Palmer's Attack on His Version of "Soft Determinism."
Donald Palmer gives what I think is a bizarrely mistaken, and possibly dishonest, argument against soft determinism. I have tried to teach this argument in the context of a realistic account of soft determinism but I have found that very few intro students are advanced enough to tell the difference between real soft determinism and Palmer's strage distortion of it. Given that I do not have time to teach Palmer's version as well as the real thing, I have converted Palmerian "soft determinism." into an essay topic for those students who are interested in pursuing Palmer's views.
The question is simple. Do any of the arguments Palmer gives in the book actually succeed in refuting real soft determinism as described in the web pages for this course?
Remember that the real definition of soft determinism is that real free will exists and determinism is true.
Soft determinists define free will as
the condition of acting on one's own internally generated choices. (Palmer isn't a soft determinist, and he doesn't get to tell other people how to define free will.)
Soft determinists define volitional determinism as the condition in which one's volitions are determined by one's immediately preceding neurophysical state.
Before you start, you should be aware that arguments that prove that free will isn't the coincidence of will and necessity support soft determinism because soft determinism uses a different definition of free will.
You should also be aware that papers that merely repeat Palmer's claims in approving terms will reveive no credit whatsoever, because they fail to engage the issue of how Palmer's definition of soft determinism is different from what I am calling "real" soft determinism. If you want to say they are the same thing, you will have to fully describe both doctrines and then give a compelling reason why the mere coincidence of will and necessity is the same thing as acting out of your own internally generated choices.
The following notes may be helpful to you:
Read Pages 224-227
224. Explain (Palmerian) soft determinism in your own words. How is it different
from hard determinism?
224-225. According to Palmer, how do soft determinists
define "freedom?"
---------How is this definition of freedom different from the definition used by Hume, as described in the quotation above?
225. Under the "soft" definition given by Palmer, is "freedom" incompatible with
determinism? Why or why not?
227. According to Palmer, how do soft-determinists define "freedom?"
---------How is this definition of freedom different from the one I give at the top of this page?
---------How is this definition of freedom different from the one used by Hume?
Stoics 225-226
225-226. According to the stoics, how is it
possible to be totally free and happy all the time?
(This doctrine is
actually called "stoicism," not soft determinism.)
---------How is the stoic form of "soft determinism" different from Hume's version of soft determinism?
In order for you to understand my criticism of Palmer's argument you should be acquainted with a style of philosophical "argument" called the straw man fallacy. Here's how it works. Suppose I want to promote my own philosophical doctrine (call it "meism) at the expense of your philosophical doctrine, ("youism"). In order to promote my doctrine, at your expense, I would have to find something wrong with your doctrine. (If I make your doctrine look bad, people will be more likely to accept my doctrine.) Let us also suppose that I can't find anything really wrong with your doctrine. No problem! Instead of telling people about a real flaw in your real doctrine, I can concoct a phony version of your doctrine, and pretend that it is your doctrine. (It doesn't matter to me that your real doctrine doesn't have this flaw.) I then point out a real flaw in this phony version of your doctrine, and get people to ignore your real doctrine because I've fooled them into thinking that you're saying something quite different, and much stupider, than what you're really saying.
Suppose, for instance, that I am promoting the doctrine that whales are not descended from land mammals, while you are arguing that whales must be descended from land animals because they have vestigal pelvic bones. I can't explain these bones any other way, so I ignore them, and claim that you are arguing that whales must be descended from land animals because they have bones. (Do you see the difference?) I then go on to point out that fish, which did not evolve from land animals, also have bones and so this argument, which I falsely attribute to you, is a bad argument. This is the straw man fallacy, in which a speaker misrepresents what someone else is saying in order to falsely make it appear that the other person is advocating a bad argument.
In our text, Donald Palmer gives what, in my view, is a serious mischaracterization of the doctrine of soft determinism. He makes two related errors about this doctrine:
First, he falsely implies that soft determinists agree with hard determininists and "libertarians" that determinism creates some kind of problem for free will. He writes that "they have been pressed to demonstrate that freedom can exist even in a world of necessity." It might be true that non-compatibilists think that compatibilists have a problem, but compatibilists don't think so. (In fact, they think it is the incompatibilists who have the problem, since they need an argument to support their position, and have consistently failed to come up with one.)
Second, and most important, he falsely claims that soft determinists redefine free will to mean only the coincidence of will and desire. Again, this is absolutely not true. Soft determinists define free will as the ability to act of one's own volition.
They define free will just the way the legal system, moral philosophers and everyone else defines it.
It may be true that there are people who believe these weird things that Palmer says soft determinists believe, but they are not representative of soft determinism. Their beliefs should have other names, such as "Augustinism" or "stoicism," rather than "soft determinism," which is very different.
Copyright © 2007 by Martin C. Young
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