to whom we owe obligations. That hypothesis may be tested empirically; and if it survives testing, it will not be pseudo-scientific, because it will then explain the empirical data as well as explaining away the troublesome intuition. I am not aware that the hypothesis has been subjected to rigorous testing; but our familiarity with the behaviour of pet-owners may give us optimism that it will survive testing. The third strategy for resolving the conflict between our theory and the intuition that it is impermissible to treat cruelly animals that are not persons is to replace our theory with a different hypothesis. Some philosophers maintain the hypothesis that the true moral theory is one that assigns to persons obligations to animals (though some of the lower animals may be excluded). That hypothesis could explain the intuition. It could also explain why our theory (that morality concerns the conditions for the fulfilment of persons) seems to be true, because persons are animals. However, the hypothesis conflicts with two other intuitions that our theory accommodates. First, it has the counter-intuitive consequence that persons have obligations to creatures that have no conception of obligation and that are

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therefore incapable of having obligations to persons. It seems incongruous that there could be an obligation without the possibility of such reciprocity. David DeGrazia suggests that that apparent incongruity can be dismissed as the upshot of a mistaken tendency to see morality as reducible to contracts, which are made between persons (1996, p. 68). However, that seems to be an unsatisfactory suggestion because our moral theory does not reduce morality to contracts; it, rather, explains morality in terms of the conditions propitious for self-discovery, of which only persons are capable. However, while the intuition, that a person cannot owe an obligation to a creature incapable of having obligations, is quite commonly held, it is also often disputed, so we should not make too much of it. Second, the hypothesis has the counter-intuitive consequence that some persons ought to forego or be denied fulfilment in order to avoid the discomfort or death of some beings that are not persons, beings that have no conception of obligation or of fulfilment or of the critical quest for self-discovery that achieving fulfilment requires. How, except as a consequence of obligations to persons, could a person have an obligation not to torture an animal that is not a person, if desisting from such torture means that the person will never achieve fulfilment? It seems absurd that a person could have an obligation to sacrifice his fulfilment, in the only life he has, for the sake of such a creature. In short, the hypothesis removes one conflict with intuition only to saddle us with another. Further, even if the hypothesis could be rectified to overcome that problem, it would be pseudo-scientific unless it also explained something additional, which it does not seem to do. Since the hypothesis fails to eliminate the inconsistency between theory and intuition satisfactorily, and also fails to explain something additional (and is thus ad hoc), it should be rejected. We thus arrive at the following conclusion. If the Kantian hypothesis survives testing, that is, if persons who treat cruelly animals that are not persons are thereby rendered more likely to violate the rights of persons, then cruel treatment of animals that are not persons is impermissible. If the Kantian hypothesis is falsified, then cruel treatment of animals that are not persons is permissible, provided that the hypothesis that we have a mistaken tendency to treat such creatures as if they were persons survives empirical testing. But if that hypothesis is also falsified we are, for the

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time being, without an answer to the question of whether cruel treatment of animals that are not persons is permissible or impermissible. We will be left with a conflict between our moral theory and a conflicting inherited theory (intuition) which we will need to resolve in one way or another. I will say more about the problem concerning our treatment of animals that are not persons in Sect. 6.3 of Chap. 6.

5.6 Conclusion We saw in Chap. 4 that a person is a being with a conception of rights and obligations which regulate how he ought to relate to other persons and how they ought to relate to him. A person is therefore inherently social, at least in the sense that he has a conception of himself as a person in potential relations with other persons. Human persons (the only persons we know) are also inherently social in that each is born into a community with a social structure, even if only an isolated family, but usually a larger social group and, nowadays, a much larger social group. That does not prevent a person from isolating himself from others, as a hermit might do; but even then there is a history of interpersonal relations and also a possibility of encountering other persons and behaving rightly or wrongly towards them. Further, a person has the capacity for critical rationality: he can evaluate alternative theories of moral rules and alternative theories about his natural characteristics, needs, capabilities and inclinations. The fulfilment of a person depends upon the discovery and satisfaction of his absolute needs (Sects. 4.2 and 4.3, Chap. 4). Each person has to discover his absolute needs for himself by experimenting with kinds of life. Such experimentation consumes resources, which are scarce and have alternative uses. Further, a person may often be able to increase his prospects for fulfilment by damaging the prospects of other persons, either competitors or victims. Morality mediates the conflicting demands of different persons by placing bounds on each individual person’s behaviour. It does that by means of objective moral rules that assign to persons moral properties and relations, such as rights and obligations. A person’s

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self-interest may be served by breaking those rules; but he ought not to break them. The objective moral rules provide persons with the entitlement to freedom for self-discovery. So, objective moral rules are grounded, indirectly, in the absolute needs of persons. They do not require of any person that he ought to determine and meet the absolute needs of others. They are rules such that, the greater the extent to which persons act in accord with them, the greater is the scope for persons in general to discover and satisfy their absolute needs for themselves. Consequently, if the behaviour of all persons fully complied with objective moral rules, the conditions would be realised for persons in general to engage in the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. That is what makes the rules moral. Some persons are entitled only to a somewhat limited range of freedom to direct their own lives, due to mental impairment or to immaturity (deficient knowledge and experience). Their lack of competence makes it the case that their chances of discovering themselves, and thus finding fulfilment, would be reduced if they had the freedom to make decisions for themselves concerning the more momentous matters. A competent adult who has committed no unexpiated wrongs, and who has not used his authority-rights to subordinate himself to others, has the full right to the freedom to direct his own life. That entitlement includes having: private property in his own body; authority-rights to acquire or dispose of private property by means of promises, exchanges, gifts, abandonment, or destruction; authority-rights to waive claim-rights in order to allow other persons access to his private property (including his body) under terms or regulations that he specifies; and immunity-rights prohibiting other persons from imposing new obligations upon him, except when he permits such imposition by exercising an authority-right or by defaulting on some of his obligations. A person’s liberty to act is constrained by his obligations (by definition of ‘liberty’ and ‘obligation’). In general, those obligations are owed to other persons. There are, though, some restrictions on a person’s liberty that do not derive from his obligations to other persons but are, rather, required for the sake of his own chances of self-discovery. A competent adult is not entitled to become a permanent slave and is not normally entitled to commit suicide. Since these are moral restrictions on his

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liberty, they are obligations. However, in becoming a permanent slave or committing suicide a person would not necessarily be violating any obligations to other persons. To whom, then, are the obligations in question owed? Since they exist for the sake of the person himself, it may seem that they are obligations that he has to himself, in which case he would have a claim-right against himself that he does not commit suicide or become a permanent slave. Yet, since a competent adult has the authority-right to release others from their obligations to him by waiving or relinquishing his claim-rights, he should also be entitled to waive or relinquish his claim-rights against himself and thus release himself from his obligations to himself. In that case, his obligations not to commit suicide and not to become a permanent slave would not restrict his behaviour after all. One way out of that dilemma would be to maintain that some claim-rights are such that they cannot be waived or relinquished by their possessors. That would introduce a special class of ‘inalienable’ or ‘unalienable’ claim-­ rights. It seems to be a pseudo-scientific stratagem: it is tailored to solve the problem at hand but it appears to do no further work. Since epistemic rationality requires that we abjure pseudo-scientific manoeuvres (see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3), I reject that solution. I offer an alternative solution in Chap. 6, Sect. 6.3. We generally think that a person’s entitlement to freedom is also limited by his obligations not to mistreat animals that are not persons, including those human animals that are so mentally impaired as to be incapable of critical rationality and of understanding moral demands. It seems that such obligations cannot be owed to those non-persons themselves, because it seems unacceptable that a person could be obliged to forego his fulfilment for the sake of a creature that is not a person. We followed Kant, in deriving an obligation not to mistreat animals that are not persons, by hypothesising a connection between animal cruelty and a propensity to violate the rights of persons; but we acknowledged that the hypothesis requires empirical testing. Kant thought that the obligation not to mistreat animals that are not persons was owed by each person to himself (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1); but that involves the pseudo-scientific stratagem of inalienable rights. Young children are also non-persons; but in the normal course of events they will develop into persons, so there is

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not quite the same problem about persons owing obligations to them. I return to the topic in Chap. 6, Sect. 6.3. Aristotle supposed that there are some humans who are incapable of critical argument but who recognise and fulfil their obligations to others (see his comments about barbarians in Sect. 5.2, above). If that were so, it seems that we would have obligations to them even though they would not be persons. I ignore that doubtful possibility in what follows, simply to avoid digressions. The freedom to direct one’s own life includes the freedom to speak, write and sign. Freedom of speech is essential to self-discovery. Each person inherits from his community theories about himself, about other persons, about social relationships and about moral behaviour. Many of these theories may be false. If a person is to discover himself he must be entitled to criticise any of those theories and to propose new ones which he and others may in turn criticise. There is no type of content such that any person has an obligation not to express that type of content. Freedom of speech is considered in more detail in Chap. 6, Sect. 6.4. The theory of our moral rights and obligations expounded in this chapter has some similarity with rule consequentialism though it is inconsistent with it. Rule consequentialism evaluates moral theories according to their consequences for the general good. The weakness in that type of theory is that persons obtain their good either by accident or through experiments intended to discover what is good for them; and it is a matter of chance whether any of those experiments succeeds. Moral theories have to be evaluated, then, according to the extent to which they set constraints that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment; and the consequences will be what they will be (they cannot be known in advance). I say some more about rule consequentialism in Sect. 6.6 of the next Chapter. That assumes that that are different moral theories available for comparative evaluation. That was also assumed in Sect. 5.2, above, and in Sect. 4.3 of Chap. 4, where it was said that different moral theories are prominent in different communities, both contemporary and historical. I will end this chapter by considering an objection to that assumption that has been propounded quite recently by James and Stuart Rachels (2012).

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They argue that diversity amongst cultures with regard to moral codes is overstated because all cultures have some values in common. They ask us to consider a society in which people believe that it is wrong to eat cows even though there is not enough food. They then suppose that the people in this society believe that after death the souls of humans inhabit the bodies of animals, especially cows, so that a cow may be someone’s grandmother. In that case, the apparent difference in values between that society and ours is explained in terms of a difference in factual beliefs, since we agree on the moral rule that we should not eat our grandparents. Rachels and Rachels continue that Eskimos often kill perfectly normal infants, especially girls. But the explanation is not that they have less affection for their children or less respect for human life than we do. It is rather that they live in a harsh environment, where food is often in short supply, and where the males are the primary food providers and they suffer a high casualty rate in hunting. The killing of surplus infants, and of more females than males, is a recognition that drastic measures are sometimes needed to ensure the group’s survival. It does not imply that Eskimo values are radically different from ours. Thus, differences in moral codes between cultures can often be explained in terms of common values applied to different circumstances or to circumstances that are believed to be different (2012, pp. 21–22). Those examples of Rachels and Rachels seem to have been carefully selected. Consider some different examples. Hindus and Buddhists believe that it is wrong to eat cows because they think it is wrong to harm other animals, especially a gentle animal such as a cow. That appears to be a real difference from the values predominant in nineteenth-century Western cultures, rather than a difference which is explained by a difference in circumstances or beliefs about circumstances. America’s South differs from its North in having a strong honour culture, so that people from the two regions typically differ about whether violence is permissible in types of circumstances that they believe to be the same (Nisbett and Cohen 1996). Hopi Indians hold (or did hold) that it is permissible to torture and kill pet birds even though they believe birds to be conscious, sentient and capable of feeling pain, and even though they do not believe that birds are rewarded for martyrdom in an afterlife. That appears to be a real difference from the values generally held in Western societies,

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not a difference to be explained in terms of common values applied to different circumstances or to circumstances that are believed to be different (Doris and Stich 2005, p. 130). Rachels and Rachels contend that some values are common to all cultures. If a society is to survive it must value its young (otherwise it will die out), it must value truth-telling (otherwise communication would be extremely difficult, if not impossible) and it must prohibit murder (otherwise no one could feel secure, so co-operation would be rare). They conclude: “there are some moral rules that all societies must embrace, because those rules are necessary for society to exist” (2012, pp. 23–24). Logically speaking, that is an atrocious argument, for four reasons. First, there is the transition from values to rules. In general, a society has a better chance of surviving if a sufficient quantity of its young make it to adulthood, which is far more likely if the society values its young and thus accepts a moral theory stating some moral rules protecting youngsters. But there are myriad rival theories stating rules about the treatment of children which, if enforced, would tend to secure population numbers, including the following: (R1) look after tall boys and short girls but torture the rest to death; (R2) parents must look after their children and ensure that every girl has her clitoris and labia removed between the ages of eight and eleven; (R3) all children must be looked after except for mixed-race children who must be suffocated; (R4) all children showing signs of gender nonconformity must be stoned to death but all the rest must be looked after; (R5) all married couples should have as many children as they can and all children must be educated in the religious schools where the priests will introduce them to the full range of sexual practices, including sado-masochism. Imagine five societies, the first accepting a moral theory that states rule (R1), the second accepting a moral theory that states rule (R2), and so on down. Each of those societies values its young but the statements of moral

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rules that they accept concerning the treatment of children are very different from each other and very different from the moral statements concerning the treatment of children that we accept. Similarly there is any number of rival moral theories about contexts in which the truth should be told that would, if generally accepted, produce enough truthtelling for the society to survive and to count as valuing truth-telling. Second, it is no surprise that all societies accept a moral theory that contains a rule prohibiting murder. A killing does not count as murder unless it is wrong, that is, unless there is a moral rule against it. ‘Murder is impermissible’ is true by definition. But cultures differ radically concerning which killings count as murder. In stratified societies it has often been held to be permissible for someone from an upper echelon to kill, more or less arbitrarily, someone from a lower order, such as a slave, a serf, an ‘untouchable,’ or a Jew. In some societies killing a homosexual, a witch, a heretic, or an unfaithful wife is regarded as permissible or obligatory: they do not count it as murder and they may even count it as justice. It is very far from being the case that different societies agree about when it is permissible to kill another human being. Third, even if it were true that a society will survive only if it embraces a specific set of moral rules, that does not entail that every society embraces that set of moral rules. A society that does not survive, such as the Mayan or ancient Roman civilisations, for example, is still a society, and its moral rules are part of the kaleidoscope of differing cultural values. Fourth, contra Rachels and Rachels, a society may survive even if it subscribes to a theory of moral rules that undermines its survival, provided that it gets a steady flow of new resources from outside. For instance, we can imagine a community of adults who do not value children and who enforce the moral rule that any children they produce must be put to death. The enforcement of that moral rule is a threat to that society’s survival; yet the society may thrive if it is joined over time by many adults from outside who similarly detest children. Rachels and Rachels claim that there are some statements of moral rules that must be accepted by all societies. Their claim is false and their defence of it is logically faulty. Substantial diversity between cultures concerning which moral theory is true appears to be a fact.

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References Aristotle. 1955. Ethics. Trans. J.A.K. Thomson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1962. Politics. Trans. T.A. Sinclair. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2016. On The Heavens. Trans. J.L.  Stocks. Adelaide: University of Adelaide. eBooks@Adelaide. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/heavens/complete.html. Accessed 7 Sept 2019. Bader, Ralf. 2018. Moralized Conceptions of Liberty. In The Oxford Handbook of Freedom, ed. David Schmidtz and Carmen Pavel, 59–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Batt, Francis. 1929. The Law of Master and Servant. 1st ed. London: Pitman. Berkeley, George. 1953. Passive Obedience. In The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, vol. VI, 15–46. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. Two Concepts of Liberty. In Four Essays on Liberty, 118–172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackburn, Simon. 1993. Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coase, Ronald. 1988. The Firm, the Market and the Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coleman, James. 1969. Relativity for the Layman, revised ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. DeGrazia, David. 1996. Taking Animals Seriously. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doris, John, and Stephen Stich. 2005. As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on Ethics. In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, 114–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foot, Philippa. 2001. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frederick, Danny. 2014. Voluntary Slavery. Las Torres de Lucca 4: 115–137. ———. 2015. Pro-Tanto Obligations and Ceteris-Paribus Rules. Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (3): 255–266. ———. 2016a. The Possibility of Contractual Slavery. Philosophical Quarterly 66 (262): 47–64. ———. 2016b. The Good Bishop and the Explanation of Political Authority. De Ethica 3 (2): 23–35. Friedman, Mark. 2011. Nozick’s Libertarian Project. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Friedman, Milton. 2002. Capitalism and Freedom, fortieth anniversary ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Galileo Galilei. 2008. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Excerpts. In The Essential Galileo, Ed. and Trans. Maurice Finocchiaro, 295–367. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162 (3859): 1243–1248. Hayek, Friedrich. 1949. The Use of Knowledge in Society. In Individualism and Economic Order, 77–91. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1978a. The Errors of Constructivism. In New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, 3–22. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1978b. Competition as a Discovery Procedure. In New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, 179–190. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hohfeld, Wesley. 1919. Fundamental Legal Conceptions. Ed. W.W. Cook. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hume, David. 1888. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1975. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. In Enquiries, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed., 169–323. Oxford: Clarendon. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. and Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koyré, Alexandre. 1957. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1957. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leibniz, Gottfried. 1982. New Essays on Human Understanding. Trans. and Ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, corrected ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, John. 1924. Two Treatises of Government. London: Dent and Sons. Lomasky, Loren. 1987. Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Mack, Eric. 2010. The Natural Right of Property. Social Philosophy & Policy 27 (1): 53–78. Nisbett, Richard, and Dov Cohen. 1996. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

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Petersen, Marie Louise, and David P. Farrington. 2007. Cruelty to Animals and Violence to People. Victims & Offenders 2 (1): 21–43. Popper, Karl. 1973. Objective Knowledge, corrected ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prior, Arthur. 1960. The Autonomy of Ethics. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 38 (3): 199–206. Quine, W.V.O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quine, W. V. O. 1976. Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory. In The Ways of Paradox, revised and enlarged ed, 137–157. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rachels, James, and Stuart Rachels. 2012. The Challenge of Cultural Relativism. In The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 7th ed., 14–31. New York: McGraw Hill. Reinach, Adolf. 2012. The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law. Ed. and Trans. John F. Crosby. Lancaster: Gazelle Books. Rothbard, Murray. 1998. The Ethics of Liberty. New  York: New  York University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1969. ABC of Relativity, 3rd revised ed. London: George Allen and Unwin. Schmidtz, David. 2010. Property and Justice. Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (1): 79–100. Thomson, Judith. 1990. The Realm of Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tullock, Gordon, Arthur Seldon, and Gordon Brady. 2002. Government Failure. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

6 Individual and State

6.1 A Brief History of the Problem We saw in the previous chapter that objective moral rules, being grounded indirectly in the absolute needs of persons, entitle persons to the maximum freedom for self-discovery. We therefore argued that a competent adult who has committed no unexpiated wrong, has an immunity-right to having obligations imposed upon her, without her consent, by the exercise of the authority-rights of other persons. We might express that by saying that morality demands individual sovereignty for all competent adult persons. In this chapter we will see that the state has an obligation to ensure conformity with objective moral rules and that in fulfilling that obligation the state exercises authority-rights to impose new obligations upon persons. From that it follows that a competent adult who has committed no unexpiated wrong, does not have the same immunity-right against the state that she has against other persons. Therefore, competent adult persons who are sovereign vis-à-vis other persons are, to some degree, subordinate to the state. How is it that the state can have an authority-right over a person that other persons do not have? That is the problem of political authority. © The Author(s) 2020 D. Frederick, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2_6

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Accounts of the state and its relationship to persons that have been offered by philosophers may be distinguished as, more or less, individualist or collectivist. On the individualist view, persons are ontologically primary and the state exists only as a result of the activities of individual persons. On that view, the state is a social construction or a logical construction, dependent for its existence on the activities and interactions of individual persons. On the collectivist view, it is the state that is ontologically primary; and persons are viewed as aspects of the state, dependent on the state to which they belong, analogous to the way in which a facial expression or gesture is dependent on the living body of which it is a characteristic. Individualist accounts attempt to explain the existence of the state and its political authority in terms of individual persons acting permissibly, either in pursuit of their own self-interest or with a view to what would be just. The most popular way of doing that is to invoke the idea of a social contract, so that the state and its political authority are explained in terms of what would have been agreed between individual persons, under propitious conditions, if they were rational and if there had been no state (for example, Hobbes 1962; Locke 1924, book II; Rawls 1999). The individual persons in question are taken to be competent adults acting rationally who, by means of a contract between themselves, relinquish their immunity-right against having obligations imposed upon them by the exercise of an authority-right of another moral agent. They thereby enter voluntary submission to the state which is created by their social contract, where that state is accorded either limited or unlimited authority-rights to impose obligations on the parties to the contract. Despite their popularity, social-contract theories appear to be untenable. When tenured professors of logic engaged in rational discussion in propitious academic environments are unable to agree over the basic laws of logic, including even the law of non-contradiction, it seems preposterous to maintain that rational persons in favourable circumstances would agree about the far more contentious matters of whether there should be a state and what its rights and obligations should be (Frederick 2013). Indeed, that seems evident from the fact that social-contract theorists cannot agree among themselves about the rights and obligations of the state.

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An alternative individualist account is Robert Nozick’s ‘invisible hand’ explanation of the state as an unintended consequence of permissible individual actions directed toward other ends (1974, part I). In Nozick’s view, in a stateless environment, groups of competent adults acting rationally would band together by agreement to protect themselves from having their rights violated by persons outside of the group. Some persons would then form a group that would specialise in providing, for a fee, protective services to persons in general. Other persons would copy that idea, so there would be a market in protective services in which rival protective agencies compete for business. However, that market would tend naturally to monopoly, so a dominant protective agency would emerge. Step by permissible step that dominant agency would evolve into a minimal state that levies taxes, enforces contracts, and protects persons against force, theft and fraud. However, Nozick’s argument appears to be ad hoc in that mistaken or implausible steps are inserted in order to get to the desired conclusion (Barnett 1977; Childs 1977; Friedman 2011, pp. 76–83; Paul 1982; Rothbard 1977; Wolff 1982, 1991, pp. 36–72). Collectivist accounts assume the existence of the state and attempt to explain its political authority in terms of what is good for the state conceived as an organic unity. The good of the state obliges every individual to perform her allotted task, thereby rendering individual persons slaves of the state. But, on collectivist views, what is good for the state is good for its members because, whether they know it or not, their absolute needs are fulfilled by performing such service (Bradley 1951; Hegel 2001; MacIntyre 2007; Plato 1974; Rousseau 1913). However, while it does seem that there are many persons who would find fulfilment in slavery (Frederick 2014, sect. II), that is, persons whose overriding need is to be subordinated to another, it also seems that the majority of persons do not find fulfilment in that way. The claim, of philosophers or (would-be) dictators, to know what the needs of persons are, is a dogmatic one that cannot withstand criticism (recall Chaps. 3 and 4). It may seem that any account of the state will be either individualist or collectivist. After all, the state cannot exist without persons. So, it may seem, either it is just a collection of separate persons who interact in specific ways or it is a single thing of which those persons are aspects. That way of thinking seems to reflect the traditional substance-and-attribute

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approach to metaphysics that was articulated, none too clearly, by Aristotle (2015). A substance has independent existence: it may exist independently of other substances; and it may also exist independently of its current attributes, since it can change its attributes but remain the same substance. But an attribute cannot have real existence without being an attribute of a substance, on which it depends. Since an attribute always inheres in, or belongs to, a particular substance, it cannot simultaneously inhere in or belong to another substance as well. Thus, relations seem unreal, mere appearances of underlying non-relational properties. For example, Benny is taller than Jenny, because Benny is six feet and Jenny is five feet. On the individualist view, the state cannot exist without persons but persons may exist without the state, so persons are substances and the state is explained in terms of the attributes of persons. On the collectivist view, persons cannot exist without the state but the state persists despite changes over time of the persons who belong to it, so the state is the substance of which persons are merely attributes. The traditional Aristotelian metaphysics was criticised by Bertrand Russell, who wrote in 1911: Speaking generally, adjectives and common nouns express qualities or properties of single things, whereas prepositions and verbs tend to express relations between two or more things. Thus the neglect of prepositions and verbs led to the belief that every proposition can be regarded as attributing a property to a single thing, rather than as expressing a relation between two or more things. Hence it was supposed that, ultimately, there can be no such entities as relations between things. Hence either there can be only one thing in the universe, or, if there are many things, they cannot possibly interact in any way, since any interaction would be a relation, and relations are impossible. The first of these views, advocated by Spinoza and held in our own day by Bradley and many other philosophers, is called monism; the second, advocated by Leibniz but not very common nowadays, is called monadism, because each of the isolated things is called a monad. Both these opposing philosophies, interesting as they are, result, in my opinion, from an undue attention to one sort of universals, namely the sort represented by adjectives and substantives rather than by verbs and prepositions. (1980, p. 54)

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Aristotle’s metaphysics was reflected in his subject-predicate logic of syllogisms (Aristotle 2007). Modern logic, invented by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and, independently, by Russell, contains not only quantifiers and predications but also, and crucially, expressions for relations. It thereby permits the perspicuous expression of propositions containing multiple generality, from which the far greater power of modern over traditional logic derives. The contrast between collectivist and individualist theories of the state appears to correspond, more or less, to the contrast between monism and monadism. Accounts of the state do not flatly deny the existence of relations. The social contract, for instance, expresses a relation between persons and it figures not only in individualist accounts but also in collectivist ones. However, it seems that both individualist and collectivist accounts of the state strive to peer through the relations to the underlying non-­ relational reality, in that individualist accounts identify the state with a collection of individual substances, and collectivist accounts identify the state with a single collective substance. I propose instead an account that recognises the reality of relations and that identifies the state with a set of relations. Thus, we reject the collectivist view that the state is a substantial entity of which individual persons are aspects. Indeed, we reject the very idea of the state as a collective entity. We also reject the individualist view that individual persons can exist entirely separately from the state and that the state is a collection of persons. Persons are inherently social (see Chaps. 4 and 5). Where there are persons, there are relations between persons; and some of those relations constitute the state. Thus, neither persons nor the state are prior: they depend on each other. Once we recognise the reality of relations we can see that the problems with individualism, particularly the difficulty in explaining political authority, need not drive us into collectivism. The idea of an entity being constituted by relations may seem baffling; but all institutions are so constituted (Emmett 1966, pp.  138–152). Consider, as an illustration, a small community in which the state is represented by a chief and her assistants. None of those persons is a component or property of the state. The state is an institution represented by particular persons only so long as, and insofar as, they have a role in that institution. Some of the persons who are subjects or officers of the state

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may in their lifetimes cease to be subjects or officers of the state (without ceasing to exist) by exiting the community, and all of them die off over time while the state continues to exist without them. The moral relations that constitute the state are therefore not tied to any individual persons. Specifications of the those relations require quantified sentences and relational terms in which there are no personal names. For instance, schematically: (i) any person, x, is chief if and only if: x is a noble and x was made chief by the other nobles and, if any person, y, is chief, then y = x; (ii) any persons, x and y, are such that, if x is chief, and x ≠ y, and x orders y to perform military service in the defence of the community, then x is entitled to punish y if y does not perform military service in the defence of the community. Those examples show just two of the relations between persons that may belong to a complex set of relations that constitute the institution of even a very simple state. Parenthetically, it should be clear that (i) is not a definition of ‘chief.’ If it were, it would be circular. Further, ‘chief ’ is not ‘implicitly defined’ by the specification of the totality of the relations that constitute the state. The rights and obligations that attach to the role of chief are different in different states. As a general point, concepts are not implicitly defined by the theories in which they figure: we often have different and rival theories about the same things (Feyerabend 1981; Findlay 1970; Kuhn 1977, chap. 12; Popper 1959, sects. 17 and 20).

6.2 The Liberal State A person’s capacities for self-consciousness, critical rationality, and moral evaluation imply that she has to discover her own nature for herself by experimenting with kinds of life and that she is obliged, in so doing, not to violate objective moral rules. Objective moral rules balance the competing aims of different persons, thereby providing the best achievable scope for persons in general to experiment in quest of personal

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fulfilment. They therefore assign to all competent adults, as their default position, the maximum freedom to direct their own lives, consistent with the entitlements to such freedom of other persons. That includes the entitlements to private property in their own bodies and the liberties to use and acquire private property, both from other persons by consent, and from nature. However, self-interest and morality often conflict: a person can increase her chances of finding fulfilment by violating the rights of others. Such immoral action undermines the constraints that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. The objective moral rules therefore include some moral rules permitting the enforcement of the other moral rules (Chap. 5). The liberty-right to enforce objective moral rules cannot reside only in persons. If it did, the weak would be unable to resist violations of their rights by stronger persons who put their own self-interest above the demands of morality. Weaker persons might band together to protect themselves; but persons might band together to pillage others. The result would be internecine strife and rapine in which the scope for persons in general to experiment in quest of personal fulfilment would be severely restricted. That would be so even if all persons agreed about what the objective moral rules are, and agreed about all the facts that, in conjunction with the moral rules, determine what persons’ rights and obligations are in specific situations, and agreed also on the weightings of the relevant rights or obligations in cases of conflict. In fact, of course, persons often disagree about such things, so there would often be conflict between persons even when they are trying to behave morally. Objective moral rules must therefore assign to a moral agent that is not a person the obligation and the liberty-right to enforce objective moral rules. The non-personal moral agent is the state, which is an institution constituted by relations between persons. The rights and obligations accorded to the state by the objective moral rules do not take away from persons their rights to defend themselves from violations of their rights; but they do mean that persons are not dependent only on their own resources in defending their rights. The true system of moral rules assigns rights and obligations that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. Those rules give competent adult persons the right to direct their own lives. In the cases of children and of adults with significant

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mental impairments, the rules itemise some restrictions on their freedom to direct their own lives, tailored to their lack of competence; in particular, they lack immunity-rights to having obligations imposed upon them by parents or carers. The rules assign to the state the rights and obligations it needs to enforce the rules that secure the conditions that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. The state is therefore obliged to defend persons’ rights to direct their own lives, that is, the rights of persons to private property in their own bodies and their rights and obligations in using, acquiring and disposing of private property. It is also obliged, where possible, to remove impediments to the freedom of persons in general. The objective moral rules therefore give to the state the obligation and the liberty-right to enforce the objective moral rules, authority-rights to impose upon persons whatever new obligations are necessary to that end, and liberty-­ rights to enforce the fulfilment of those obligations. In short, the state has the obligation to be a liberal state; or, to put it another way, all persons are entitled to be subjects of a liberal state. There will always be some natural resources that are not private property because access to them is at the time very difficult or practically impossible, such as resources under the polar ice-caps or on the moon. But accessible resources can be converted into private property. The state requires property rights in some resources in order to be able to fulfil its obligation of enforcing objective moral rules. Apart from those, accessible resources that are either unowned or state-owned are impediments to persons’ quests for fulfilment (Chap. 5, Sect. 5.4). Thus, except in some special cases, the state has the obligation, and the liberty-right, to convert such resources into private property, and to provide a scheme whereby such newly ‘privatised’ resources will be allocated to persons fairly. There are usually (perhaps always) innumerable rival ways of making a fair allocation, so the state has the liberty-right to choose between them and thus also the authority-right to impose on persons some new obligations concerning ways of acquiring the resources. So whereas in most cases the state simply enforces obligations that persons owe to each other, in some cases it enforces obligations that persons owe to the state. The special cases of accessible resources that may be exceptions to the state’s obligation to privatise are known as ‘public goods’ (Samuelson

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1954). Such goods are difficult to charge for, which means that there is a risk that they will be undersupplied without state intervention, which in turn means that persons in general may be frustrated in pursuing their freely-chosen aims because they have fewer means to do so. However, it seems that only a relatively small class of such goods would fail to be supplied without state control, since joint-ownership by users of the resource who co-operate voluntarily, and even charitable enterprises, can often succeed more efficiently than government in providing and managing the resource as a not-for-profit venture (Ostrom 2010; see also Anomaly 2015). Further, some such goods lose their ‘public good’ character as technology improves. For instance, the advent of technology enabling charging for the use of roads according to time of day as well as distance of travel means that private property rights in roads provided for profit are now feasible (Glaister and Graham 2004; Hibbs 1993). The responsibilities of the state just adumbrated can be carried out only if the state can command resources. The state therefore has the authority-right to impose obligations on persons to provide the state with the resources necessary for it to fulfil its obligations. Since moral rules must be impartial to provide constraints that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment, the taxes that the state levies to obtain the resources it needs must be equitable. Since there are innumerable tax systems that would yield the same revenue and are equitable, despite differing in their impacts on particular persons, the state has the liberty-right to choose between them. The state, along with its obligations and rights, is realised in practice in the form of an institutional structure comprising a multitude of interlocking roles in which each role is occupied by a person. The occupants of the roles in the institution(s) of the state we can call ‘officers of the state.’ Officers of the state do not constitute the state, they only represent it. Qua persons, those officers of the state do not have authority-rights to impose, on competent adults who have committed no unexpiated wrongs, obligations without their consent. It is only when acting in their official capacity, as officers of the state, that they can impose obligations on such competent adults without their consent; and they do that by exercising the state’s authority-rights. The roles of the officers have specific obligations and rights attached to them such that, ideally, the obligations

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of the state are carried out if and only if each person occupying each role carries out the obligations of that role. The officers of the state are persons; and persons are fallible. The officers of the state, just like persons in general, can be expected to make mistakes about which rules are the objective moral rules, including those rules that specify the objective rights and obligations of the state. Persons must try to improve their theories about the rights and obligations of the state by means of conjectures, criticism, and comparative evaluation of conjectures (Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3). The rights and obligations of the state as set forth here are the result of such a fallible process. Further discussion may show that this exposition is in some ways mistaken. That is always the case. As a consequence, the chief officer of the state has, with regard to the state’s subjects, an obligation and a liberty-right to review the official theory of the state’s rights and obligations. Similarly, the state’s institutional structure is unlikely to be fully efficient and effective. In practice, some roles will overlap or conflict with others and some necessary obligations might not be assigned to any role so that, if they are carried out at all, it is only because of the alertness and goodwill of particular officers acting beyond their official capacity. Therefore, the scope for persons in general to experiment in quest of personal fulfilment is enhanced if the chief officer of the state has, with regard to each of its subjects, the obligation and the liberty-right to review the state’s institutional structure in order to make it more efficient and effective in performing the state’s functions. Therefore, the chief officer of the state has that obligation and liberty-right. The obligations and associated rights of the chief officer of the state to review and, if possible, replace with something better, the state’s organisational structures and the official theory of the state’s functions, will normally be realised, in part, in more specific obligations and rights of some of the subordinate officers of the state who may, for instance, commission studies from academics or other professionals. Proposed revisions to the currently accepted theory of the state and its institutions should, of course, be subjected to criticism and, where practical, empirical testing, and to comparison with rival proposals. The chief officer of the state is therefore obliged to experiment with proposed changes, and to do so in a controlled way and also, where possible, on a

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relatively small scale so that interfering variables can as far as possible be eliminated (Popper 1966, vol. I, chap. 9). Some revisions to the theory of the state and its institutions may be such that they can be trialled only across the whole community, so learning from experience will be facilitated if there are numerous separate states in which different experiments are made and the lessons learned are shared. Since the conditions for persons in general to experiment in quest of personal fulfilment would be improved if states engaged in such comparative experimentation, each state has the obligation of not being or becoming a world state. Morally, then, there must be a plurality of states with separate jurisdictions. The officers of the state are persons; and persons are peccable. The fact that self-interest and morality often conflict means that there is a permanent risk of officers of the state overstepping the limits of their official authority, thereby violating the rights of other persons. As a consequence, it is a moral requirement that there is a system of checks on the officers of the state that enables them to be held to account. Some of the checks operate within the institution of the state itself, such as a division between legislature, executive, and judiciary. Others allow the persons in the community to eject state officers and replace them with others by means of democratic elections. The British and American local-representation systems facilitate such accountability to the electorate. Some other electoral systems do not. For example, the proportional-representation systems used in continental Western Europe give priority to parties and they make coalition governments the norm, thereby insulating failing politicians from democratic sanction and enabling them to remain in power (Popper 1999, chap. 8). One consequence of persons’ fallibility and peccability is that no fully adequate system of checks on the officers of the state has yet been devised. Since persons are fallible and peccable, the leading officers of one state may try to subjugate or rob the persons in another state by force. The objective moral rules therefore prescribe not only that there be multiple states but also that each state has the obligation and the liberty-right to defend the rights of its subjects from being violated, not only by other persons within its community, but also by persons outside of the community, including the organised armies of other states.

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The existence of many states creates the possibility of migration from one to another. Since states exist for the sake of freedom, the default position is that persons should be permitted to migrate freely. Free migration also has the benefit of providing information about the experiments being conducted in states to try to improve state institutions or to clarify their rights and obligations: when persons begin to flee a state, it is an important indication that something is amiss. However, when a state, through the errors or the ill-will of its officers, becomes entrenched as an illiberal state, its subjects may in time become so benighted that their immigration into another state poses a danger to the subjects of that host state, in which case the host state may be required, by its standing obligations, to impose some form of immigration control. That topic is discussed elsewhere (Frederick and Friedman 2020). The review of the official theory of the state, or of its institutional structure, which involves the comparison of accepted official theories with rival ones, will never lead to agreement on which theory is true, so long as persons exercise their critical rationality; but it can be brought to a conclusion when persons agree to accept one theory as having stood up best to critical appraisal in the current state of the debate (recall Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3). Such a conclusion is, of course, provisional in that new theories, new arguments, new experiments may be proposed in future. There will be times, however, when the state of the debate does not yield such a provisional conclusion. Several new theories may be debated and compared with the current one; yet it may remain unclear which of the theories in contention stands up best to criticism and testing. In such a situation, the rival theories being advocated could be trialled simultaneously (in different segments of the community or in different divisions of the state) to discover which is better than the others; or they may be trialled successively, for limited time periods. However, it may be that the trials also fail to yield a provisional conclusion and that a decision has to be made on which theory to implement before any further trials can be completed. In such a situation it may seem that a compromise should be reached. After all, when persons have conflicting interests, they can usually agree on a compromise that gives each party some, but not all, of what she wants. So, similarly, it might be thought, a compromise between

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the different theories in contention could give the advocates of each rival theory some, but not all, of what they want. However, compromise would be a defective way to resolve a conflict between rival theories. A compromise theory will contradict each of the rival theories in contention. It would be a fluke if such an ad hoc theory turned out to be better than those rivals; indeed, it may be clear in the light of discussion to date that it is a worse theory than any of the rivals in contention. Compromise would commit to a theory that may be universally deemed false. An alternative to compromise would be to use a lottery to decide between the rival theories (recall Chap. 3, Sect. 3.4). But a better pragmatic solution is to retain the currently accepted theory of the state’s rights and obligations, and of its optimal institutional structure, until a different theory can be shown by means of argument, including empirical trials, to be better. That avoids the cost and disruption of implementing a new theory that may eventually be discovered to be worse or no better than the currently accepted one. The peccability of some persons often makes it more difficult for other moral agents (persons or states) to fulfil their obligations. Imagine, for instance, that a powerful group of the state’s subjects institutes a system of enforced slavery within the state’s territory and that they have sophisticated weaponry that they will deploy, if necessary, to defend their institution. Would it be permissible for the officers of the state to compromise with the slave-holders, permitting them to continue their practice, perhaps under specific conditions that somewhat ameliorate the conditions of the slaves, in order to avoid the turmoil, suffering and death of a civil war? If it did so, it would cease to be a liberal state: it would have defaulted on its obligation to secure maximum freedom of its subjects in favour of an obligation to avoid civil war. Can there be circumstances in which a liberal state is obliged to cease being a liberal state? The question is a difficult one that requires a full-length discussion, which cannot be attempted here, though a positive answer is suggested in Frederick and Friedman (2020, sects. 3 and 8), where some other scenarios are considered. Readers imbued with the individualist conception of the state might wonder how agreement on the rights and obligations of the state was ever initially attained. When it comes to revisions of the official theory of the

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state and its existing institutional structure, there are already accepted theories in place. The accepted theories facilitate agreement in two ways. First, the accepted theory is the default which remains in place until a rival theory can be shown by argument to be better; and thus it remains in place even when it is unclear whether any rival theory is better. Second, the officially accepted theory is the one with which persons are familiar, the one that they have learned or been taught, or to which they have been acclimatised, so it provides a common framework of assumptions. Of course, any of those assumptions may be impugned; but all of them remain common assumptions until someone impugns them. However, before the state was initially instituted, there was no official theory of the state in place, so there was no default theory and everything may have been in dispute, in which case there would have been very little, if any, chance of agreement on a theory of the state. Anyone who raises that difficulty forgets that we have rejected the individualist conception of the state. The state did not have to be created by persons; it came into existence with them. Human persons evolved from earlier life-forms that were not persons but were animals that lived in a group with a dominance hierarchy and some specialised roles, such as mother, father, child, hunter, gatherer, chief, lookout. When those creatures developed into persons their biologically and culturally inherited expectations about the natural and social world became theories that were in principle open to criticism and revision. Having moral concepts, their inherited expectations about the social world would have been interpreted as moral laws; in fact, it seems that they also understood the natural world in terms of moral laws (Piaget 1929, chaps. 5–7). Thereby, the social arrangements that the first persons inherited from their non-person ancestors were turned into institutions. An initial agreement, or ‘social contract’ or ‘collective acceptance,’ concerning what institutions to have was unnecessary, so it never mattered that it was also impossible (Frederick Forthcoming). Even if apes evolved into persons in just one place, rather than several, they divided into separate tribes whose institutions evolved in different ways. There were as many states as there were tribes, so the institution of the state would have differed between tribes. Even if all or most tribes had a single chief, the rights and obligations that attached to the role of chief

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would probably have differed between states. Persons from one tribe often traded with persons from another and brought back to their own tribe not only goods but also stories of unusual customs and social arrangements. The encounter with new ideas gave a spur to the exercise of critical rationality and thus to the reform of existing institutions. By undermining the ‘closed society’ of the tribe, it enabled, but did not determine, progress toward a more ‘open society’ and thus toward a liberal state (Popper 1966, vol. I, pp. 171–177). But nowhere in the world has a fully liberal state been achieved. The properties that are assigned to the state by the objective moral rules are moral properties: obligations, liberty-rights, claim-rights, authority-rights, immunity-rights and moral disabilities. States generally, perhaps universally, fail to do all that they ought to do, and they also do what they ought not to do. It may therefore seem that we could never recognise a state when we encountered one. There are, however, two non-­ moral properties that an institution must have if it is to be a state, because an institution with those properties is essential to the existence of a community. A state enforces community-wide rules (and adjudicates disputes about those rules) and levies taxes on the community. Those are, of course, things that every state ought to do; but an institution is a state only if it actually does them. Every community has some form of state, since without a state of some form there would be no community. Even an isolated family has an institutional structure of different roles through which rules are enforced, more or less strictly, by an authority figure; otherwise, the family would break up. When Robinson Crusoe met Friday, they formed a community in which Crusoe represented the state, enforcing rules and exacting Friday’s contribution. The objective moral rules that the state is obliged to enforce spell out the entitlements of persons to freedom to direct their own lives, so the Master-slave structure of the Crusoe-Friday state violated objective moral rules: it was an unjust state. Had Crusoe met on the island, not Friday, but a shipwrecked European, they might have formed a community of equals; but the community would have been possible only to the extent that it had some arrangement for enforcing common rules, resolving disagreements, and devoting resources to those ends, that is, a state. The common European culture of the two persons might have enabled them to fall into an

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institutional structure with the recognisable characteristics of the state almost without thinking about it. That concept of the state, as the institution (or set of institutions) in a community that enforces community-wide rules, adjudicates disputes about those rules, and levies taxes on the community, is a very wide one. That is because what is important for the problem of political authority is something that large, modern, bureaucratic states have in common with the chief or elders in a hunter-gatherer society and even with the head of an isolated family. In connection with some other theoretical problems it may be that the differences between smaller, more informal, states and larger, bureaucratic ones need to be emphasised, in which case, in such contexts, it may be more convenient to reserve the term ‘state’ for the rule-enforcing, tax-levying institutions to be found in modern, large, highly-organised communities. Nothing hangs on our choice of words, so long as, in each context, our meaning is clear. Potential conflicts between self-interest and morality, aggravated by human fallibility, explain why objective moral rules require the existence of a state with the obligations and rights: (a) to safeguard persons’ rights to direct their own lives; (b) to remove impediments to freedom by privatising accessible resources; (c) to avoid becoming a world state and to permit largely free immigration and emigration; (d) to defend its subjects’ rights against possible incursions by other states; (e) to ensure that its institutions are replete with ‘checks and balances,’ including democratic elections that enable voters to eject specific politicians; (f ) to review and revise its stated remit and the efficiency and effectiveness of its institutions to try to ensure that the state fulfils all and only its obligations; (g) to impose on its subjects, and enforce, obligations that are necessary for the state to fulfil its obligations. With regard to (g), we have noted that the state has the obligations, authority-rights and liberty-rights to impose upon its subjects, and enforce the fulfilment of, obligations to comply with the state’s choice of

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equitable schemes for acquiring currently unowned or state-owned resources and for providing to the state the resources that the state needs to fulfil its obligations. Other obligations owed by subjects to their state are explained in the next section.

6.3 Obligations to the State The state is a creature of objective moral rules. Objective moral rules set the constraints that allow for persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. The existence and entitlements of the state are required to ensure, as far as practically possible, that persons comply with the objective moral rules. The objective moral rules assign to persons some obligations that they cannot owe to persons. Such obligations of persons must therefore be owed to the state. The obligations in question are in addition to the obligations to the state set out in Sect. 6.2. We saw in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2, that there are some obligations that a competent adult has for the sake of her own scope for self-discovery. One is the obligation not to commit suicide, unless life offers no prospects for future fulfilment; another is the obligation not to submit to permanent slavery. Under some circumstances, a person may have those obligations as consequences of other obligations that she owes to other persons. For instance, if Kitty has promised Kenny that she will never submit to becoming any kind of slave, she then has as a consequence the obligation to Kenny not to submit to permanent slavery; and if Laura has small children and the consequent obligation to look after them, she also has the consequent obligation not to commit suicide. However, under different circumstances a person may have no obligations to any other person that entail that she has an obligation not to submit to permanent slavery or not to commit suicide. Since we rejected, as a pseudo-scientific ‘artful dodge’ (Chap. 5, Sect. 5.6), the notion of a person’s obligations to herself, and the related notion of inalienable rights, then such a person has no obligations to any person not to submit to permanent slavery or not to commit suicide. But according to the objective moral rules she does have those obligations. She must, then, owe those obligations to the state. The obligation of the state is to enforce the moral rules that allow persons in

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general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. Since one of those rules prohibits voluntary submission to permanent slavery and another prohibits suicide (except in special cases), the state must use its authority-rights to impose those obligations on persons, which are therefore obligations that persons owe to the state. We must acknowledge a difficulty. When Robinson Crusoe was alone on the island, there was no potential conflict between him and another person because he was the only person there. The state exists if there is a community; but it exists only if there is a community. Yet Crusoe had the obligation not to commit suicide. His prospects of fulfilment depended, let us suppose, on his interaction with other persons; but it was only a matter of time before he was rescued. Since he had prospects for future fulfilment, he was obliged not to commit suicide. But to whom did he owe that obligation, given that he was an isolated and thus stateless individual? On the theory propounded here, it seems that the obligation must be owed to the state of one of the communities of which Crusoe was a member; presumably, the most recent such community. That seems unsatisfactorily ad hoc. However, if Crusoe does not owe the obligation not to commit suicide to the state of one of the communities of which he had membership, then there seem to be only two non-recherché possibilities. The first is that he owes the obligation to himself. But we have already found that idea to be unacceptable. A person’s obligation to herself is equivalent to a claim-­ right against herself; so either she can waive her claim-right and thus release herself from the obligation, in which case the obligation is no real obligation, or her claim-right against herself is unwaivable or inalienable. But the idea of an unwaivable right is a purely ad hoc patch, because it explains nothing else; it disposes of the problem by artifice. If our preferred solution is ad hoc (as it seems to be) it applies only to cases of isolated persons, such as Crusoe on the otherwise uninhabited island. But the ad hoc theory of inalienable claim-rights against oneself would apply also to persons who belong to communities, such as Crusoe when he returns to society. So at least our theory is less extensively ad hoc than the alternative theory: it needs improvement, but it is better than its rival. The second non-recherché possibility is simply to deny that persons who have prospects for future fulfilment do have the obligation not to commit

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suicide. That is inconsistent with any moral theory that grounds obligations in the conditions for the fulfilment of persons; it would require a different metaphysical theory. The freedom for persons in general to seek fulfilment through self-­ discovery will, it seems, be better secured if very young children (who will normally become persons with a lifetime in front of them) are protected and nurtured by their parents or carers than if they are not. Therefore, the objective moral rules assign such obligations to parents and carers. However, very young children have no understanding of moral obligations, so they cannot have obligations to others. That may make it doubtful to some of us that parents or carers can have obligations to very young children. On the other hand, those children will, in the normal course of events, become persons who have obligations, so the sacrifices of their parents and carers can be understood as being made for the sake of future persons. That may enable us to make sense of a person owing an obligation to a creature that is not yet a person. We might think that it does not matter whether the parents or carers owe the obligations to the children because, if they do not, then they owe the obligations to the state, and the state will be obliged to enforce the obligations either way. However, the contention that the obligations are owed to the state raises again the problem we encountered with Robinson Crusoe. Imagine that Laura and her baby are the only survivors of a shipwreck living on an island. Laura is the only person there (the baby is not yet a person), so there is no state there to which she can owe the obligation to protect and nurture her child. As in the case of Crusoe, we can say that she owes the obligation to the state that she most recently left. Unhappy though that is, it is a recourse available if it turns out that obligations cannot be owed to children that are not yet persons; and it is a recourse that involves no new ad hoc patch, since it is an application of the same patch that we used for Crusoe. Prior to the very young child is the foetus from which the child develops. Again, it seems clear that the freedom for persons in general to seek fulfilment through self-discovery will be better secured if pregnant women have the obligation to protect the foetus and carry the baby to term than if they do not. If the woman does not want to become a mother but carries the baby to term, her freedom is restricted for nine months or

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so (it is assumed here that the woman will have the option of transferring the baby to adoptive parents after the birth). But if the foetus is aborted, the freedom of the person whom the foetus would, in the natural course of events, become would be annulled (compare and contrast Caplan 2015). The foetus cannot have obligations but it will normally, if not aborted, develop into a person that does have obligations. If that is not sufficient for the pregnant woman to owe to the foetus the obligations to look after it and carry it to birth, then she must owe those obligations to the state. In that case, in desert-island situations, we will need again to avail ourselves of the familiar ad hoc patch. However, it seems that abortion is permissible in cases in which it is required in order to save the woman’s life, since in such cases the embryo is an innocent aggressor against which the woman is entitled to defend herself (Thomson 1971, 1990, pp. 366–368). Moral rules safeguard the freedom of persons. Consequently, the state can have no authority-right to impose upon persons new obligations concerning the treatment of animals that are not persons, including humans who are too severely mentally impaired to be able to develop into persons, except insofar as such treatment threatens the freedom of persons. If, as Kant hypothesised, a person who treats cruelly animals that are not persons will become more liable to violate the rights of other persons to direct their own lives, then the state has an obligation to impose on persons, and to enforce, an obligation not to treat cruelly animals that are not persons. That obligation will be owed to the state, so our theory avoids Kant’s reliance on an obligation to oneself not to mistreat animals that are not persons. We noted in Sect. 5.5 of Chap. 5 that Kant’s hypothesis, though plausible, has not yet been tested empirically. We must therefore consider how things stand morally if Kant’s hypothesis is false. We can break Kant’s hypothesis into two parts: (A) a person who treats cruelly non-human animals that are not persons will become more liable to violate the rights of persons; (B) a person who treats cruelly human animals that are not persons will become more liable to violate the rights of persons.

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Suppose that (A) is false. Then it is permissible for persons to treat cruelly non-human animals that are not persons. However, the permissible treatment of non-human animals that are not persons is still constrained by the rules securing the freedom of persons, insofar as such non-human animals are private property. For instance, it is wrong to use or to damage such a creature that belongs to another person without the consent of that other person. But, where a person owns such a creature, she is morally entitled to use it in any way that is consistent with her obligations to other persons and to the state. For instance, it may be permissible for her, in the privacy of her own home, to torture the creature to death. Rules prohibiting such treatment are matter of etiquette rather than morals. They could still, though, become a matter of morals through agreements between persons. For example, householders on a housing estate could agree to a covenant prohibiting inhumane treatment of non-­ human animals that are not persons on any of the premises in the development. They would thereby give each other an obligation to desist from such behaviour anywhere on the estate. In the absence of such agreements, the sensitivity of the vast majority of persons to the inhumane treatment of such beings will probably mean that cruel treatment of them would be generally regarded with as much disapproval as if it were in violation of a moral rule, as a result of which the perpetrator of such treatment might be ostracised. Further, persons are entitled to offer goods or services to the perpetrator in exchange for better treatment of the creature. But control of such cruel treatment is a matter of voluntary arrangements. Such cruel treatment is a matter for the state only if it is done in such a way that the claim-rights or immunity-rights of persons are violated. It must, however, be emphasised that the absence of an obligation not to treat cruelly a non-human animal that is not a person does not amount to an obligation or even a recommendation to treat that animal cruelly. It seems plausible that most people abhor such behaviour. But abhorrent does not equal immoral. Suppose that (B) is false. Then it is permissible to treat cruelly even human animals that will not develop into persons. A subset of such human animals are some of those that once were persons who, through injury, disease or old age, ceased to be so. Such a creature will become private property allocated to persons either through the last will and

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testament of the person whom she used to be or through an intestacy scheme specified by the state. As a result she will normally become the private property of a relative who may take care of her, have her life terminated or sell her to the highest bidder. The highest bidder might be someone who finds fulfilment in torturing ex-persons or using them for sex, or someone who uses them for medical research or transplants. That doubtless sounds horrendous, but that will presumably be because we cannot help mistakenly seeing such a creature as a person, and because the relatives, friends and acquaintances of the person whom she used to be cannot help mistakenly seeing her as that person. One presumes that the relatives of a living ex-person would normally be reluctant to put her on the market; but some of them would do so if the price were right. In that case, both buyer and seller would obtain resources that she thinks will improve her ability to pursue her aims and find fulfilment. There is here, of course, a parallel with a market in human organs, about which many people are irrationally squeamish (Frederick 2010). However, those garish implications of the falsity of Kant’s hypothesis can be overlooked for the time being since that hypothesis, particularly part (B), is plausibly true, pending the results of empirical testing. In that case, though we can have no obligations to human or non-human animals that are not persons, we do have obligations to the state not to treat such animals cruelly.

6.4 Freedom of Speech The scope for persons to experiment in quest of personal fulfilment depends upon the extent to which persons behave morally; or, as we have alternatively put it, the true moral theory is the one such that, if universally enforced, the best achievable conditions for persons in general to discover themselves through experimentation with kinds of life would be realised. Personal fulfilment depends upon self-discovery, which in turn depends upon freedom, which is why all competent adults who have committed no unexpiated wrongs are morally entitled to the freedom to direct their own lives. A person is not born knowing which kind of life will be most fulfilling for her. She will have a theory or theories about that

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which she inherits from her culture; but any, even all, of those theories may be false. It must therefore be permissible for her to criticise those theories, search for or propose new ones and criticise them too. It must also be permissible for other persons to criticise those theories, since they may spot strengths or weaknesses in them that she misses, and to propose new ones that she has not considered. Worthwhile criticism may come from anyone. Children, teenagers, persons with a mental impairment, and persons who have committed unexpiated wrongs that are punishable by loss of liberty, may offer a comment which, even if not directly pertinent, may lead to a thought that unearths a novel view or a novel criticism. Each person is therefore morally entitled to comment on any theory, no matter who, if anyone, accepts it, and to propose any new theory, no matter how bizarre it may seem. That entitlement to unrestricted freedom of speech falls under (B), (C) and (D) in the specification of the right to direct one’s own life given in Sect. 5.3 of Chap. 5: it involves a person’s liberty-rights to perform the actions that she thinks will achieve her goals, her immunity-rights against others imposing new obligations upon her, and her claim-rights against others impinging on her body. Freedom of speech concerns the content of speech, not the time, place or manner of speech. Anyone may opine that corn dealers starve the poor; but it would be impermissible to shout that opinion angrily to an excited mob assembled outside the house of a corn-dealer, because of the high probability that it would lead to violence (Mill 2003, p.  131). Anyone may express the opinion that the local cinema is on fire. But it is not permissible to express that view by shouting ‘Fire!’ at the cinema when it is full of people and the building is not on fire, because that would be highly likely to prompt a stampede that causes damage to persons and property. Anyone may declaim the non-existence of God or the enormity of the child abuses carried out by the clergy. But, barring some special circumstances, such speech is not permissible at a church wedding ceremony, because it would spoil the occasion. Anyone may express the view that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood for ritual purposes; but it is not normally permissible to voice it in a seminar discussing Isaac Newton’s and Albert Einstein’s theories of gravity, because

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its irrelevance would waste the time and disrupt the concentration of the seminar participants. The state has the obligation to secure persons’ entitlements to freedom. In relation to freedom of speech the state has two tasks. It must ensure that no content is prohibited from being expressed. It must enforce prohibitions on times, places or manners of expression that have a high probability of bringing about, forthwith, violations of the claim-rights of persons. Thus, prohibitions on incitement to immediate violence (as in the case of the corn-dealer) and on speech which causes immediately an unnecessary and dangerous commotion (as in the case of the lying shout of ‘Fire!’) are legitimate state regulation of the time, place or manner of speech. Most of the regulations of time, place or manner of speech are not imposed by the state but are instead accepted or introduced by persons. The institution of private property permits property-owners to introduce regulations for their own property. Many of these regulations have evolved over time and any of them is liable to be changed by the property owners or by other persons acting on their behalf. Thus, the limitations on acceptable speech during the course of a seminar are decided by the owners of the institution in which the seminar takes place, though the owners may delegate authority-rights to tighten or loosen such regulations, in limited ways, to various officers within the institution, including the person in charge of the particular seminar. Similarly, restrictions on acceptable speech during a church wedding service are laid down by the owners of the church or officers acting on their behalf. One can imagine, at least in the Church of England nowadays, that the minister may be permitted to allow denunciations of the church and clergy during the service if the couple to be married request it; but she is not obliged to allow whatever the couple request, since it is the owners of the church and its officers who have the authority-rights to set the regulations for what happens in the church. However, the state’s obligation to ensure that no content is prohibited from being expressed requires it to oversee the regulations that property-­ owners impose on their properties. The state should ensure that the total restrictions imposed do not make it unreasonably difficult to express any particular content or to make that content available to the public at large.

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Freedom of speech has long had its opponents. Even its defenders have often been half-hearted, claiming that, while it is in general a good thing, there are some contents, or some sorts of contents, that are not covered by it. In recent decades, and in recent years more especially, there has been an upsurge in demands to curtail freedom of speech. More distressing still, those enemies of freedom seem to be found disproportionally amongst sections of society that, until quite recently, were typically vocal in their support of freedom of speech, in particular, teachers and researchers in schools and universities. I have argued for freedom of speech and against objections to it in some detail in other places (Frederick 2011, 2016c, 2016d, pp. 49–62, 2019, pp. 44–45, 46–47). I will not repeat that material here. Instead I will criticise a recent defence of censorship with which I have not previously engaged in detail. Jeremy Waldron champions laws against “hate speech” which, he says, is speech associating “ascriptive” characteristics like ethnicity, or race, or religion with conduct or attributes that should disqualify someone from being treated as an equal in the ordinary operations of society. Such speech is thus liable to undermine a person’s “dignity” or standing (Waldron 2012, p. 5). Hate speech, he says, does not merely express hate; it tells the members of the minority denounced that they are not welcome, that they will be shunned, excluded, beaten, and driven out, that they should be afraid; and it encourages other members of the community to discriminate against them (2012, pp. 1–2). A society which permits such publications may look quite different from a society that does not. Its hoardings and its lampposts may be festooned with depictions of members of racial minorities characterizing them as bestial or subhuman … proclaiming that members of these minorities are criminals, perverts, or terrorists … There may be signs indicating that the members of the minority in question are not welcome in certain neighborhoods or in polite society generally, and flaming symbols intended to intimidate them if they remain. (2012, p. 66)

Waldron is concerned about the effects of such publications on the lives of the persons who are their targets (2012, pp. 1–2). He favours laws that prohibit hate speech that is printed, published, pasted up, or posted on

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the Internet, so that such content ceases to be a permanent or semi-­ permanent part of the visible environment (2012, p. 37). Waldron commends hate-speech laws by attempting to balance one harm against another. A type of content, he says, is to be prohibited from being expressed if the harm to the producer from prohibiting its expression would be smaller than the harm to consumers from permitting its expression (2012, p. 147). Hate speech is important to those who produce it because it tells the world who they are and what they value; and that matters a great deal to them. If they are silenced on such topics, they are harmed (2012, pp. 148–150). On the other hand, if they are permitted to make their thoughts on such subjects public, then isolated racists will feel comfort from the spread of racist ideas, people in general will think and act on the assumption that the place of minority members in ordinary life is insecure, and members of vulnerable minorities will become convinced that they are not accepted as equals and “would have to live and go about in a society festooned with vicious characterizations of them and their kind and with foul denigrations of their status” and they “would have to explain all that to their children” (2012, pp. 153–155). Since the harm from censorship is smaller than the harm from freedom, hate speech should be prohibited (2012, pp. 159–160). It seems clear that Waldron is speaking of psychological harms and— even more nebulously—harms to a person’s interests (2012, p.  147). Psychological harm is not to be belittled. But it is, in the current state of knowledge, difficult to measure, so a claim that one collection of psychological harms is weightier than another collection is not currently falsifiable. As for harms to a person’s interests, that is anybody’s guess. So what we have here is Waldron making an unfalsifiable guess that one set of harms is weightier than another, and then using that untestable hypothesis to make policy proposals that will, directly or indirectly, affect the lives of everyone and frustrate the pursuit of self-discovery upon which the fulfilment of persons depends. It is worse than that because Waldron’s guess as to the extent of the harms seems outlandish. He appears to be grossly mistaken about both what would be gained and about what would be lost by hate-speech laws. Most of the harms that he attributes to hate speech can be prevented without laws against hate speech. Graffiti and unauthorised billposting

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defaces or damages public or private property and the same goes for burning a cross on a householder’s lawn. As such activities violate property rights they are illegal independently of hate-speech laws. Almost all of the other expressions of hate speech that upset Waldron would be prohibited by restrictions on time, place or manner of speech. For instance, covenants or other rules agreed by the residents on an estate or set by the company that built the estate may prohibit the expression of racist views on billboards or lamp-posts in that residential area. That is consistent with the permissibility of such views being expressed in a publication or a public discussion or a conversation or even on billboards in non-residential areas, including areas that are set aside for extreme or innovative political campaigning. One famous such area is Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park. Persons choose whether or not to visit such areas. One may object to the way in which United States’ courts have interpreted time, place or manner restrictions, for instance, in permitting a Nazi march through a predominantly Jewish community in Skokie (though the march did not go ahead). But the impermissibility of such a march in such an area does not entail the impermissibility of Nazi marches everywhere or the impermissibility of every expression of Nazi content. Provided that the state does its job of securing freedom, we would expect a diversity of regulations in different areas and different venues, arising out of the decisions and agreements of free persons choosing the regulations that best suit them. We would not expect residential or business areas to be plastered with racist words, pictures and symbols; and we would not expect many residential areas to host Nazi marches, though it is an obligation of the state to ensure that there are some areas (town centres, for instance) where such things can take place. Waldron asks us to choose between completely unregulated speech and prohibition of specific types of content. But it is better to reject both. He fails to see that himself because he is contemptuously dismissive of the distinction between prohibitions on content and prohibitions on time, place or manner (2012, pp. 150–155). That leads to him seriously overstating the harms of hate speech to persons in minority groups. Such speech would be available in books, journals, specialist newspapers, some public meetings, some public places set aside for presentation of unconventional views, and on the internet. It would rarely be shoved under

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people’s noses. For instance, if a mainstream newspaper began expressing such views in its pages, many purchasers of the paper would cease to buy it; so the paper would lose business and cease to be mainstream. The consumers would not be forced to continue buying it. Even when persons in minority groups do encounter hate speech, for most of them it is just one opinion amongst many others and, contrary to Waldron’s claims, it will not amount to anything like dispelling the “sense of assurance that constitutes the social upholding of individual dignity” (2012, pp. 166–167). Waldron is also grossly mistaken about what is lost by hate-speech laws. What is lost is not simply a matter of the unsatisfied needs of those who would express hate speech. The sort of hate-speech laws that Waldron recommends would prohibit all publication of views that imply that adult persons of some identifiable social groups are not entitled to the rights or treatment generally accorded to competent adults. As we saw above, in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2, Aristotle expounded the view, in his 1955 and in his 1962, that non-Greeks (barbarians) are natural slaves, due to defects in their deliberative capabilities, and that Greeks are entitled to enslave them against their will. Further, David Hume opined that the other races of humans are substantially inferior to the white race with regard to practical and intellectual ability (Hume 1985, p. 208, footnote 10). Kant accepted Hume’s view and he regarded negroes and Native Americans as morally defective (Kant 2007a, pp. 59–60 [2: 253–254], 2007b, pp. 92–93 [2: 437–438], 2007c, pp. 210–211[8: 175–176]). On Waldron’s view, it seems, those classic works of philosophy should be prohibited from being published, at least without serious redaction. Such a policy would be a substantial hindrance to the growth of knowledge. As the history of science shows, we learn from our mistakes, especially the mistakes of the intellectually gifted who have made substantial contributions to our knowledge. As John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) emphasised, consideration of views that we take to be false can help us to understand not only why they are false but also why our own contrary views are superior and perhaps also where our own views may need to be improved (Mill 2003, chap. 2). Further, it is a fact of elementary logic that every false proposition has a multitude of true logical consequences. So, studying and criticising a false theory can lead us to the discovery of

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new truths. For example, Aristotle’s theory affirmed that there are barbarians and that all barbarians are natural slaves. We reject that theory as false. But it has the logical implication that there are natural slaves. I have argued elsewhere that that proposition appears to be true and that the fact that it may be true has implications for our understanding of morality and law, including the permissibility of fixed-term slavery contracts (Frederick 2014). Free debate does not guarantee progress but it does encourage it and, as we saw in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3, so long as pseudo-­ scientific stratagems are avoided, regress is prevented. Since the general fulfilment of persons depends upon the growth of knowledge, including—and especially—the acquisition of self-knowledge and knowledge about possible social roles, hate-speech laws reduce the scope for persons in general to discover themselves and achieve fulfilment. Waldron misses that point because he considers that, as time goes by, some issues become settled, so that there is no need for further debate or consideration of alternatives (2012, pp.  192–197). He thinks that we have reached that point with regard to the contention that “ascriptive” characteristics are irrelevant to social standing. He takes inspiration from John Rawls (1921–2002): Rawls stipulates that in a well-ordered society “everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else accepts, the very same principles of justice.” Now, this is an attractive idea, …. (2012, p.  69, footnote suppressed; see also pp. 93–96, 193–197)

That idea is attractive to one who is gulled by the dogmatic conception that in our quest for knowledge we aspire to a stagnant “reflective equilibrium.” It is repulsive to one who sees our quest for knowledge as a process of continual improvement (Frederick 2016b). In the history of science it has happened repeatedly that generally accepted theories are later overturned. Johannes Kepler’s and Galileo Galilei’s theories were overturned by Newton’s. For two centuries Newton’s theory was generally accepted as the settled truth; but then it was overturned by Einstein’s theories of relativity (see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3). Disagreement over principles of justice, including the social standing of minorities, should be

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encouraged and welcomed so that we can improve our knowledge through open discussion and criticism. In Chap. 7 of his book Waldron seems to define “hate speech” in a more restricted manner, so that it is not (as in the earlier parts of the book) speech that impugns the equal standing of persons in minorities but, rather, speech that does that in a vituperative or abusive way. However, even speech of that kind may provoke new and worthwhile thoughts in someone who considers it. It may also be valued, not only by racists and such like, but even by some of the persons who are its targets. Here is an example. Imagine the members of The Abusive Club who hire a room above a public house for their weekly meetings at which they shout at each other the most blood-curdling abuse imaginable. It is a multi-racial affair in which racial and religious insults are especially prized. The most extreme and wicked abuse is savoured by its victims as well as it perpetrators and others in the company. What the Club members get out of this varies from person to person; but some of the participants derive a masochistic fulfilment in suffering psychological torment from the abuse that they receive. These sessions are for Club members only and people can choose whether or not they want to join the Club (or start a similar one of their own). The public-house owner knows what occurs in these meetings, so she waives the usual house regulations prohibiting uncivil language, so long as the Club members pay for the room and cause no damage to the property. Waldron is mistaken not only about what would be gained and lost by laws against hate speech; he is mistaken also in focussing on harm. The problem is not just that we cannot yet measure harms, particularly psychological harms and ‘harms to a person’s interests.’ That is indicated by the fact that Nadine Strossen (2018) carries out a similar exercise and finds that the weightier harms are on the opposite side. The problem, as we saw in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2, is that consequentialism is mistaken. The point of moral behaviour, and moral prohibitions, is to create the best achievable scope for the freedom to experiment through which persons can find fulfilment. Many of the experiments will fail, perhaps the vast majority, perhaps relatively few; but no one can know in advance which experiments, or how many of them, will succeed. The failed experiments may involve harm to the person and, even, ‘harm to her interests.’ But

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that does not count against them because they are the only way through which persons can find more fulfilling lives. The best we can do is to create the scope for the experiments on which the achievement of fulfilment depends; but how much fulfilment we get as a result is a matter of chance, depending upon the undetermined actions of persons guided by fallible conjectures. A further indication of the fanciful nature of Waldron’s discussion is given by his comment that each person, no matter the group to which she belongs, should be able to go about her business with the assurance that she need not face discrimination, hostility, or violence (2012, p. 4). That expresses a nice sentiment but it is the stuff of fairy tales. Even if we did all happen to agree about the principles of justice it does not follow that we would adhere to them. The real world is inhabited by persons even the best of whom has to struggle against the moral defects of her nature. There is much more that is mistaken in Waldron’s thoroughly mistaken discussion but which we need not consider here. I will end by quoting what appears to be a reductio ad absurdum. Moreover, it would be inconsistent with the respect demanded by their status as citizens to publish a claim, for example, that Tea Party politicians cannot be trusted with public funds or that they are dishonest… because that would be a scurrilous attack on what I have called their elementary dignity in society. It would be group defamation of exactly the kind we have been considering. (2012, p. 121)

In Britain it is often heard that Labour politicians cannot be trusted with the public finances, that the Tories cannot be trusted to keep their promises, and even that all politicians are liars. Moreover, each of those claims appears to be true! In conclusion, entitlement to freedom of speech for all persons is one of the conditions required to provide the scope for experimentation on which human fulfilment depends. It is thus a moral requirement. There is no content such that it is impermissible for any person to express it and make it available to the public at large. Nevertheless, every content is such that it is impermissible to express it in some times, places or manners. Some prohibitions on time, place or manner derive from the state

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(such as those concerning incitement to violence); others derive from property-owners or their agents, perhaps in agreement with other persons (such as covenants in residential areas). The state’s obligation to ensure that no type of content is prohibited from being expressed enjoins the state to ensure that the total prohibitions imposed on time, place or manner do not make it unreasonably difficult to express any content or to make that content available to the public at large. There may, of course, be worries about officers of the state construing that obligation in ways that allow them to suppress speech of which they disapprove. There are similar worries about all the state’s obligations. As explained in Sect. 6.2, the institution(s) of the state must comprise a set of checks and balances designed to mitigate such abuses.

6.5 Illiberal States We saw in Sect. 6.2 that every person has the property of being morally entitled to be a subject of a liberal state. In fact, however, that entitlement is rarely met, if ever. Recall the man, described in Sect. 5.3 of the previous chapter, who had been abducted and treated as a slave. He had the moral property of being entitled to freedom to direct his own life, but he did not have that freedom. In all the larger communities (that is, countries), the primary institution that enforces rules and levies taxes on the community does not fulfil the obligations of the state and violates the immunity-­ rights of persons by acting outside of its authority-rights to impose upon persons requirements which it may call ‘obligations’ but which are not genuine obligations. As a consequence, every such existing state has the property of being morally obliged to be a liberal state but also has the property of being an illiberal state (to a greater or lesser extent). Every such state is therefore immoral or unjust. The subjects of an illiberal state still owe obligations to that state. They owe to the state the obligations not to submit to voluntary slavery, not to commit suicide (except in special circumstances), to abide by the state’s scheme for acquiring private property rights in previously unowned or state-owned resources (provided the scheme is equitable), and to pay their fair share of the costs of the state’s rightful activities. Thus, the fact

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that a state is illiberal does not destroy its political authority. But it does raise the question of whether its subjects are obliged to comply with the state’s demands when it acts illiberally. Bishop Berkeley defended an obligation of passive obedience, which had two components. First, a person is obliged to comply with the demands and regulations of an unjust state wherever doing so involves her in no wrongdoing. Second, where compliance requires her to act wrongly, she ought to refuse to comply but accept the state’s penalty for failure to comply (Berkeley 1953, para. III). For instance, if an unjust state prohibits stealing or damaging one’s neighbour’s property, one ought to comply; but if it requires one to discriminate against persons of particular races or religions, by enforcing regulations such as the old “Jim Crow laws” in the United States or the apartheid laws that obtained in South Africa, then one ought to refuse to comply and one ought to accept, and not resist, the punishment meted out by the state for so doing. I have shown elsewhere that the arguments that Berkeley propounded for passive obedience are not cogent (Frederick 2016a, pp. 32–33). Here I will show that both prongs of the supposed obligation of passive obedience are mistaken. Insofar as an unjust state acts within its objective authority-rights or enforces regulations that coincide with objective moral rules, then its subjects are obliged to comply; for, to that extent, both the subjects and the state are doing what they ought morally to do. The problem arises to the extent that the state enforces rules that do not belong to the set of objective moral rules, and that do not fall within one of the sets of alternative rules (for taxation, for example) that the state has the authority-­ right to impose and the liberty-right to enforce. That is, the problem arises when the state acts outside of its moral rights. In such cases the state requires persons to do things that are impermissible or to desist from doing things that are permissible. In the first type of case, which falls under the second prong of Berkeley’s principle, in which what the state requires of a person is impermissible, a person has an obligation not to do as the state requires, but she may suffer some more or less unpleasant punishment for refusing to do as the state requires. If the punishment is severe she may be excused, and thus not be blameworthy, for complying and thus for committing a wrong. If the

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punishment is immaterial, such as a fine that she can easily pay, then she would normally be blameworthy, as well as committing a wrong, if she complied. If she does not comply, as Berkeley says she should not, and her non-compliance is discovered, she then has a choice between submitting to the punishment that the state imposes, or attempting to flee, or resisting. It seems that, morally, she may choose any of those options. She is not obliged either to waive or to defend her (objective) immunity-­ rights, claim-rights or liberty-rights. So Berkeley is mistaken in saying that she has an obligation to accept the state’s punishment for her action. In the second type of case, which falls under the first prong of Berkeley’s principle, in which the state requires persons to desist from doing things that are permissible, a person has no obligation either to do or not to do as the state requires, so she does no wrong either way. So, Berkeley is mistaken in saying that she has an obligation to comply. If she does not comply, and her non-compliance is discovered, she then has a choice between submitting to the punishment that the state imposes, or attempting to flee, or resisting. As in the first type of case, it seems that, morally, she may choose any of those options. She is not obliged either to waive or to defend her (objective) immunity-rights, claim-rights or liberty-rights. That second type of case is illustrated by the following example, which is a slightly modified version of an example provided by Jason Brennan (2016, p. 42) for another purpose. (1) The state makes marijuana illegal. Ann has marijuana in her house. One night, police officers raid Ann’s house. She recognises that they are police officers. She knows that if they capture her, she will be imprisoned for a decade. Ann struggles to escape and, in the process, she kills the police officers in self-defence. In (1), the state’s actions go beyond its objective rights, since Ann’s entitlement to freedom permits her to smoke marijuana (in the absence of some obligation that Ann has incurred to another person not to smoke marijuana). As a consequence Ann has the liberty-right to resist arrest. She kills the police officers in self-defence, so she does no wrong. Brennan’s purpose is to defend what he calls “The Moral Parity Thesis.” The idea is that it is permissible to kill a civilian in self-defence or in

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defence of others in a type of circumstance if and only if it is permissible to kill an officer of the state in self-defence or in defence of others in the same type of circumstance (Brennan 2016, p. 43). Consider an example, adapted from Brennan (2016, pp. 41–42). (2) Ann is driving a minivan with her three children in the back. She is forced to stop by another driver who emerges from his car and immediately starts shooting at the windows of her van. Ann retrieves her gun from the glove compartment and shoots the man in defence of herself and her children. Ann acts permissibly whether or not the man is a police officer. That type of example seems unexceptionable because the officer of the state is acting outside of the political authority of the state and also outside of his own rights. But consider a different example. (3) Harry tells Sally that his organisation is protecting her from would­be criminals. He demands payment of a fee. Sally refuses to pay. Harry informs Sally that, in line with his organisation’s procedures, he is required to take from her property sufficient to cover her debt. Harry proceeds; Sally resists. A struggle ensues in which Sally shoots and kills Harry to defend herself and her property. Sally acts permissibly if Harry works for a local crime gang. She acts impermissibly if Harry is an enforcement officer of a liberal state. What makes the difference is that in the former case Harry was not entitled to do what he did, whereas in the latter case he was so entitled. It should be noted that in the former case Sally’s action is self-defence, in the moral or legal sense, because Harry was acting wrongly; whereas in the latter case it is not self-defence, in the moral or legal sense, because Harry was acting rightly. Brennan does not consider examples in which an officer of the state acts within her official authority. That is because he assumes that there is no such thing as political authority. His reason for that assumption is the failings of philosophers to explain how political authority is possible (2016, pp.  48–49). It seems that the philosophers he has in mind are

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those who accept individualist views of the state. Brennan himself accepts such a view: “I define government as the subset of a society which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion, and which has coercive power sufficient to maintain that monopoly” (2016, p. 46, footnote 17). A “subset of society” presumably means a subset of the persons that make up the community. But the state and its political authority cannot be understood on such a view (see Sect. 6.1, above). Given Brennan’s assumption, his moral parity thesis seems almost trivial. Brennan is sensitive to that objection (2016, p. 49). His response is threefold. First, he says that, even if there were political authority, his moral parity thesis would be true in cases where an officer of the state acts outside of the state’s political authority, as in example (1), above. Second, he questions whether a state could have the political authority to commit unjust acts (2016, p.  49). But that is a confusion. Acts that would be unjust if (as Brennan assumes) the state had no political authority are not unjust if the state (unlike its subjects) has the relevant authority-right; because then the state can use its authority-right to give its subjects an obligation that they did not otherwise have; then, in using its liberty-­ right to enforce that obligation, it is not acting unjustly. In contrast, one of the state’s subjects, lacking the state’s authority-right but acting as the state does, would be violating a claim-right and thus acting unjustly. Third, Brennan points out that some theorists claim that, independently of the question about political authority, it is (except in extreme cases) wrong to kill an officer of a democratic state who is acting within the rights (or, rather, ‘rights’) that the state has assigned to him through the democratically accepted procedures. So, the non-trivial point made by Brennan’s defence of his parity thesis is that such theorists are mistaken. On the theory defended here, whether or not a state is democratic is irrelevant to the issue. Political theorists (and others) who contend that democratic procedures bestow new authority-rights on the state are mistaken. Rights and obligations are assigned by objective moral rules grounded in freedom as providing the condition for the fulfilment of persons in general. Those objective moral rules assign rights and obligations not only to persons but also to the state, which is an entity distinct from the persons who are its subjects. The state is not, and cannot be, the result of a social contract. It is not like a club that is created by a group of

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persons and that has the rights and obligations that those persons assign to it and that may be modified by a democratic vote of the club’s members. In a club that is entered into voluntarily, a majority vote can create new obligations where the club members have previously agreed to be bound by majority decisions. But the state exists and has objective rights and obligations whatever persons may agree amongst themselves. In Sect. 6.2 we defended removal of officers of the state by democratic vote; but that is just a way of inhibiting those officers from pursuing their own interests instead of fulfilling their objective obligations; it is not a way of bestowing on the state new rights that derive from the rights of its subjects. In summary, persons have obligations not to violate the rights of other persons and thus to obey the laws of the state that reflect those obligations. Persons also have obligations not to violate the rights of the state. The state has some authority-rights to impose obligations on persons (and thereby to create claim-rights in itself against its subjects). Persons therefore have obligations to obey the laws of the state that enforce its claim-rights. The state’s liberty-rights entitle it to enforce rules that safeguard persons’ entitlements to freedom. When a state, through its officers, acts outside of its authority-rights or liberty-rights to attempt to enforce laws that encroach on persons’ entitlements to freedom, persons do not have an obligation to obey. If those laws require persons to do things that they have an obligation not to do, then persons have a moral obligation to disobey. If the rules require persons to do things that they have no obligation to do, then it is morally permissible for persons to disobey. It is, of course, permissible for persons to try to facilitate the reform of a state to make it more liberal and less unjust, but only so long as such activity violates no (objective) rights of persons or states. Such activities encompass: • • • •

standing for election to a legislative body; promoting new theories or criticising the state or its officers; peaceful protest; refusal to obey unjust laws;

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• self-defence and defence of others against unjust actions of officers of the state; • preventing persons from acting in accordance with unjust laws (for example, obstructing the operation of abortion clinics). Whether a person performs such an activity will depend, amongst other things, on her theories about who she is and how she should live, as well as upon the particular circumstances of the possible action, including its costs, risks and benefits. She should also take account of her fallibility: she may be inhibited from pursuing some forthright and costly actions by her recognition of the fact that the theories she holds, including moral theories, may be false. It might be objected that, unless most persons think that they have an at least pro-tanto obligation to obey the law, their disagreements about what rights and obligations they and the state have would erupt into strife and disorder. Some persons would try to kill state-licensed abortionists, some others would defend the state-licensed abortionists by trying to kill the would-be killers; judges and juries may refuse to convict people for killing state-licensed abortionists or for killing the people who try to kill the killers; police officers would refuse to write speeding tickets and pull-over drunk drivers because everyone stopped would feel free to resist, up to and including the use of lethal force, if they believe they are innocent. In short, if everyone were to decide for herself whether and when the state should be obeyed, the result would be anarchy. The objection is clearly mistaken. It seems doubtful that most people do think that they have an at least pro-tanto obligation to obey the law. Yet there is not anarchy. People are generally law-abiding not because it is the law but because they, by and large, respect each other’s rights—rights that the law more or less defectively reflects. Where they disagree over such rights, they often seek arbitration, perhaps through the courts, because a non-peaceful attempt at rectification is liable to bring forth a non-peaceful retaliation, if not from the victim then from the state. Judges and juries have a job to do: they are to decide whether or not the accused has broken the law and what the penalty should be. If they do not do what is specified for their role, they will normally be dismissed. Their personal moral views are irrelevant. The same goes for police

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officers; and anyone attempting to employ lethal force to resist arrest will normally encounter lethal force in return—and not just from the officers initially involved. People generally obey the law not because (or not just because) they think they have an obligation to do so; they obey the law in some cases because they think it gets things right, and in other cases because it would cause a lot of trouble for them and others if they did not obey the law. Pervasive disagreement about moral issues, including the rights and obligations of the state, is a fact. Many officers of the state may believe that they are acting rightly when they play their part in announcing, explaining and enforcing the state’s regulations. Many subjects of the state may be natural slaves and they may think that other persons are too, so they may subscribe to a collectivist ideology and they may campaign against individual freedom. Many may think that a democratic majority can turn wrong into right and therefore defend a democratic state no matter what it does (perhaps within some limits). There are also always likely to be a few who prize the freedom of persons, even though they might not be able to explain at all clearly why, and who demand a liberal state. What is also a fact is that, in most of the world, including those parts where the disagreements between persons are greatest because in large part freedom of speech is permitted, there is not anarchy. People decide for themselves whether to obey the state. For the most part they do obey. The penalties that states impose for disobedience will be a part of the explanation; another part will be that people in a community inherit the shared norms of that community and criticise or reject that body of norms only bits at a time; another part will be that most people are more concerned to get on with their lives as best they can under the political circumstances than to change the political circumstances. But as the state eats farther into persons’ freedom, the political circumstances become more of a personal issue.

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6.6 Conclusion Philosophers have struggled to give an account of the state because they have failed to distinguish the state as an entity distinct from persons. They tend either to see the state as a collection of persons, perhaps all those persons who make up a community or a smaller group of those persons, or to see the state as being the (ultimate) reality of which persons are only aspects. In fact the state is an institution, that is, a system of relations into which persons enter and exit. In any community the state is the institution that enforces community-wide regulations, including regulations concerning the payment of taxes which provide the state with the resources it needs to perform its functions. Every community has such an institution because without such an institution there would be no community. Even an isolated family has rules enforced, more or less strictly, by an authority figure; otherwise, it would break up. Thus, the state is distinct from persons, though it cannot exist without them, nor they without it (even Robinson Crusoe was a product of a society). Objective moral rules assign to competent adult persons the right to direct their own lives, and to other persons appropriately diminished rights of a similar kind, and to the state the obligations, authority-rights and liberty-rights to enforce laws that safeguard persons’ rights to direct their own lives and thereby permit the greatest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. Expressed another way: it is a moral fact that persons have obligations to respect each other’s entitlements to freedom to direct their own lives and to respect the state’s entitlement to enforce the fulfilment of those obligations and to impose and enforce further obligations on persons for the sake of the freedom of all. Obligations that persons owe to the state, rather than to each other, include: • not to submit voluntarily to permanent slavery; • not to commit suicide, except where life offers no prospects of fulfilment; • to provide their fair share of the resources that the state needs to fulfil its obligations;

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• to abide by equitable state schemes for converting unowned or state-­ owned resources into private property; and perhaps, • to protect and nurture any foetus or child in their care that is too young to have obligations; • not to treat cruelly animals that will not develop into persons. The state’s obligations are owed to its subjects. The state is not a person, but persons can owe it obligations because it owes obligations to them. The state is an abstract entity, constituted by relations, which is represented by persons who are officers of the state, who are obliged to perform the tasks that contribute to the fulfilment of the state’s obligations. Since persons are fallible, the theory of the state’s rights and obligations that is officially accepted (in a constitution or elsewhere) may be mistaken. The chief officer of the state therefore has the obligation to the subjects of the state to review and revise that official theory and also the institutional structure of the state. Typically, she will delegate many of the necessary tasks to subordinate officers to some of whom she may grant the right to commission studies from external consultants. Each state has the obligation to its subjects not to become a world state, so that lessons can be learned from rival experiments in different states. Potential conflicts between self-interest and morality, as well as human fallibility, mean that the chief officer of the state has an obligation (to the state’s subjects) to ensure that the institution(s) of the state incorporate checks and balances, including effective forms of democratic control by the state’s subjects. The state’s overriding obligation is to secure the freedom of persons to experiment with kinds of life in quest of personal fulfilment, so every state has the obligation to its subjects to be a liberal state and, correspondingly, each person is entitled to be the subject of a liberal state. A fundamental obligation of a liberal state is to ensure unrestricted freedom of speech because personal fulfilment depends upon self-discovery which in turn depends upon freedom to explore and to criticise even those inherited theories that seem to be part of a person’s identity. In

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consequence, every state is obliged to ensure that no content is prohibited from being expressed. But the state must also enforce prohibitions on times, places or manners of expression that have a high probability of bringing about, forthwith, violations of the claim-rights of persons. Lamentably, all currently existing states appear to be illiberal, though some are more illiberal than others. The subjects of an illiberal state owe to it the same obligations as they owe to a liberal state; that is, in so far as the state does what a state ought to do, its subjects owe it obedience. However, in so far as the state oversteps its moral bounds, its subjects owe it nothing. It is permissible for persons to ignore unjust laws, to avoid or flee punishment for breaking them, and to resist arrest using proportionate force where necessary. It is also, however, permissible for persons to comply with unjust laws, or to submit to the state’s punishment for breaking them, wherever doing so is consistent with their objective moral obligations (to other persons or to the state). It is impermissible for persons to comply with unjust laws where doing so involves violating the objective moral rights of others, though compliance may be excusable if penalties for non-compliance are harsh. The theory of the state propounded above is novel and, I trust, illuminating. It solves the problem of political authority as well as dispensing with the dubious notions of a person’s inalienable rights or obligations to herself, since the peculiarities of such rights and obligations are explained in terms of obligations to the state. It also accounts for the role of the state in classical liberal and some libertarian theorising in a way that coheres with, and depends upon, the centrality of individual freedom to liberal moral theory. An outline and defence of such a moral theory was provided in the previous chapter. Now we can briefly compare and contrast that moral theory, including the account given of the state in this chapter, with moral theories of a consequentialist type. It was pointed out in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2, that consequentialist moral theories are false because indeterminism and fallibilism entail that the best conditions for general personal fulfilment need not generate the best consequences for general personal fulfilment, and that the consequences of actions cannot be known in advance. A familiar way of trying to dodge such problems is to invoke expected outcomes; but we exposed that

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strategy as misguided in Sect. 3.4 of Chap. 3. Thus, moral behaviour cannot be a matter of maximising consequences or expected consequences. According to act consequentialism, to act morally an agent must try to maximise the general good. According to our view, the agent ought to experiment to try to discover for herself what fulfils her; but in doing that she ought to avoid violating moral rules, so that other persons have the freedom to try to discover for themselves what fulfils them. That makes possible the fulfilment of persons in general. However, since no person’s experiments in living are guaranteed success, perfect moral behaviour on the part of everyone could fail to increase the fulfilment of persons in general by even one jot. Of course, that is not very likely, but it is possible. Fulfilment of persons in general depends upon freedom but need not be a consequence of it (freedom is necessary but not sufficient for it). According to rule consequentialism, to act morally an agent must act without violating the moral rules. Unlike act consequentialism, rule consequentialism does not require the agent to maximise anything; it requires her only to conform to the rules that are such that the general good would be maximised if everyone conformed to them. According to our view, each person ought to ensure that her experiments in living do not violate the rules that allow persons in general the widest experimentation in quest of personal fulfilment. Maximisation of the fulfilment of persons in general does not enter the picture either as an obligation of persons or as the consequence of universal conformity to the objective moral rules. The rules, if enforced, do maximise the freedom of persons to experiment with kinds of life; but it is the state that has the obligation to maximise the freedom of persons by enforcing the set of moral rules expounded in the true moral theory. The state is not a person, though it is represented by persons who, in performing their official obligations, are obliged to contribute in one way or another to the enforcement of the objective moral rules. However, neither a person’s own experimentation with kinds of life, nor the state’s maintenance of the conditions for maximum freedom for persons to experiment with kinds of life, is sure to increase the fulfilment of persons in general, though each does remove barriers to either personal or general fulfilment. The topic of the state is a very large and a very contentious one. I have not said all that needs to be said about the liberal state; and the further

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development of the theory expounded above will become embroiled in many of the disputed questions in contemporary political philosophy. Here I will make brief comments on three contentious issues. The first concerns social welfare. It was noted in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.3, that obligations of beneficence can come out of the blue, such as an obligation to rescue a child who is drowning in a lake or to help a man who has fallen down some steps. Such obligations arise when one can help the person in distress at small marginal cost to oneself. However, it is feared that such charitable actions will leave many distressed persons without the help that they need. For instance, a person who, through no fault of her own, falls into financial difficulties may receive charitable help from a neighbour; but if most people in the neighbourhood are in financial difficulties because of the closure of the main local employer, it seems that not all of them will receive such assistance even if all the other persons in the neighbourhood fulfil their charitable obligations. It is therefore often claimed that the state should provide a “safety net,” raising revenue from taxpayers to fund assistance to those in distress. Such a scheme appears to be excluded on the theory expounded above, as it would require the state to interfere with persons’ freedom (which it is obliged not to do) in an attempt to promote persons’ welfare (which it has no right to do). There are, however, alternatives to state welfare programmes and to charity, namely, insurance schemes, either provided by profit-seeking providers or run by not-for-profit mutual assistance societies. In Britain there was a profusion of such mutual-aid associations before the state stepped in to take over welfare provision; and on balance the mutual aid seems to have provided a better system than the state does, in particular, being less inclined to cause dependency and degeneration (Green 1993, 1996). On the theory expounded here, whether obligations to assist persons in difficulty rest with persons or with the state depends upon which assignment better provides persons in general the freedom to direct their own lives. The second contentious issue, which seems to be an obsessive concern of political philosophers and other theorists, is equality of resources. It may be objected that, since the state is obliged to safeguard the entitlements to freedom of persons in general, and since the exercise of a person’s entitlement to freedom typically consumes scarce resources, the

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state is obliged to ensure that persons have equal shares of resources. However, as was noted in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.3, that seems to be mistaken. The function of the state is to secure persons’ moral entitlements to freedom because that is a necessary condition for the fulfilment of persons in general. Different persons find fulfilment in different ways, some of which require more resources than others. For example, some persons seem to find fulfilment in activities that consume substantial resources, such as travel by expensive means to lavish surroundings in exotic locations; others eschew such activities and seem to find fulfilment instead in a quiet life of contemplation in a sparse environment. Further, even if persons were given equal resources, they would soon differ with regard to their riches, partly because some use resources more wastefully and partly because some put their resources to productive use and, through talent or luck, are able to provide superior goods or services which are bought by a great many persons or bought at a premium price (Nozick 1974, pp. 160–164). Equality of resources, or even greater equality of resources, does not seem to be a legitimate concern of the state. The third contentious issue on which a brief comment is worth making is that of inheritance. It is customary in some circles to object to inheritance on grounds of equality of resources; but, as just noted, equality of resources does not seem to be a legitimate concern of the state. What is more interesting is whether anyone has an obligation to carry out the wishes expressed in a dead person’s last will and testament. A dead person is an ex-person that cannot have obligations, so it is not something to which persons can owe obligations. Persons could owe an obligation to the state to carry out a dead person’s wishes, but only if the objective moral rules assigned to some person(s) that obligation; but the rules would do that only if carrying out last wills and testaments helped to secure the conditions for persons in general to experiment freely with kinds of life—which it does not seem to do. It seems, then, that when a person dies, what was her private property, including her body, becomes unowned property and, as such, should be privatised by the state according to an equitable scheme. One equitable scheme, of course, would be to use the deceased person’s property to pay off all the debts she had at the point of death, or as much of them as her now unowned property will cover; any remaining resources could be converted to cash and used by

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the state to reduce the tax burden. It seems that, under such circumstances, persons would transform their bequests into debts by means of contracts or some other legal expedient; for example, a beneficiary could pay a nominal amount now on condition of receiving a large amount when the testator dies. We may then end up in a situation not too dissimilar to the one we are in now. But this is just preliminary speculation.

References Anomaly, Jonathan. 2015. Public Goods and Government Action. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14 (2): 109–128. Aristotle. 1955. Ethics. Trans. J A.K. Thomson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1962. Politics. Trans. T.A. Sinclair. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2007. Prior Analytics. Trans. A.J.  Jenkinson. Adelaide: University of Adelaide. eBooks@Adelaide. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/ a8pra/. Accessed 3 Jan 2011. ———. 2015. Categories. Trans. E.M. Edghill. Adelaide: University of Adelaide. eBooks@Adelaide. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/categories/. Accessed 29 Oct 2019. Barnett, Randy. 1977. Whither Anarchy. Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (1): 15–21. Berkeley, George. 1953. Passive Obedience. In The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, vol. VI, 15–46. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Bradley, F.H. 1951. Ethical Studies. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Brennan, Jason. 2016. When May We Kill Government Agents? In Defense of Moral Parity. Social Philosophy and Policy 32 (2): 40–61. Caplan, Bryan. 2015. Where Are the Pro-life Libertarians? EconLog, April 22. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/where_are_the_p.html. Accessed 10 Dec 2019. Childs, Roy. 1977. The Invisible Hand Strikes Back. Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (1): 23–33. Emmett, Dorothy. 1966. Rules, Roles and Relations. London: Macmillan. Feyerabend, Paul. 1981. On the Interpretation of Scientific Theories. In Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, 37–43. New  York: Cambridge University Press.

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Findlay, J.N. 1970. The Teaching of Meaning. In Ascent to the Absolute, 78–89. London: George Allen & Unwin. Frederick, Danny. 2010. A Competitive Market in Human Organs. Libertarian Papers 2: 27. ———. 2011. Pornography and Freedom. Kritike 5 (2): 84–95. ———. 2013. Social Contract Theory Should Be Abandoned. Rationality, Markets and Morals 4: 178–189. ———. 2014. Voluntary Slavery. Las Torres de Lucca 4: 115–137. ———. 2016a. The Good Bishop and the Explanation of Political Authority. De Ethica 3 (2): 23–35. ———. 2016b. Defective Equilibrium. Organon F 23 (4): 443–459. ———. 2016c. ‘Objectification’ and Obfuscation. Kritike 10 (2): 173–190. ———. 2016d. Freedom: Positive, Negative, Expressive. Reason Papers 38 (2): 39–63. ———. 2019. O’Hear on Popper, Criticism and the Open Society. Cosmos + Taxis 6 (6+7): 43–48. ———. Forthcoming. Are Institutions Created by Collective Acceptance? Journal of Value Inquiry. Published online before print, 21 October 2019: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-019-09719-z Frederick, Danny, and Mark Friedman. 2020. The Liberal Defense of Immigration Control. Cosmos + Taxis 8 (2+3): 23–38. Friedman, Mark. 2011. Nozick’s Libertarian Project. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Glaister, Stephen, and Daniel Graham. 2004. Pricing Our Roads. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Green, David. 1993. Reinventing Civil Society. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit. ———. 1996. Community Without Politics. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. The Philosophy of Right. Trans. S.W. Dyde. Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books. Hibbs, John. 1993. On the Move…A Market for Mobility on the Roads. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Hobbes, Thomas. 1962. Leviathan. Ed. John Plamenatz. Glasgow: Fontana. Hume, David. 1985. Of National Characters. In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, 197–215. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Kant, Immanuel. 2007a. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. In Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and

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Robert Louden, Trans. Robert Louden, 23–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007b. On the Different Races of Human Beings. In Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden. Trans. Robert Louden, 82–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007c. On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy. In Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden, Trans. Robert Louden, 192–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1977. Second Thoughts on Paradigms. In The Essential Tension, 293–319. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Locke, John. 1924. Two Treatises of Government. London: Dent and Sons. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2007. After Virtue. 3rd ed. Notre-Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mill, John Stuart. 2003. On Liberty, in Utilitarianism and On Liberty. Ed. Mary Warnock, 2nd ed., 88–180. Oxford: Blackwell. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Ostrom, Elinor. 2010. Beyond Markets and States. American Economic Review 100 (3): 641–672. Paul, Jeffrey. 1982. The Withering of the Minimal State. In Reading Nozick, ed. Jeffrey Paul, 68–76. Oxford: Blackwell. Piaget, Jean. 1929. The Child’s Conception of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Plato. 1974. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed., revised. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Popper, Karl. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1966. The Open Society and its Enemies, 5th, revised, ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1999. All Life is Problem Solving. London: Routledge. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Rothbard, Murray. 1977. Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State. Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (1): 45–57. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1913. The Social Contract. Trans. G.D.H. Cole. London: Dent and Sons. Russell, Bertrand. 1980. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Samuelson, Paul. 1954. The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure. Review of Economics and Statistics 36 (4): 387–389. Strossen, Nadine. 2018. Hate. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Thomson, Judith. 1971. A Defense of Abortion. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1): 47–66. ———. 1990. The Realm of Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waldron, Jeremy. 2012. The Harm in Hate Speech. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolff, Jonathan. 1991. Robert Nozick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolff, Robert Paul. 1982. Robert Nozick’s Derivation of the Minimal State. In Reading Nozick, ed. Jeffrey Paul, 77–104. Oxford: Blackwell.

7 Conclusion

7.1 A Summary of the Argument A person is an agent and thus acts. An action requires a bodily motion brought about by an act of will, though sometimes, due to injury or disease, an act of will fails to bring about a bodily motion. When it produces a bodily motion, an act of will becomes an action (it acquires that status). Every act is an undetermined event. But, as an act it is under the control of the agent. It is not an undetermined mere event that is outside of the agent’s control. An act is something an agent does. It is undetermined because it is under the agent’s control: it is up to the agent whether she acts. But each act has an absolute objective probability of occurring that is greater than 0 but smaller than 1. That makes social science and everyday management possible. Many recent philosophers maintain that free will is impossible or perplexing because they confuse undetermined acts with undetermined mere events, or because of logical confusions that lead them into infinite regress, or confusions regarding intentional actions with actions generally, action types with individual actions, free will with social or political freedom, free actions with actions for which the agent

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is morally responsible, actions with bodily motions, intentional actions with actions done for reasons, or goals with reasons. Philosophers generally construe Reason as being an authority or a force that compels persons, insofar as they are rational, to conform. However, that view cannot be squared with a thinker’s free will and fallibility, which require a conception of rationality as spontaneity tempered by criticism. Deductive reasoning is not a mechanical process of drawing inferences from premises; it is rather a matter of guessing what follows and deciding whether to test that guess by seeking counter examples or by producing a more detailed derivation. Since reasoning presupposes decisions, it is not the case that all decisions can be taken after reasoning. Decisions, being mental acts are undetermined. Theoretical reasoning is a matter of guessing what explains some phenomena and then employing deductive reasoning in the criticism and testing of the guessed explanations. Where possible, we test our explanatory theories against observation statements that we decide to accept. Practical reasoning is similarly a matter of making guesses concerning what one ought to do and then criticising and testing those guesses, often by simply trying them out (because of our ignorance of relevant facts at the time of action), and sometimes by acting against them, to try to falsify them (because of our uncertainty even when we take ourselves to know what we ought to do). The dogmatic and authoritarian conception of reason that bedevils traditional and recent philosophy has led researchers into a quagmire of delusive ‘justification’ and ‘subjective probability.’ Persons differ from other agents in having the capacities for critical rationality, an appreciation of moral obligation, and therefore also the high level of self-consciousness that is implied by those capacities. Like other animals, a person has needs which must be satisfied if he is to live a good life. An animal’s needs may go unsatisfied if its inclinations and abilities are not appropriate to its needs. However, unlike other animals, a person can adapt his inclinations and capabilities to his needs because his capacity for critical rationality enables him to formulate and test theories about his own needs, and about ways of satisfying them. That means that his fulfilment depends upon self-discovery, for which he requires freedom of speech, for himself and for others, and freedom to experiment with different kinds of life. It therefore demands an open society. It is

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largely a matter of luck whether fulfilment is achieved by a person who experiments freely, because his decisions are undetermined and his conjectures fallible. His fulfilment depends upon the satisfaction of his needs, which is not the same as happiness and has nothing to do with ‘authenticity.’ However, persons pursuing their own fulfilment may come into conflict with one another, primarily because resources are scarce, but sometimes because a person finds fulfilment in injuring another. Morality arbitrates between the competing quests for fulfilment of different persons by means of rules assigning rights and obligations to persons. There are many theories of moral rules. Rule consequentialism attempts to evaluate them as better or worse according to how far the well-being of persons in general would be achieved if the theory were acted upon. However, because of indeterminism and fallibilism, whether fulfilment is achieved is largely a matter of chance. Consequently, moral theories must be evaluated not in terms of consequences but according to the scope that their enforcement would give to persons to discover themselves by experimentation. The objective moral rules assign to competent adult persons the freedom to direct their own lives by giving them the following entitlements: to private property in their own bodies; to acquire and relinquish private property, by consent, in resources external to their bodies; and to immunity from having obligations imposed upon them, without their consent, by the exercise of the authority-rights of other persons. For their own sakes, a lesser degree of freedom to direct their own lives is accorded to persons who are not competent adults, and the freedom of competent adults is restricted by obligations not to commit suicide (except in circumstances in which there is no possibility of future fulfilment) and not to become permanent slaves. Morality also demands the existence of a state to enforce the obligations that persons have to each other and to impose on persons additional obligations that are required to safeguard the freedom of all. The state is not a person or a collection of persons or a collective entity. It is a set of relations between persons, that is, an institution. The state is that institution in a community that makes the community possible, by enforcing laws and collecting taxes, in however rudimentary a way; and it is represented by persons who fill the offices or roles of that institution. Qua

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persons, those officers of the state have no more authority than any competent adult; but qua officers of the state they are responsible for exercising the state’s authority-rights over persons. Persons are entitled to be subjects of a liberal state that enforces private property rights, privatises unowned resources when they become accessible, keeps its structure and functions under review in order to better fulfil its obligations, avoids becoming a world state and defends its subjects from attack by other states. Persons owe to their state the obligations to: pay sufficient and equitable taxes; abide by the state’s scheme’s for privatising unowned or state-owned resources; not to commit suicide (except in dire circumstances); not to submit to permanent slavery; and, perhaps, to look after their children and foetuses, and not treat cruelly animals that are not persons. The state has obligations to restrict time, place or manner of speech to prevent imminent damage to persons or property. Private property owners are entitled to make their own regulations for speech with respect to their own properties (premises or media). But the state has the obligation to ensure that there is no content such that all the private regulations taken together make it unreasonably difficult to express that content and to make it available to the public at large. To the extent that a state is illiberal it has power but not authority: its subjects have no obligations to comply with its unjust laws—indeed, they are obliged not to comply with laws that require them to behave wrongly—and they are entitled, but not obliged, to resist attempts by the state’s officers to impose penalties on them for non-compliance.

7.2 Brief Comparison with Pettit There is a resemblance between some of the above theses and some of the contentions of Philip Pettit. First, Pettit’s conception of freedom as non-­ domination has some similarities to my conception of the freedom to direct one’s own life. Second, like me, Pettit claims to have steered a course between collectivist and individualist views of the state by recognising the reality and importance of interpersonal relations. Third, Pettit has produced a book in which he begins with free will and ends up with

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political freedom, as I do too in this book. I cannot here provide a critique of Pettit’s work in any detail. I will make a few critical comments as I show that these three parallels between my theory and his are superficial. First, both Pettit and I reject the idea (though for different reasons) that the freedom that is central in morals and politics is negative freedom, that is, the absence of obstruction by physical interference or threats of physical interference from other persons. We both regard negative freedom as important but not as the central idea. For Pettit, the central idea is “republican freedom” or non-domination, where a person is not dominated if and only if there is no other agent who has the capacity to interfere arbitrarily with what the person does or is able to do (1997, pp. 4–5). For example, a slave may have negative freedom if his master permits him to do as he pleases but he will not have republican freedom because the master may interfere with the slave’s choices at any time (1997, pp. 22–23). On my account, the central idea is freedom to direct one’s own life. That idea includes a kind of non-domination in that an agent has the full freedom to direct his own life only if there is no other person who has the authority-right to impose new obligations on him without his consent. However, the full freedom to direct one’s own life also includes having private property in one’s own body, the liberty to acquire or relinquish private property, with the consent of others, and the enforcement of the obligations that others owe to one, in an environment in which the bulk of resources are freely exchangeable private property. On Pettit’s view, private property rights and free market exchange are barriers to republican freedom because they enable persons to interfere arbitrarily in another person’s choices. For instance, suppose that a businessman destroys the custom of a competitor by deliberately undercutting the latter’s prices. He does not thereby impose any new obligation on his competitor or violate any of the competitor’s claim-rights (presuming that he has not promised the competitor not to undercut his prices), so he does not interfere with the competitor’s freedom to direct his own life. But he does, in Pettit’s sense, “interfere arbitrarily” in the choices of the latter and therefore makes the latter unfree in Pettit’s “republican” sense of freedom (1997, p. 54). However, if “republican” freedom requires that freedom to compete is curtailed, one wonders how much freedom would be left to us. Consider a parallel case: Ernie, by making himself more

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attractive to Emily, may ruin Peter’s chances with her. Ernie does not thereby interfere with Peter’s freedom to direct his own life; but he does thereby interfere arbitrarily in Peter’s choices (compare Nozick 1974, pp. 262–265). Pettit, it seems, would have to clamp down on people’s efforts to attract potential sexual partners. Further, restrictions on competition create monopolies, or near monopolies, that are able to dictate terms to their employees, customers or suppliers, thus having much greater scope to interfere arbitrarily in their choices than would be possible in competitive market. Pettit does not explain why that form of arbitrary interference is better than the kind that results from open competition (theorists generally think it is worse). In further contrast to Pettit, I contend that there need be nothing amiss in a competent adult consenting to be dominated, by agreeing to join a hierarchical relationship, as do employees, some members of voluntary associations and some people in personal relationships. Such hierarchical relationships can be terminated by the subordinate party. I also claim that it is permissible for persons who conjecture that they are natural slaves to enter fixed-term slavery contracts which, for the duration of the fixed term, would be terminable only by the superordinate party. In all such cases of voluntary subordination, the subordinate exercises his freedom to direct his own life to give up part of his freedom to direct his own life (Frederick 2014, 2016). On my view, persons who are not competent adults, such as children and the mentally impaired, have more or less restricted entitlement to freedom to direct their own lives, depending on how far they are from the status of a competent adult; and even competent adults have obligations imposed upon them by the state (which is not a person). The rationale for such involuntary subordination is to safeguard the overall freedom required for the fulfilment of persons in general; so it is an objective matter which kinds of involuntary subordination are permissible. Pettit endorses some parent or carer interferences with their children’s choices, at least where there are guards against child abuse and a culture of children’s rights (1997, p. 61), and he also endorses state interference with the choices of competent adults. His rationale for such interferences, however, is that they are consistent with non-domination when they are not arbitrary, and that an interference is not arbitrary if and only if it

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promises to further the interests of the person interfered with according to opinions of a kind that the person shares (1997, p. 23). However, that is not an objective matter, as it depends upon the theories that happen to be held by people in the society. Those theories may be false and they may also change over time and differ from society to society. Further, the likelihood of ideas being shared by interferer and interfered in such cases seems small. For instance, children and, especially, teenagers very often do not share, and may vigorously dispute, the opinions of their carers about what is best for them, even when the carers seem to other informed adults to be beyond reproach. Similarly, competent adults often vigorously disagree with the state’s opinions about their interests. Pettit’s attempted solution to such problems is to maintain that, to secure republican freedom, the state’s interferences must “track” the welfare and world-view of the public, that is, “the shared interests of those affected under an interpretation of what those interests require that is shared, at least at the procedural level, by those affected” (1997, p. 56). By that, it seems, he means that the state can interfere with persons’ choices in any way, and republican freedom will be assured, so long as the decision to interfere is reached through a democratic process with requisite checks and balances (1997, pp. 65–68, 171–205). Thus, encroachments on freedom count as republican freedom if a constitutional state enforces them. The second way in which Pettit’s theory resembles mine is in his claim to offer a political philosophy that is anti-collectivist and anti-­individualist in insisting that people are essentially social (1997, p. vii). However, it seems that, when he claims to oppose collectivism, Pettit is rather opposing one particular form of collectivism, namely, historicism (as described in Popper 1957). For he says that his “philosophy is anti-collectivist in rejecting the idea that individuals are the playthings of aggregate social forces; they are not numbers in a game of historical chance, not pawns in a march to historical destiny” (Pettit 1997, p. vii). He speaks in a collectivist way when he says that recognising the state as an institution that promotes republican freedom gives people reason to identify with other people and with the polity in general, rather than seeing themselves as set apart, in essential competition (1997, p. 125). He is partial to a metaphysics of “collective agents” as well (1997, pp.  52, 112, 2002, 2003,

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pp. 167–93; List and Pettit 2011). He does not, as I do, identify the state with a system of relations. However, all this is somewhat impressionistic, so I enter it here merely as a note of scepticism about his claim to be anti-collectivist. The third resemblance concerns the connection between free will and political freedom. Pettit has attempted a unified account of free will and political freedom in terms of fitness to be held responsible (2001). I have not provided a unified account of free will and political freedom, but my account of the latter in Chap. 6 assumes my account of the former in Chap. 2 and develops from that account via the arguments of Chaps. 3, 4, and 5. Pettit’s account of free will is a variety of compatibilism, attempting the alchemy of turning mechanism into free agency. My account is indeterministic. Pettit’s account of political freedom in terms of persons’ capacity for rational debate is obscure. I have criticised a similar attempt to derive freedom from the capacity for rational debate elsewhere (Frederick 2013); and that criticism identifies some of the problems that may need to be avoided in the attempt to clarify Pettit’s theory. Therefore, despite some superficial resemblances between Pettit’s theories and mine, they are actually substantially different. The two theories are not only irreconcilable but opposed.

7.3 Further Work I have propounded a theory of persons, their agency, rationality, rights and obligations, their connections with other persons, with animals that are not persons, and with the state. The theory is highly general and it may be developed in different ways: it can be used as a core theory for any number of rival, more detailed, theories. I have not claimed that my theory is true. I claim that it is better than the available alternatives. From my study of the work done by others in the areas that my theory covers, that claim seems to me to be clearly true. My theory not only has the advantage of broad scope; it also seems to be superior to rival theories that pertain only to some part of the scope of my theory (alternative theories of free will, for instance). Defending that claim in detail would require much additional work, which cannot be

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attempted here (it would be a life’s work); but my confidence in the claim may be understandable from the criticisms I have given of rival theories, in passing, during the course of this book. Those criticisms are at the same time defences of my theory. However, I have also pointed out some ways in which my theory needs to be improved. My explanation for how a person on a desert island could have obligations that are not owed to other persons is that the obligation is owed to the last state of which the person was a subject. That is ad hoc. I defended that explanation by pointing out that it was less ad hoc than the alternatives; but an ad hoc patch, even if it is the best currently available, is still an unhappy expedient, so we should strive for a better theory that does not need it. My theory of free will gives no account of omissions, as contrasted with actions. It might turn out that a satisfactory theory of omissions requires some revisions to the theory of actions incorporated in my account of free will. My theory is not the last word on the topics that it covers; but I think it is a significant step forward from where we were before I propounded it. Finally, I have indicated some areas in which my theory needs to be supplemented by work in other areas. For instance, I have said nothing about where acts of will fit in with neurophysiological events, or about what the rationality and agency of animals that are not persons might look like from the inside; though that second issue, and perhaps also the first, might always be a mystery to us. I argued that Helen Steward mischaracterises compulsive behaviour: insofar as it is really compelled, it is not action; insofar as it is action, it is not really compelled. I also said that so-called ‘compulsive’ behaviours are not really compulsive at all because some people manage to give them up. I suggested that it may be better to explain away so-called ‘compulsive action’ as a form of self-deception; but that suggestion needs development. I also suggested that our free will might not be entirely governed by probabilistic laws but might instead enable us to interfere with such laws. I mean that as a serious suggestion but it will need some imaginative work to develop it. We cannot owe obligations to animals that are not persons; but we may owe an obligation to the state that we do not treat such creatures cruelly. I assumed that we do; but that assumption depends upon the truth of the proposition that a person who practises cruelty to such creatures will be more inclined

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to violate the rights of persons. That proposition needs to be tested empirically. Should it fail the empirical test then we have no obligations not to treat cruelly animals that are not persons, except insofar as such obligations are deducible from obligations that we owe to persons with regard to their property rights (including promises we have made to them). I therefore gave two versions of my theory pending the results of empirical research. In Sect. 6.2, Chap. 6, I raised the question of whether there can be circumstances in which a liberal state is morally required to compromise on its obligation to secure freedom for the sake avoiding large-scale suffering and death. A positive answer has been suggested in Frederick and Friedman 2020; but the issue is a difficult one that needs to be pursued carefully and in depth. I commend my theory, or some improvement of it, as the core module of any acceptable general theory of freedom.

References Frederick, Danny. 2013. Hoppe’s Derivation of Self-Ownership from Argumentation: Analysis and Critique. Reason Papers 35 (1): 92–106. ———. 2014. Voluntary Slavery. Las Torres de Lucca 4: 115–137. ———. 2016. The Possibility of Contractual Slavery. Philosophical Quarterly 66 (262): 47–64. Frederick, Danny, and Mark Friedman. 2020. The Liberal Defense of Immigration Control. Cosmos + Taxis 8 (2+3): 23–38. List, Christian, and Philip Pettit. 2011. Group Agency. New  York: Oxford University Press. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2001. A Theory of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. Collective Persons and Powers. Legal Theory 8 (4): 443–470. ———. 2003. Groups with Minds of their Own. In Socialising Metaphysics, ed. Frederick Schmitt, 167–193. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Popper, Karl. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Index

A

Abortion, 214, 232 Abusive Club, 224 Accident, 25, 121, 128, 130, 188 Act, 2, 7, 9–15, 17–34, 37–39, 47, 72–103, 111, 146, 176, 186, 245 Action, 2, 4, 7, 10–39, 43, 44, 49, 82, 84–88, 93, 97–99, 101–104, 110–114, 116, 135–137, 141, 146, 150, 158, 162, 165–168, 170–172, 175, 228, 232, 245, 246, 253 Action type, 19–22, 24–26, 29, 31, 33, 245 Act type, 19, 20 Addict, 36, 38 Ad hoc, 184, 197, 207, 212–214, 253

Agent, 2, 10–19, 22, 25, 26, 29–34, 36–38, 43, 44, 47–51, 54, 56, 72, 84, 87, 88, 92, 93, 98–104, 111, 114, 136, 141, 142, 146, 150, 171, 196, 201, 207, 237, 245, 246, 249 Agent causation, 32 Aim, 3, 10, 13, 22, 28, 31, 34, 43, 44, 61, 62, 69, 70, 72, 89, 90, 100–104, 115, 125, 141, 146, 176, 200, 203, 216 Algorithm, 52, 55, 56 Allais, Maurice, 76 Anarchy, 232, 233 Animals, 1, 3, 4, 34, 39, 55, 109–142, 145, 162, 181–185, 187, 189, 208, 214–216, 235, 246, 248, 252–254 Anomaly, Jonathan, 203

© The Author(s) 2020 D. Frederick, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48637-2

255

256 Index

Anscombe, G. E. M., 99 Apes, 34, 208 A priori, 46, 49, 60, 127, 152, 154, 164, 165 Argument, 2, 4, 17, 23, 24, 44, 46, 47, 51–54, 57–59, 61, 69, 90, 91, 97, 99–101, 103, 111–113, 125, 141, 146, 154, 158, 159, 161, 163–165, 190, 206–208, 227, 245–248 critical, 112, 188 deductive, 46, 47, 64, 100, 101 practical, 99–101 theoretical, 100 Aristotle, 2, 44, 46, 59, 60, 98, 99, 120, 152, 153, 156–158, 160, 169, 188, 199, 222, 223 Astronomer Royal, 67 Authentic, 133, 135 Authenticity, 3, 132–140, 142, 247 Authoritarian, 45–47, 49–51, 58, 59, 72, 87, 98, 104, 112, 115, 246 Ayer, A. J., 113 B

Background assumption, 67, 68, 94, 182 Bader, Ralf, 175, 176 Barbarian, 156, 188, 222, 223 Barnett, Randy, 197 Bartley, William, 102 Batt, Francis, 179 Berkeley, George, 4, 149, 227, 228 Berlin, Isaiah, 168 Better theory, 61, 62, 67, 69, 102, 114, 253

Blackburn, Simon, 148 Blame, 46, 73, 88–93 Blameworthy, 89–93, 95–97, 227, 228 Bodily motion, 10, 11, 14, 18, 22, 24, 27, 29–30, 32, 36, 245, 246 Bradley, F. H., 197, 198 Brennan, Jason, 4, 228–230 Brewer, Bill, 2, 47, 48 Broome, John, 2, 47–50, 88 Buchak, Lara, 76 C

Cambodia, 129, 134 Capabilities, 116, 121–125, 127, 128, 130–133, 138–140, 152, 185, 246 Caplan, Bryan, 214 Carroll, Lewis, 2, 57–59 Chance, 9, 12–17, 25, 76, 119, 120, 123, 125, 137, 150, 186, 188, 190, 201, 225, 247, 250, 251 Characteristics, 116, 124, 125, 130, 133, 140, 185, 210 Chief officer, 204, 235 Child/children, 4, 29, 126, 155, 156, 158, 160, 173, 174, 187, 189–191, 201, 211, 213, 217, 220, 229, 235, 238, 248, 250, 251 Childs, Roy, 197 Chisholm, Roderick, 2, 32 Closed society, 129, 141, 209 Coase, Ronald, 179, 180 Cognitive dissonance, 94 Cognitive psychology, 55 Cohen, Dov, 189

 Index 

Coleman, James, 153 Collective agent, 251 Collectivism, 251 Collectivist, 3, 196–199, 233, 248, 251 Competence, minimum, 29, 34, 159 Competent adult, 160, 162, 168–170, 173, 174, 177, 186, 187, 195–197, 201, 203, 211, 216, 222, 234, 247, 248, 250, 251 Competition, 121, 125, 130, 176, 181, 250, 251 Compliance, 227, 236 Compromise, 206, 207, 254 Compulsion, 36, 38, 43–48, 56, 87 Compulsive, 36–38, 253 Conjecture, 64, 68, 98–100, 127, 129, 133, 137, 140, 152, 153, 161, 171, 177, 204, 225, 247, 250 Consequences, 236, 237 Consequentialism, 4, 236 Act, 237 Rule, 237 Continuous improvement, 62 Contract, 184, 196, 197 social, 196, 199, 208, 230 Control, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 25, 32, 33, 38, 203, 245 Counterexample, 47, 51–54 Criticise, 2, 3, 17, 32, 38, 46, 55, 64, 101, 127, 141, 145, 149, 188, 217, 219, 233, 235 Criticism, 1, 4, 34, 46, 63–66, 69, 98, 99, 101–103, 112, 114, 125, 134, 141, 148, 149, 154, 197, 204, 206, 208, 217, 224, 246, 252, 253

257

Crusoe, Robinson, 209, 212, 213, 234 Customs, 126, 129, 141, 159, 209 D

Davidson, Donald, 2, 30, 31, 88 Davies, Martin, 49 Decide, 246 Deciding, 2, 246 Decision, 30, 39, 46, 52, 54, 56, 62, 72–76, 80, 81, 83, 85–89, 93–98, 100–104, 114, 138, 159, 160, 178, 186, 206, 221, 231, 246, 247, 251 arbitrary, 54, 93–98 momentous, 159 theory, 2, 4, 46, 73, 74 Deduction, deductive, 2, 43, 46–59, 98–100, 103, 104, 246 Definition, implicit, 32, 69 DeGrazia, David, 184 Delusion, 140 Democratic elections, 205, 210 Demonstration, 53, 113 Derivation, 52–54, 70, 246 Descartes, René, 2, 12, 45 Determinism, 8, 30, 32, 33, 74 Disability, 157 moral, 166–170, 172–174, 209 Disagreement, 3, 209, 223, 232, 233 Doctor case, 90, 93, 95 Dogmatic, 2, 246 Dolphins, 34, 109 Done for reasons, 246 Doris, John, 190 Dunlop, Nic, 129, 130

258 Index E

Eccles, John, 35, 55, 125 Eddington, Arthur, 102 Edison, Thomas, 87, 88 Einstein, Albert, 45, 68, 153, 182, 217, 223 Ekstrom, Laura, 2, 32 Emmett, Dorothy, 199 Empirical, 60, 63–68, 71, 85, 99, 100, 113, 127, 133, 151, 154, 157, 164, 182–184, 187, 204, 207, 216, 254 Employment, 179 End, 5, 8, 31, 37, 44, 47, 63, 76, 94, 96, 104, 110, 111, 118, 138, 162, 188, 202, 240 Enforce, 3, 150–152, 154, 181, 190, 191, 197, 201, 202, 209–211, 213, 214, 216, 218, 226, 227, 230, 231, 234, 236, 237, 247–249, 251 Enforceable, 150, 151 Entitlement to freedom, 154–160, 162, 165, 168, 169, 174, 175, 178, 186, 187, 225, 228, 238 Equality, 238, 239 Evans, Jonathan, 55 Evolution, 34, 47, 61, 121, 123 Expected utility, 73–76, 79–84, 94–97 Experience, 59, 60, 62, 65, 69, 87, 119, 131, 139, 140, 158, 159, 173, 186, 205 Experience machine, 139, 140 Experiment, 66, 102, 128–130, 133, 138, 145, 146, 159–161, 169, 171, 177, 178, 188, 200, 201, 204–206, 216, 224, 225, 235, 237, 239, 246, 247

Experimentation, 3, 56, 146, 153, 154, 159–161, 163, 178, 181, 185, 186, 188, 201–203, 205, 211, 212, 216, 225, 234, 237, 247 F

Fallibilism, 1, 2, 43–105, 112, 236, 247 Fallibility, 1–3, 46, 88, 100, 104, 148, 153, 160, 205, 210, 232, 235, 246 Fallible, 45, 46, 53, 54, 56, 70, 100, 104, 114, 153, 164, 204, 205, 225, 235, 247 Falsifiability, 64, 69 Falsifiable, 62–64, 66–68, 70, 123, 124, 220 Falsification, 69, 137 Falsified, 128, 131, 137, 140, 184 Falsify, 99, 129, 246 Farrington, David, 183 Faulks, Sebastian, 142 Feyerabend, Paul, 32, 87, 200 Findlay, J. N., 32, 200 Fischer, John Martin, 2, 30 Fitzgerald, P. F., 29 Flew, Antony, 115 Foot, Philippa, 3, 119–122, 124, 132, 146 Frankfurt, Harry, 2, 27–29 Frankfurt-type cases, 27, 29 Frankl, Victor, 126 Free action, 245 Free agency, 114, 252 Freedom, 1–4, 9, 27, 29, 30, 45, 87, 111, 145–191, 195, 201, 202, 206, 207, 210, 213–226, 228, 230, 231, 233–239, 245–252, 254

 Index 

to direct one’s own life, 159, 169, 175, 176, 188, 202, 234, 238, 248, 249 moralised, 175, 176 negative, 168, 169, 249 republican, 249, 251 of speech, 246 Freedom as non-domination, 248 Free will, 1–3, 7–39, 86, 112, 114, 150, 245, 246, 252, 253 Friedman, Mark, 178, 197, 206, 254 Friedman, Milton, 177 Fulfil, 129, 132, 133, 138, 141, 160, 181, 207, 226 Fulfilment, 3, 122, 125, 127, 128, 130–133, 135, 137, 139–142, 146, 151–154, 159–163, 169, 171, 176–178, 181–188, 197, 201–205, 211–213, 216, 220, 223–225, 230, 234–237, 239, 246, 247, 250 G

Galileo Galilei, 8, 63, 64, 70, 87, 88, 152, 153, 223 Gambling, 75–77, 84, 91, 92, 95–97 Gambling temperament, 73, 76, 77, 84, 91, 92, 96 Game theory, 75, 81 Glaister, Stephen, 203 Glannon, Walter, 114 Goal, 13, 31, 54, 89, 90, 126, 127, 176, 217, 246 Gödel, Kurt, 45, 50, 60 Graham, Daniel, 203 Graham, Peter, 2, 88–91, 97 Green, David, 238 Guessing, 246

259

H

Habit, 13, 31, 38, 56, 101, 115, 135 Halmos, Paul, 56 Hansson, Bengt, 76 Happiness, 131, 132, 151, 247 Hardin, Garrett, 178 Harm, 189, 220, 221, 224 to a person’s interests, 220, 224 psychological, 220, 224 Harman, Gilbert, 49, 60 Hayek, Friedrich, 35, 151, 178 Hegel, G. W. F., 197 Held to account, 86, 90, 92–94, 111, 205 Hen, 116–120, 122 Herman, Louis, 110 Hibbs, John, 203 Historicism, 251 Hobart, R. E., 9, 14, 15, 17, 32 Hobbes, Thomas, 48, 196 Hohfeld, Wesley, 3, 165–167 Homosexuality, 134, 137 Honneth, Axel, 138 Hornsby, Jennifer, 10, 23 Howson, Colin, 81 Human, 2, 14, 19, 34, 35, 38, 39, 48, 55, 94, 109, 110, 112, 118, 122, 124–127, 130, 131, 133, 141, 156, 157, 159, 170, 185, 187–189, 191, 210, 214–216, 222, 225, 235 Human animals, 214 Hume, David, 59, 60, 149, 222 I

Identity, 132–140, 235 Ignorance, 46, 73, 76–85, 89, 91, 94–97, 246

260 Index

Immaturity, 158, 173, 186 Immigration, 206, 210 Impermissible, 157, 160–162, 168, 182–185, 191, 217, 225, 227, 236 Inalienable, 187, 211, 212, 236 Inclinations, 13, 59, 102, 116, 118, 120–125, 133, 140, 185, 246 Incompleteness theorem, 45, 50, 60 Indeterministic, 2, 252 Indeterminism, 1–3, 7–39, 236, 247 Indeterministic causation, 32 Individual actions, 26, 245 Individualism, 199 Individualist, 3, 196–199, 207, 208, 230 Induction, 99 Inductive, 43, 46, 48, 59, 98 Inference, 43, 46, 49–60, 163–165, 246 Inheritance, 239 Inherited theories, 61, 62, 64, 101, 133, 134, 185 Institution, 125, 129, 130, 199–201, 203–210, 218, 226, 234, 235, 247 Intentional, 20, 22–28, 30, 31, 33, 36–39, 115, 245 Intentional content, 22 Intentionality, 10, 22 Interference, arbitrary, 250 Internal voice, 133, 134 Intuitive evidence, 53, 60 Invisible hand, 197 Irrational, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51, 59, 69, 101, 109, 182 Irrationality, 38, 47, 50, 98

J

Jeffrey, Richard, 52 Joyce, Richard, 112 Justification, 69, 98, 101, 246 Justified, 2, 44, 60, 98, 101 K

Kane, Robert, 2, 30, 32 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 30, 48, 60, 109, 111–114, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 169, 182–184, 187, 214, 216, 222 Kepler, Johannes, 63, 64, 70, 223 Knowledge, 13, 43, 45–49, 53, 55, 58, 69–73, 79, 85–88, 90, 93, 98, 100, 103, 104, 111, 112, 114, 123, 126, 127, 136, 137, 141, 148, 157–159, 173, 178, 186, 220, 222–224 uncertain, 73, 85–88 Kolodny, Niko, 2, 77–79, 81, 83–85, 97 Korsgaard, Christine, 2, 48 Koyré, Alexandre, 153 Kripke, Saul, 46, 164 Kuhn, Thomas, 32, 68, 88, 153, 200 L

Lakatos, Imre, 56, 67 Language, 72, 122, 125, 132, 141, 158 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 8 Laws, 231, 234 Le Verrier, Urbain, 68, 182 Leibniz, Gottfried, 165, 198 Life form, 119–123, 126

 Index 

List, Christian, 252 Locke, John, 26–28, 38, 39, 178, 196 Logical form, 46, 52, 164, 165 Lomasky, Loren, 178 Luck, 142, 152, 153, 239, 247 Lynch, Michael, 3, 135–137 M

MacFarlane, John, 2, 78, 79, 81, 83–85, 97 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 197 Mack, Eric, 178 Mackie, J. L., 112 Maximin, 73, 75, 76, 81–84, 90, 94, 96, 97 Maximisation, 237 Maximise, 237 McCann, Hugh, 2, 22, 33 McLeod, Stephen, 115 Mead, George, 138 Mechanical process, 246 Mele, Alfred, 2, 31, 32 Mental acts, 246 Mental impairment, 29, 156–160, 174, 186, 202, 217 Mere event, 10, 14, 15, 17, 20, 30, 32, 33, 245 undetermined, 245 Methodological rule, 46, 69 Mill, John Stuart, 217, 222 Miller, David, 72 Miners case, 79–81, 84, 85, 90, 97 Moral agency, 1, 111 fact, 147, 148, 175, 234 responsibility, 28, 29, 34, 111

261

Morality, 1, 3, 145–147, 150, 177, 183–185, 195, 201, 205, 210, 223, 235, 247 Moral rule, 3, 147–150, 155, 185, 189–191, 201, 203, 211, 214, 215, 237, 247 enforceable, 150 objective, 147, 148, 185, 186, 195, 200–202, 204, 205, 209–211, 213, 227, 230, 234, 237, 239, 247 primary, 147, 149, 150 secondary, 149, 150 Moral theory, 4, 112, 113, 147–162, 182–185, 188, 190, 191, 213, 216, 232, 236, 237, 247 enforceable, 151 Mutation, 120, 121, 123, 181 Mutual-aid associations, 238 N

Nagel, Ernest, 53 Natural kinds, 121 Needs, 3, 12, 44, 110, 114–116, 121–128, 130–133, 140, 141, 145, 185, 197, 246, 247 absolute, 3, 104, 115, 116, 185, 186, 195, 197 basic animal, 126 basic human, 126 Newman, James, 53 Newton, Isaac, 8, 45, 63, 64, 67, 68, 70, 102, 153, 155, 182, 217, 223 Nisbett, Richard, 189 Non-domination, 249

262 Index

Norm, 43–45, 47, 48, 51, 58, 59, 69, 70, 75, 79, 81–83, 97, 104, 137, 156, 233 Nozick, Robert, 2, 32, 126, 139, 140, 178, 182, 197, 239, 250 O

Obligation, 3, 4, 34, 109, 145–147, 155–158, 161, 165–174, 177, 179, 183–188, 195, 196, 201–218, 221, 226–228, 230–239, 246–250, 252–254 to animals, 183, 253 to obey the law, 232 to oneself, 211, 212, 214, 236 to the state, 3–4, 211–214, 216, 234, 236, 253 Observation statement, 61, 62, 64–68, 70, 100, 101, 103, 123, 246 Obsessive-compulsive, 36, 38 Omissions, 38, 39, 165, 253 Open society, 3, 130, 141, 209, 246 Opportunities, 27, 120, 130, 132, 134, 141, 153, 154, 171 Ostrom, Elinor, 203 Ought, 3, 43, 111, 147, 209, 246 objective, 72, 85 subjective, 72, 85, 95, 97, 98 Outcome, 3, 15, 72, 76, 80–83, 90, 153, 236 P

Parfit, Derek, 77 Passive obedience, 227 Paul, Jeffrey, 197

Permissible, 147, 149, 161, 162, 168, 169, 178, 182, 184, 185, 189, 191, 197, 207, 214, 215, 217, 227–229, 231, 236, 250 Person, 1–3, 109, 112–114, 118, 122, 124–128, 130, 133, 136, 141, 142, 145, 150, 154–162, 175, 177, 178, 181–188, 195–218, 221, 223–227, 230–237, 245, 246, 248–250, 252, 253 Petersen, Marie Louise, 183 Pettit, Philip, 4, 248–252 Piaget, Jean, 208 Plato, 197 Political authority, 195–197, 199, 210, 227, 229, 230, 236 Pollard, Bill, 31 Polya, George, 56 Popper, Karl, 2, 3, 32, 35, 36, 45, 46, 54–56, 61–67, 69–72, 102–104, 125, 129, 130, 137, 153, 200, 205, 209, 251 Predictable, 12–14, 33, 38, 93 Prichard. H. A., 2, 4, 23, 34 Priest, Graham, 51 Prior, Arthur, 164 Privatise, 202, 248 Probabilistic laws, 9, 33–36, 253 Probability, 12–17, 27, 28, 35, 60, 74, 75, 79–81, 94, 97, 217, 218, 236 absolute, 13, 14, 21, 22, 25–27, 33, 34, 36–38, 73 objective, 14, 60, 72, 74, 80, 95, 97, 100, 245 subjective, 60, 81, 85, 97, 246 Probable, 12, 13, 18, 59, 60, 80, 132

 Index 

Progress, 39, 61, 67, 69, 72, 88, 101, 154, 209, 223 Proof, 52, 55, 56, 98 Property, 177, 178, 202, 218, 221, 224, 226, 239, 254 private, 3, 177, 178, 180, 181, 186, 201–203, 215, 216, 218, 226, 235, 239, 247–249 public, 177, 178 Protective agencies, 197 Pseudo-scientific, 69, 115, 137, 141, 182–184, 187, 223 Public goods, 202, 203 Punishment, 150, 157, 227, 228, 236 Q

Quine, W. V. O., 56, 165 R

Rachels, James, 3, 189, 191 Rachels, Stuart, 3, 189–191 Rational, 2, 12, 14, 38, 43–45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 87, 88, 98, 101–104, 111, 112, 114, 146, 147, 155, 196, 252 Rationality, 1, 2, 38, 43–105, 109, 111, 112, 141, 146, 147, 187, 246, 252, 253 critical, 1, 3, 111, 114, 125, 127, 137, 141, 145, 148, 152, 153, 156, 158, 159, 185, 187, 200, 206, 209, 246 instrumental, 102, 104, 105, 110, 111, 118, 146 Rawls, John, 196, 223

263

Reason, 21, 24, 30, 31, 38, 43–45, 47–51, 54–56, 58, 67, 72, 74, 77, 78, 87–89, 93, 98, 101, 102, 131, 149, 158–160, 162, 170, 173, 190, 229, 246, 249, 251 practical, 46, 146 theoretical, 102 Reasoning, 2, 43, 44, 46–59, 89, 90, 98–104, 114, 246 Reasons, 246 Reciprocity, 184 Recognition, mutual, 138 Reflective equilibrium, 223 Regan, Donald, 77 Regress, 2, 4, 17, 23, 32, 53, 54, 59, 101, 223, 245 Regulations, 218, 221, 227, 233, 234, 248 Reinach, Adolf, 165 Relations, 32, 34, 87, 88, 122, 147, 185, 198–201, 234, 235, 247, 248, 252 Reproducible situation or event, 66 Right, 3, 4, 9, 43, 109, 114, 146–148, 154, 165–170, 179, 186, 195, 196, 201–208, 210, 214, 222, 226–233, 235, 236, 238, 247–250, 252, 254 authority, 167–174, 179–181, 186, 187, 195, 196, 202, 203, 209, 210, 212, 214, 218, 226, 227, 230, 231, 234, 247–249 claim, 165–170, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 186, 187, 209, 212, 215, 217, 218, 228, 231, 236, 249

264 Index

Right (cont.) immunity, 167–169, 173, 174, 186, 195, 202, 209, 215, 217, 226, 228 liberty, 165–168, 170–174, 176–178, 201–205, 209, 210, 217, 227, 228, 230, 231, 234 to direct one’s own life, 234 Risk, 2, 17, 46, 63, 72–77, 80, 82, 89–92, 96, 100, 109, 129, 141, 142, 182, 185, 187, 188, 203, 205, 232 Role, 46, 126, 128–130, 134, 138, 140, 141, 199, 200, 203, 204, 208, 209, 223, 232, 236 Rothbard, Murray, 168, 197 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 197 Rule, 43, 49, 50, 54, 55, 69, 95, 97, 104, 113, 128, 147–150, 186, 190, 191, 201, 202, 204, 209, 210, 212, 215, 221, 226, 227, 231, 234, 237, 239, 247 Rule consequentialism, 3, 149, 151, 153, 154, 188, 247 Russell, Bertrand, 12, 45, 50, 53, 60, 198, 199 Russell’s Paradox, 45, 50, 60 Ryle, Gilbert, 2, 17, 57–59 S

Samuelson, Paul, 202 Schmidtz, David, 177 Searle, John, 55 Self-consciousness, 55, 109–112, 114, 124, 141, 145, 200, 246 Self-deception, 38, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 253

Self-interest, 145–147, 150, 201, 210, 235 Shall, 93, 94, 96, 100 Simon, Herbert, 94 Slave, 156, 161, 174, 179, 186, 187, 191, 197, 207, 209, 211, 226, 247, 249 natural, 156, 161, 222, 223, 233, 250 voluntary, 179 Slavery, 161, 163, 197, 207, 211, 212, 234, 248 fixed-term, 161, 223, 250 voluntary, 45, 161, 226 Social science, 14, 33, 35, 38, 245 Sovereignty individual, 195 state, 195 Sowden, Lanning, 76 Speakers’ Corner, 221 Species, 3, 119–125 Speech, 226 content, 217 freedom of, 4, 188, 216–226, 233 hate, 4, 219–224 time, place or manner, 217, 218, 221, 248 Spinoza, Baruch, 198 Spontaneity, 246 Standard individuating willing type, 22 State, the, 1, 8, 73, 109, 147, 195–240, 247 checks, 205, 226, 235 collectivist, 197, 199 democratic, 230, 233 illiberal, 206, 226–233, 236, 248 individualist, 248

 Index 

liberal, 200–211, 226, 229, 233, 235–237, 248, 254 minimal, 197 unjust, 4, 209, 226, 227 world, 205, 210, 235, 248 Steward, Helen, 2, 18, 33, 34, 36, 38, 86, 87, 110, 253 Stich, Stephen, 190 Strossen, Nadine, 224 Structure, 204, 209, 248 institutional, 141, 203, 204, 206–210, 235 social, 125, 127, 140, 185 Substance-and-attribute, 197 Suicide, 162, 186, 187, 211–213, 226, 234, 247, 248 Summer, Tony, 134–137, 140 Swift, Jonathan, 43, 44

265

rival, 63–65, 70, 103, 190, 200, 206–208, 252, 253 Theory-laden, 61, 65, 66 Thomason, Neil, 51 Thomson, Judith, 165, 214 Tradition, 101, 102, 126, 130, 133, 134, 141, 168 Tribes, 208, 209 Truth, 15, 31, 43–47, 53, 57–61, 69, 70, 72, 82, 90, 99, 101, 136, 137, 140, 147, 150, 153, 164, 190, 191, 223, 253 Tullock, Gordon, 178 Turing machine, 54 Turing, Alan, 48 Turnspit, 30, 48 U

T

Taxes, 234 Taylor, Charles, 3, 133–135 Taylor, Richard, 2, 32 Teenager, 158, 173, 174, 217, 251 Test, 2, 3, 50–54, 62, 64, 67, 68, 86–88, 90, 98–100, 103, 104, 111, 127, 128, 130–132, 137, 140, 141, 145, 152, 157, 182, 206, 246, 254 Testator, 240 Theories, 2, 8, 45, 112, 133–138, 141, 145, 147–149, 151, 182, 185, 196, 204, 206–208, 216, 232, 235, 246, 247, 251 inherited, 61, 62, 64, 101, 133, 134, 185, 235 moral, 152–154

Uncertainty, 2, 46, 72, 246 Undetermined, 12–17, 25, 26, 28, 32, 33, 46, 225, 245–247 Unexpiated wrong, 160, 162, 169, 170, 173, 174, 177, 182, 186, 195, 203, 216, 217 Unintentional, 20–22 Universal law, 154, 155, 160 Urbach, Peter, 81 Urination, 37 Utility, 74 V

Validity formal, 46, 165 informal, 165 van Inwagen, Peter, 14–17

266 Index

Verisimilitude, 72 Visalberghi, Elisabetta, 110 W

Waldron, Jeremy, 4, 219–225 Wants, 46, 91, 92, 110, 115, 119, 121, 124, 128, 135, 152, 173, 179, 180, 207, 213 Watkins, John, 76, 81, 82 Wedgwood, Ralph, 88 Welfare, 238 Well-being, 149–151, 172, 247

Whitehead, Alfred, 53 Will, 8, 10, 12, 45 act of, 2, 10–14, 17–31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 245, 253 Williamson, Timothy, 50 Willing, 10, 18–25, 27, 28 Wolfenden, Jeremy, 142 Wolff, Jonathan, 197 Wolff, Robert Paul, 197 Z

Zahar, Elie, 68