Justified True Belief

(P1) Some people deserve praise or blame for what they do. + Some deeds earn praise and some earn blame, and the person has it coming. The claim is about what he is owed, not about what blaming him accomplishes. (1) We know this more surely than we know the premises of any argument against it. - Think of a man who spends a year befriending an elderly widow, learns where she keeps her savings, and takes every penny. You do not need a philosophy degree to know he has earned something, and neither does she. - Now suppose somebody wants to argue that he has earned nothing at all. An argument for that verdict has to be built out of premises, and those premises together have to be more credible than the verdict they are meant to overturn. Here are the ones usually offered. • The physical world is causally closed, meaning that nothing outside the chain of physical causes ever reaches in and makes a difference to it. A choice is then one more physical event with physical causes standing behind it. • Every event, choices included, was necessitated by what came before, and nothing necessitated before a man was born can be his own doing. • The self is a story the brain tells itself, and there is nobody home behind the story to run up a debt. - Hold each of those up against the widow and her savings. It is not close. Every one of them is a serious thesis defended by serious people, and not one of them is anywhere near as certain as the thing it is being used to overturn. - That is not a refusal to argue. It is a rule about which direction an argument runs. When a chain of reasoning ends somewhere you know to be false, the sane move is to go looking for the bad link, and philosophers do this all the time in every other field. (2) Deserving blame and finding blame useful are two different things. - There is a name for what the premise claims, and it is worth learning, because the whole quarrel turns on it. Philosophers call it basic desert. • "Desert" here is simply the noun for deserving, nothing to do with sand. "Basic" means that it rests on nothing further: a person deserves blame just for having done the wrong thing knowing what it was, and not because blaming him will reform him or warn anybody else. • The term was sharpened, as it happens, by philosophers who deny that anyone ever has any. - Picture a judge who knows the man in the dock is innocent and sentences him anyway, because the town is frightened and a conviction would settle everyone down. The sentence might well work. Everyone can see it would still be a crime, and the reason is that punishment has to be deserved before it can be useful. - Blame that is only a lever is not blame. It is management, and management is what we do to weather and to machinery. (3) Our ordinary dealings with one another already assume desert. - Somebody steps on your hand. Before you say a word you look up to see whether he meant it, and everything that happens next depends on the answer. The pain is identical either way. - Resentment, gratitude, indignation, and forgiveness are not policies adopted because they produce good results. Nobody works out in advance that indignation will improve the neighborhood and then decides to feel it. These are responses to what a person did, and they collapse into nonsense if he did not do it. • The philosophers who changed everyone's mind about this in the twentieth century were not the ones you would expect. The argument that turned the field came from the side that holds freedom survives even in a world where everything was settled in advance. - Here is the sharpest test of all, and it is one everybody has run. An apology. If blame were only a tool for adjusting future behavior, an apology would be beside the point, since nothing about the past has changed and the lesson is already learned. Nobody treats it as beside the point. What an apology answers is a debt. (4) Scripture promises a judgment measured by what each person did. - "He will render to each one according to his works" (Romans 2:6). - "I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak" (Matthew 12:36). - "So then each of us will give an account of himself to God" (Romans 14:12). - Paul puts the premise into three words without meaning to. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, "so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil" (2 Corinthians 5:10). What is due. Not what is useful, and not what will improve the room. - Ezekiel has God saying he will judge Israel "every one according to his ways" (Ezekiel 18:30), and the prophets keep saying it because it is the ground of the warning. A warning addressed to somebody who cannot be held to account is theater. - One honest limit belongs right here. Scripture nowhere states a theory of the will. It speaks to its hearers as people who will answer for themselves, it confesses God as sovereign over everything, and it leaves the fitting together of those two to us. • The famous commands, "choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19) and "choose this day whom you will serve" (Joshua 24:15), are not by themselves evidence for one theory of the will over another, for the plain reason that every side in this dispute agrees that we choose. • What (P1) rests on is not the word "choose." It is the judgment. (5) The church said all of this before the argument had a name. - Justin Martyr, writing to a Roman emperor in the middle of the second century, put it as flatly as anyone has since. Punishments and rewards "are rendered according to the merit of each man's actions," and if instead all things happen by fate, "neither is anything at all in our own power" (First Apology 43). - Irenaeus, a generation later, saw the same thing from the other end. If some people had been made good by nature and others bad, "these latter would not be deserving of praise for being good, for such were they created; nor would the former be reprehensible, for thus they were made" (Against Heresies IV.37.2). - Justin's own image is still the one to keep. God did not make man "like other things, as trees and quadrupeds, which cannot act by choice." Nobody praises an oak for growing straight. Therefore, at least some people genuinely deserve the praise or blame they get, in the plain sense that they have it coming.

(P2) Nobody deserves praise or blame for a deed that was not up to him. + This is the rule behind every excuse anyone has ever accepted. Where a deed was not the person's to control, blame slides off him, and everybody knows it long before anybody argues about it. (1) Every excuse we accept works by showing the deed was not fully the man's. - Aristotle wrote the rule down in the fourth century BC and nobody has improved on it much. Praise and blame go to what a person does voluntarily; what is involuntary gets "pardon, and sometimes also pity." • The involuntary acts, on his account, are the ones done "under compulsion or owing to ignorance," and an act is compulsory when "the moving principle is outside" the man, "being a principle in which nothing is contributed by the person who is acting" (Nicomachean Ethics III.1). - Two families of excuse come out of that, and they work by different routes. • Compulsion is a failure of control. The deed ran through the man rather than out of him. • Ignorance is a failure of knowledge, which is a second condition on responsibility and a separate question (P3). - (P2) is about the first family only, and "up to him" keeps that meaning everywhere it appears. - Aristotle's example of compulsion has aged well. A man is carried somewhere "by a wind, or by men who had him in their power." Wherever he ends up, he did not go there. He was taken. - Run through the excuses of the first kind that you actually accept from people. He was pushed. Somebody stronger closed his hand around the knife. His arm jerked and he could not stop it. Then notice what never appears on any excuse list of either kind: nobody has ever been excused on the ground that the deed was too much his own. (2) The law of Moses separated the murderer from the manslayer. - The whole weight of that distinction rests on what was up to the man. Two neighbors go into the forest to cut wood, the axe head slips off the handle and kills one of them, and the survivor flees to a city of refuge and lives (Deuteronomy 19:4-5). Same corpse, same axe, entirely different verdict. - Numbers puts the test in so many words. On one side is the man who "pushed him suddenly without enmity," or who "without seeing him dropped it on him," a man of whom the law says plainly that "he was not his enemy and did not seek his harm" (Numbers 35:22-23). On the other is the man who lay in wait. The question the law asks is never how bad the outcome was. It is how much of the outcome was his. - Ezekiel then refuses to let the account be transferred to somebody else: "The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son" (Ezekiel 18:20). Guilt does not travel, and the reason it does not travel is that it belongs to the one whose deed it was. • A fair reader will bring up the texts that pull the other way, where trouble does fall on a household: the iniquity of the fathers visited on the children (Exodus 20:5), Achan's family destroyed along with him (Joshua 7:24-25). They are real and they are hard. • What they describe is harm running down a line, which is how families have always worked. What they never do is reckon a son guilty of his father's deed, and the law had already ruled that out: fathers are not put to death for their children, nor children for their fathers (Deuteronomy 24:16). (3) Courts still ask what was up to the man before they convict. - The law has a Latin name for the part of a crime that is not the deed itself. Mens rea means the guilty mind, and to convict a man of a serious crime you have to show not only that he did the thing but that he meant it, or knew what he was risking. Take the mental part away and what is left is an accident, which is a misfortune rather than a wrong. • There are exceptions, and they make the point rather than break it. A strict liability offense, such as selling alcohol to someone underage, convicts without any showing of a guilty mind at all. Those offenses are regulatory, they carry small penalties, and lawyers have argued about them for as long as they have existed, for exactly the reason a reader would guess: convicting a man who did his honest best feels like an injustice. - A man with no history of illness has a seizure at the wheel and kills a cyclist. Anglo-American law calls this automatism, a movement of the body that the person never steered, and he is not sentenced for the death. Depending on the jurisdiction and on what caused the seizure, he is acquitted outright or he is examined and treated. Now change one fact, that he knew he had epilepsy and drove anyway, and the verdict changes with it. The cyclist is just as dead in both stories. What differs is what was up to the driver. - Four more courtroom defenses look like four separate doctrines and are really the same two families of excuse in legal dress. • Involuntary movement, where his arm was pushed or it spasmed, is the control family in its purest form. • Duress, where a threat left him no course anybody could be expected to refuse, is the control family at its edge, and the law keeps that edge narrow: in English law duress is no defense at all to a charge of murder. • Infancy, where he was too young to grasp what he was doing, belongs to the knowledge family, since what the child lacks is the capacity to know. • Insanity belongs to whichever family the jurisdiction has chosen. The M'Naghten rules of 1843 ask whether the accused knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong, which is a test of knowledge. A court following the Model Penal Code also asks whether he could conform his conduct to the law, which is a test of control. (4) A deed can be up to a man indirectly, through a choice he made earlier. - Confusing the two ways causes more trouble than almost anything else in this subject. A deed is directly up to a man when he chose it there and then. It is indirectly up to him when it followed from something earlier that he did choose. - The drunk driver is the standard case. At the moment of the crash he could not steer straight, and he is guilty of the crash anyway, because the freedom he needed had already been spent three hours earlier in a parking lot. Nobody thinks the second whisky bought him an excuse. - Degrees work the same way. The servant who knew what his master wanted and did not get ready "will receive a severe beating," while "the one who did not know" and did what deserved one "will receive a light beating" (Luke 12:47-48). The deed does not change between the two halves of that sentence. What changes is how much of it was the servant's. (5) A God who blamed people for what was never theirs would not be just. - Abraham's question assumes the premise and expects God to agree with it: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25). He is not asking God to be merciful. He is asking God to be fair, and he is confident enough of the answer to bargain on it. - The judgment Scripture promises is "according to his works" (Romans 2:6), and a work that was never a man's own is not his work. Pull this premise out and the last judgment stops being a verdict and becomes a sorting, in which people receive outcomes for things that merely happened through them. Therefore, no praise or blame is deserved for a deed that was never the person's to control.

(C1) Therefore, some of what we do is up to us. + The two premises together leave exactly one place to land, and the step is short enough to walk through in full. (1) The conclusion follows by a rule of logic called modus tollens. - A deductive argument works like a locked chain: if every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. There is no third option of granting the premises and shrugging at the conclusion. You either break a link or you take what comes. - The rule doing the work here is modus tollens, which is simpler than its name. If one thing would bring another with it, and the second thing is not so, then the first thing is not so either. If it rained last night the driveway is wet; the driveway is bone dry; so it did not rain. - Now fit the premises to it. (P2) says that if a deed was not up to the man, then he does not deserve praise or blame for it. (P1) says that some people do deserve praise or blame. Take one of them. He deserves it, so the second half of (P2) is false of him, and therefore the first half is false of him as well. His deed was up to him. (2) A premise has to be more plausible than its denial. - That is the standard for an argument like this one, and nothing more is required. Demanding certainty instead is how a real argument gets waved away, since almost nothing outside mathematics can meet it. - Set (P1) beside its denial: nobody has ever deserved blame for anything, not the man who took the widow's savings, not anyone. - Set (P2) beside its denial: some people deserve blame for deeds that were never theirs to control. - Neither denial is a thing people believe when they are not in the middle of defending a theory. (3) The conclusion claims a good deal less than it may appear to. - It does not say that everything we do is up to us, because a great deal of it is not. Your heartbeat is not, and neither is the family you were born into or the flinch when a door slams. Both premises were built out of exactly the cases where everyone already agrees about that. - It does not say what "up to us" requires. The premises leave that question open, and it is where the entire disagreement lives. - It does not say that determinism is false. Determinism is the claim that everything that happens, your choices included, was settled in advance by what came before, and a thoughtful determinist who believes responsibility survives that can sign this conclusion without flinching. Many do, and that is a feature rather than a weakness. A conclusion both sides can accept is the only place an argument between them can start. Therefore, at least some of what human beings do is genuinely up to them.

(P3) Free will is the control that makes a deed up to the one who does it. + The control that makes a deed a person's own has an ordinary name, and it is the one everybody already uses. What the name does not yet say is what that control requires. (1) The phrase names the control, not a theory of how it works. - Free will is the power to make choices a person can be praised or blamed for. Philosophers call it the control condition: the part of responsibility that concerns a person's grip on what he did, as distinct from the part that concerns what he knew. - Everyone agrees a car is moved by its engine long before anyone agrees whether the engine burns gasoline or runs off a battery. Naming the thing that does the work is not the same as saying how it works, and the name is useful precisely because it can be agreed on first. - So defined, the phrase belongs to nobody in particular. Someone who holds that every choice was settled in advance can use it, and does, and so can someone who holds that some choices were left open. That is exactly what lets the two of them disagree about one thing rather than talk past each other about two. (2) Two answers to "up to him in what sense" have run side by side since Aristotle. - The first is sourcehood: the choice came from the person himself rather than from something working on him from outside. Aristotle's version is still the crispest anyone has managed. "The acts whose moving principles are in us must themselves also be in our power and voluntary" (Nicomachean Ethics III.5). • Aristotle himself has no phrase for "free will." The vocabulary of a will that is free is later, worked out among the Stoics and inherited by the Latin church, and what Aristotle supplies is the pair of questions rather than the term. - The second is the categorical ability to do otherwise, which philosophers also call leeway. "Categorical" means unconditional: holding the past and the laws of nature exactly as they in fact were, more than one thing could have happened next. A real fork in the road, not a road that merely looked forked from the driver's seat. • The principle built on it is worth learning by name, because it runs through everything downstream. The principle of alternative possibilities says that a person is responsible for what he did only if he could have done otherwise. - Think of a letter. One test asks whether you wrote it at all, or took it down word for word from somebody standing behind your chair. The other asks whether you could have written a different letter. Those two questions usually get the same answer, and they are not the same question, and nearly every serious dispute in this field is a dispute about which one matters. • The order they are listed in is the order that is kept everywhere downstream. The source is what makes a choice a person's own, and the open door is what a choice of that kind ordinarily looks like from outside. A man can be the source of a choice with no other door open to him, and the case for that comes later (D7); nobody is the source of a choice that was made for him, however many doors stood open. (3) Responsibility needs knowledge as well as control. - A man hands his neighbor a glass of what he has every reason to believe is water, and it is poison. He did it, and it was up to him, and he is not a murderer. Nobody disputes this half of the picture. - Free will is the control half. The knowing half is real and it is a different question, and keeping the two apart early saves a good deal of confusion later. (4) A free choice is made for reasons. - Hunger, habit, upbringing, advice, temperament, and the pull of what a person loves are all at work in a free choice, and none of that threatens freedom in the slightest. An influence is not a determination, and the space between those two words is the whole subject. - Your mother's advice weighs on a decision. It does not make the decision. A hypnotist's command is a different sort of thing altogether, and everyone can feel the difference long before anyone can define it. (5) Freedom is not a power to do anything whatever. - A man can swim, and he cannot swim in the middle of a desert. Separate the ability, which is in him, from the opportunity, which is not always there, and a surprising number of objections to free will fall over at once. - No one ever meant that a free man can choose to be seven feet tall, or to breathe under water, or to have been born in another century. The claim concerns which of the options actually before him he takes. Therefore, free will is the name for whatever control over his own actions a person must have in order to be praised or blamed for them.

(P4) A choice is either settled by everything that came before it or it is not. + Everything that came before a choice either settles which way the choice goes or it does not. There is no third thing for it to do. (1) Determinism is the claim that the past and the laws leave exactly one future. - Determinism says that, given the way the world was a moment ago and the rules it runs by, only one next moment was possible. Set a row of dominoes on a kitchen table and tip the first one. The tenth domino's fall was settled before it happened, and a mind that knew the setup could have read the whole sequence off in advance. - The conditions that do the settling need not be physical. Where the laws of nature do the work, it is physical determinism. Where God's decree does the work, it is theological determinism. Either way the thesis is the same: everything that comes to pass is necessitated by prior conditions, natural or supernatural. • "Prior" can mean logically prior rather than earlier on the clock, which leaves room for a timeless God settling things that happen in time. The claim is about what settles what, not about the order of the calendar. • "Settled" means necessitated, and nothing weaker counts. A prior state that makes a choice highly likely without making it certain has not settled it, so cases like that fall on the same side of the line as the wide open ones. - Determinism is a claim about absolutely everything, and that is why a single exception is fatal to it. If one person has ever made one choice that nothing before it settled, then determinism about human choices is false, whatever is true of the tides. (2) Whether freedom and determinism can both be true is a separate question. - Compatibilism is the thesis that they can. Notice what it does not say. It does not say determinism is true, and it does not say that anybody is free. It says only that the two are not at war. - Incompatibilism says they are at war. If people are determined, then on this view they cannot be praised or blamed for anything they choose, and that is the end of it. - Two neighbors can argue for an hour about whether a man could be both a devoted father and a career soldier, without either of them ever saying whether this particular man is either one. The compatibility question is like that, and keeping it separate from the question of what is actually the case saves an enormous amount of crossed wire. (3) Two questions sort the whole field into four positions. - Ask them in order. Can freedom and determinism live together? And do we in fact have freedom? Four positions come out of those two questions, and every view a reader is likely to meet is one of them or a variant of one. - Libertarianism: freedom is real, so determinism is false where choices are made. • The word has nothing whatever to do with politics; it comes from liberty. A free choice, on this view, is one that nothing settled but the person who made it, acting for reasons of his own. • In the ordinary case that shows up as a door he could have walked through and did not. The open door is the usual mark. The source is the thing itself. - Hard determinism: determinism is true, so freedom is an illusion and nobody deserves anything. • Its best image comes from Spinoza, who denied that any will is free. Imagine a stone in flight that is given a mind just long enough to be aware of its own motion. It would be perfectly certain it was flying because it wanted to. - Free will skepticism: nobody is free and nobody is responsible. • What makes this the live version of the denial today is that it does not need determinism at all. Suppose indeterminism is true, meaning that some things are genuinely not settled in advance. The skeptic says that is no help whatever, because a choice that nothing settled is not thereby anybody's doing. - Compatibilism, filled in: we are free and responsible, and the world may be fully determined all the same. • Hobbes held it and Jonathan Edwards held it, and when professional philosophers were last surveyed in large numbers, close to three in five of those who answered accepted some version of it. It is the majority view rather than a fringe one, and anybody who treats it as fringe has not understood the disagreement. - None of this is new, and it is worth knowing how old it is. Josephus, writing for Roman readers in the first century, reports that the Jewish parties had already divided over exactly this. The Essenes said fate governs everything; the Sadducees denied fate altogether and held that "all our actions are in our own power"; the Pharisees held that some things are the work of fate and some are in our own power (Antiquities 13.171-173). The argument a reader is walking into was old when the apostles were young. (4) There is no fifth position hiding between them. - (P4) is not a contested claim and is not meant to be. It is an instance of the law of excluded middle, the rule that a statement and its denial cannot both be false: either the prior conditions settled the choice or they did not. Its work is to force the fork so that the two accounts of freedom can be told apart, rather than to add a fact about the world. - The dispute comes down to a single yes-or-no question about a single choice. Hold every influence on it exactly as it was: the entire past, the man's makeup, his circumstances, and, if God is drawing on his heart, that too. Either all of it together settled the one choice he made, or it did not. - Rewind the tape to the second before he decided, with nothing whatever changed, and play it again. If only one thing can happen, the choice was determined. If more than one can, it was not. Every position in the field is an answer to that question, paired with an answer about whether responsibility survives it. - An honest libertarian concedes a great deal here, and should. Most events really are determined: the tides, the chemistry, most of what goes on inside a body. The claim was never that the world is loose. It is that some human choices are not settled in advance. Therefore, every choice a person makes was either settled by everything that came before it or it was not.

(C2) Therefore, human beings have free will, of either the compatibilist's kind or the libertarian's. + Four claims are now in place, and putting them together leaves two live options and no more. (1) The chain closes. - Some of what we do is up to us (C1). The control that makes a deed a person's own is what "free will" names (P3). So human beings have free will, in the sense that matters to praise and blame. - Which kind of control it is turns on (P4), and the fork there is clean for a simple reason. A kind of control either survives determinism or it does not. If the control we actually have is the sort a person could exercise even in a world where everything about him was settled in advance, it is the compatibilist's kind. If it is the sort that requires the choice not to have been settled, it is the libertarian's. There is no third door in the corridor. - Notice how little that second branch claims. Saying what libertarian freedom would require is not the same as saying anybody has it, and whether any human choice was in fact left unsettled is a question (C2) leaves standing wide open. (2) Two positions are already out. - Hard determinism and free will skepticism both have to deny (P1), and that is where the bill arrives. No punishment is ever deserved, no gratitude is ever earned, and the last judgment becomes a sorting rather than a verdict. - Their best defenders know it, which is the most telling thing about them. The serious books in that tradition give a great deal of their length to what should stand where desert stood: a forward-looking account of punishment, an account of love and meaning that asks nothing of desert, a replacement for the moral anger nobody can quite stop feeling. A substitution on that scale is an admission of how much (P1) was carrying. (3) Two hard questions are left standing. - First the philosophical one: whether the control responsibility needs can survive in a world where everything was settled in advance, and whether a choice that nothing settled could be anybody's doing at all. - Then the same question in theological dress: whether a God who knows every choice before it is made, and governs everything that happens, leaves the choosing to the one who does it. - Neither is settled by (C2), and pretending otherwise would spoil what (C2) is for. What it settles is narrower and firmer. The denial of free will has been answered, and what remains is a family argument among people who agree that we are responsible for what we do. Therefore, human beings have free will, and the only question left open is which kind of freedom it is.