Notes on Ayer and Hume: On Free Will, Determinism, and Compatibilism

After reading Ayer's paper I have several worries about his conclusion that free will and determinism are in fact compatible. My central concern is his dismissal of the claim that causal necessity entails a sort of constraint that would preclude the possibility of free action. Ayer seems to offer the view that constraint is only to be considered a restriction of freedom if constraint is taken is a gross sense, e.g., having a gun to one's head. However, it seems that he has failed to show that causal necessity, if it should be shown to exist, would indeed not be a form of constraint. The determinist thesis is, after all, the claim that causal necessity is a constraint on free action, and it is this claim that Ayer does not seem to offer any convincing argument against.

I also had the distinct sense while reading Ayer's paper that his claim that freedom is not incompatible with determinism came a bit too quickly, i.e., that he is begging the question. He does this by saying that the way in which the concept of freedom is used by participants in the free-will/determinism debate is not the way in which the ordinary person, using ordinary language, would use freedom. The ordinary conception of freedom, Ayer argues, could only reasonably mean that there is a lack of constraint. Given this definition of freedom, it is little wonder that Ayer was able to conclude that there is no incompatibility between freedom and causal necessity. However, despite my earlier worries for Ayer's argument, i.e., that causal necessity may be a type of constraint, Ayer seems to be conveniently defining freedom in such a way that he is sure to arrive at his conclusion, i.e., begging the question.

I shall now move on to the selection from Hume. I found Hume's treatment of the problem of causal necessity to be, on the whole, very convincing. However, his argument for the claim that there can be no causal necessity that we can be aware of, due to the realization that all we have is a collection of various events that can only be linked together through an inference, has very unhappy consequences for the determinist position. However, Hume's skeptical position may also be seen as having little bearing on the issue at hand. This is because it could be reasonably argued that our inability to obtain a level of certainty about the existence of causal necessity has no bearing on the actual existence of such necessity. Thus, it seems that Hume's work could be important epistemically, especially by throwing into doubt our ability to correctly infer the existence of causal necessity, but also that it does not seem to take a firm position about the actual question. He even goes so far as to say that mankind has hitherto accepted both the doctrine of free will and that of determinism, i.e. causality. Thus he concludes that the debate is mainly verbal, and somewhat akin to 'wheel-spinning.' By any reasonable sense, Hume says that one is forced to recognize the fact that both doctrines have been accepted by all men, and to recognize that it is because of this reasonability that once can conclude that free will and determinism are not in fact incompatible. In a very fundamental sense, Hume's reasoning is very akin to that of Ayer in that a larger emphasis is placed on constraint defining one's level of freedom that on causality. However, Hume's position seems to arise more out of a sense of skepticism than does the position of Ayer.