Why Libertarian Free Choice Isn’t Brute

There are lots of different kinds of causes or explanations. Just think about the word because and how many different ways we use it in everyday language. Why did Suzi play that song? Because certain physical processes occurred—OK, sure. That’s certainly part of the explanatory story (or maybe, more accurately, it’s just one way of describing the thing or event we’re trying to explain).

But generally, we think there’s a better explanation for happenings like this within the category of reasons-based action—she played that song because she thought her mother would like it. Her mother, as everyone knows, is a major Ratt fan. (I say generally and we because, in our common-sense mode of being, that’s typically the sort of story we’d give, as opposed to one involving neuronal events.)

She wanted to please her mom. Of course, she could have chosen to play a different song or no song at all. For any of these actions, reasons could be cited to explain why the particular action occurred.

Reasons-based action is a sort of explanatory category that, obviously, not all philosophers accept. If someone holds to a deterministic or necessitarian form of explanation, they’ll probably reject this category—and that’s a mistake. There’s little reason to think that all explanations or causes should or must be deterministic or necessitating. Rather, we should just hold that they remove mystery; they ultimately answer some of why question.¹

Reasons-based action is also often used to show that libertarian free choices are not radically unintelligible or brute. Why did Suzi play the song she played? Because she wanted to please her mom and she knew Way Cool Jr. was her mother’s favorite song. (Her mother, as everyone knows, is a major Ratt fan.) Simple, right?

Again, in our usual mode of everyday living, we accept this as a perfectly legitimate explanation; we are generally satisfied with this sort of response!

However, the typical pushback at this point—from philosophers, anyway—is to demand an explanation for why Suzi played this song rather than some other song or no song at all; that is, an explanation for why this rather than that (contrastive facts). This, I’m told, is supposed to be a particularly challenging issue for proponents of libertarian free will to address.

I guess I never got that memo, because it strikes me as either a remarkably weak objection and, not to mention, subtly (or maybe even flagrantly?) begging the question against a certain category of explanation in favor of an overly narrow and restricted view of what qualifies as explanation.

So, a few general points of response:

First, not all contrastive facts clearly call for explanation; in fact, I think many clearly do not. For example, why Suzi chose to play the song she did rather than eat a giraffe just doesn’t seem like the sort of thing we need explained, because, almost certainly, eating a giraffe was never something Suzi considered. And we shouldn’t have to give an explanation for something entirely negative, which is partly what’s being asked for here.

Of course, if we do bring in other options Suzi considered—say, possibly playing Steelheart’s I’ll Never Let You Go—then there’s clearly an explanation for why she chose to play Ratt’s Way Cool Jr. instead: it was her mom’s favorite song, and she wanted to please her. Her mother, as everyone knows, is a major Ratt fan.

So, what we have is either a situation where no explanation is called for, or one where an explanation (some reason) is readily available. No bruteness!

For what it’s worth, I think this account becomes even more satisfying when placed within a well-seasoned soup of other metaphysical commitments—two of which are worth briefly mentioning.

First, an understanding of the will as the active power to end deliberation; that is, to make any finite motive for action actually efficacious. At its core, the will is just the power to say (Pokémon voice), “I choose you!” to something that doesn’t—and can’t—force you to choose it.

Second—and closely related—is the recognition that no finite thing is inherently determinative of the will. It always requires further "activation," so to speak, by the power of the will. Only the Good as such (ultimately, God) is inherently determinative of the will by its very nature.

In other words, it’s the combination of these metaphysical commitments—about the will as an active power to end deliberation and the fact that no finite thing is ever inherently determinative in and of itself (because every finite thing can be conceptualized in so many different ways, as either desirable or, given its inherent imperfection, not desirable)—together with the citation of the reason considered at the conclusion of deliberation (the reason the will ultimately settled upon), that gives us fully adequate (though genuinely non-necessitating) explanations within the context of rational willing or reasons-based action.

This is, of course, just a sketch. For those wanting a more detailed account, see my book The Best Argument for God, where I also apply this model to counter the classical randomness objection to libertarian free will. For an even deeper dive, check out Yves Simon’s Freedom of Choice, which, in my view, remains one of the best books on the subject to date.

1. Indeed, as John Haldane has explained,

There is a very natural and widely exercised way of thinking according to which a sufficient cause is a “cause enough” and a sufficient explanation an “explanation enough.” In these terms the quantum events do have an explanation. For example, it may be a property of the experimental set-up that a certain percentage of emissions follow a given pattern. To observe this is not necessary to confine oneself to a statistical description. Indeed, I take it that the point of a realist interpretation is to attribute a natural propensity to the system. Propensities are explanatory even when they are non-deterministic. If I say that an event occurred because of a reactive tendency I have answered the question “why?” in a way that I have not if I say it just occurred.

J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002),126.