โ Scribed by Richard Double
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Perhaps the best-known recent compatibilist account of free will is the reason-sensitive view (Levin's word) endorsed by Harry Frankfurt (Frankfurt, 1971), Gary Watson (Watson, 1975), Michael Levin (Levin, 1979), Keith Lehrer (1980), Daniel Dennett (Dennett, 1984), and others. Although specifics vary, these accounts share the belief that determined human decisions can be free provided we enjoy a certain relation between our decisions and our reflections about our decisions. Reason-sensitive ("R-S") accounts face counter-examples involving hypothesized external agents who cause us to have our reflective attitudes, thereby purportedly satisfying reason-sensitivity while leaving us unfree. In this paper I show how such criticisms of R-S accounts depend upon two premises which I argue can be neutralized.
I extract from Frankfurt's work a 'generic' R-S account that I believe captures the view also defended by the others:
Original R-S account: S's decision d is free if and only if S is able to bring d into accord with S's reflective judgments about the desirability of d.
Critics have proposed thought-experiments to make explicit what they take to be the implicit inadequacy of R-S accounts. An obvious challenge is to imagine that some external agent unbeknownst to us gives us our second-order volitions, thereby, satisfying reason-sensitivity yet leaving us unfree. Michael Slote uses the example of hypnotism: Robert, who is genuinely undecided between two conflicting first-order desires X and Y, is visited by a hypnotist who decides to "solve" his problem by putting him in a
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