Seymour: Martin, you’ve told me that you’ve been thinking about Causes, Agents, Explanations and Free Will for your entire career.
What’s so important about these “Philosophical Chestnuts” to you, Martin?
Was it something in your own life history or upbringing? Did your questioning begin before 1958, when you decided to major in Philosophy at Queen’s, or later, when you were working on your PhD?
Martin: The story really began when I was in Grade 12, the year before I first went to Queen’s. A teacher at Michael Hall School read us the chapter from “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoevski, in which the youngest brother Alyosha, who has decided to become a monk, is confronted by his elder brother Ivan, who cannot accept the message of Christianity because he is overwhelmed by the amount of evil and suffering in the world. It is a dramatic presentation of the classic problem of evil from philosophy of religion. Here was a teacher who was himself a Christian believer, confronting us with this massive problem that had proved to be an insurmountable barrier to religious belief for so many people. The same year, the class read Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and also had an introduction to philosophy by tackling Descartes’ “Meditations on First Philosophy”.
Seymour: Why and when did you decide to turn your philosophical preoccupation into a book? Were the themes and/or insights present in your undergraduate and graduate essays or your doctoral thesis?
Martin: In second year at Queen’s, when I took the course on the British empiricists, I found myself dissatisfied with Hume’s account of the nature of cause and effect (that it’s just a matter of A being followed by B every time). It seemed to me that Locke’s idea that cause and effect is what we experience when we dothings, or have things done to us, had been unfairly dismissed by Hume and his followers. When I encountered the problem of determinism and free will, as any philosophy major will do, I immediately was attracted to the position of libertarianism, and sceptical of the claims of soft determinism – the theory that you can believe in both free will and deterministic causation. At the time I did not connect the two issues, and neither did other philosophical scholars. Drawing the connection clearly is one of the things I attempt to do in the new book.
I left Princeton graduate school with an unfinished doctoral dissertation and a job offer from the University of Manitoba. Years later, I got into a conversation with a Manitoba colleague about the theological problem of evil and the role of the idea of free will in any viable solution to the problem of evil. I found myself saying things that I knew I had not read elsewhere, and it occurred to me that I might be able to make an original contribution to this area of philosophy. At the next opportunity I scrapped the dissertation I had been working on, and started a massive new manuscript on God and evil, free will, cause and effect and the nature of scientific explanation (which, I found, needs to be brought in as well). Eventually that massive thing earned me a Ph.D.
After completing the degree, I continued refining and revising the manuscript (and shortening it a lot). Some parts have appeared as articles in philosophical journals. The theological material has been dropped from the book, because it was the least original.
Seymour: As you look back, what aspects of your thought changed, developed and matured over the years?
Martin: Most of all it has been a matter of “connecting the dots” – perceiving links between different ideas that had not been apparent to me before. The most significant change of opinion on an individual philosophical issue is that I now hold what is called a “singularist” view of causation. That means that I think causality is present in every single cause-effect sequence; it is not a matter of being an instance of a regularity that has no exceptions in nature.
Seymour: Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will. Any one of the four could be a book in itself. May we look at these chestnuts one by one?
Martin: By all means. But we should not lose sight of the fact that one of the main purposes of this book is to spell out the connections between them.
Seymour: Causes: I looked up “cause" on Wikipedia, and got "Causality is the natural or worldly agency or efficacy that connects one process with another process or state, where the first is partly responsible for the second, and the second is partly dependent on the first.”
Martin: This is an excellent definition. I particularly like the reference to agency and efficacy, and the fact that time is not expressly built into the definition. Effects do typically occur later than their causes, of course, but I would maintain that this is something we learn from experience. I would even maintain that we can imagine a world in which there were some exceptions. This is one of the points where I find myself in disagreement with Hume; he made it a defining property of a cause that it occurs earlier in time than its effect.
Seymour: I simple-mindedly boiled this down to: "Events linked together over time."
Martin: “Linked together” is more vague than the Wikipedia definition; and you are siding with Hume in saying that a reference to time is essential.
Seymour: I’m guessing you’re thinking a bit beyond billiard table causation: as in "Cue strikes cue-ball, causing cue-ball to hit eight ball which falls into side pocket.” What have you to add, modify, extrapolate? Expound!
Martin: The main thing I would have to say is that there are different senses of ‘cause’ in the language, and different things going on in the world corresponding to those different senses of ‘cause’. Billiard table causation is one kind. It’s a different thing when, say, a forecast of bad weather causes you to cancel plans to go on a picnic; here the effect is a freely chosen action. And different again when spinning a roulette wheel causes it to stop on red; it could just as easily have stopped on black.
Seymour: Agents: Who dun it. If we go back to the billiard table, we’re talking about someone — an agent — picking up a cue and striking the cue ball, thus setting in motion a series of events linked in a sequence over time.
Martin: I would say, who OR WHAT dun it. The player is an agent, as you say; but when the cue ball hits the eight ball, the cue ball is the agent – not a conscious agent, of course, but still an agent, exercising efficacy and making something happen. I submit that we need this general, minimal, stripped-down idea of a natural agent in order to give a proper account of our idea of cause and effect, and how that idea originates in our own experience of being agents and making things happen.
Seymour: What about an agent who is a deluded revolutionary who shoots an archduke?
Martin: A complicated story would have to be told here about the causes of the person’s behaviour, sorting out the points at which the agent made free choices and the points at which their choices were unfree. The detailed stuff would be a task for psychology; I don’t see a conceptual difficulty that has to be addressed by philosophy.
Seymour: Explanations: That’s what you’ve been doing so far, isn’t it? What’s special about your explanations? Or should I ask, what is your take on explanations — of Causes, Agents and Free Will?
Martin: What I found when I started doing research on this topic was that there was one bunch of philosophers who were discussing the nature of cause and effect, and another bunch who were going on about what makes a good scientific explanation, and the two groups were not talking to each other at all. That has changed in recent decades, but there was a need to say how the two areas of discussion are related. I say it’s quite simple: if an event E is going to be explained by an explanatory story S, then S must be causally prior to E, in the way that any cause is prior to its effect. But just as there are different kids of causes, there are several different kinds of explanation, and it doesn’t pay to lump them together, overlooking their differences, just so that you can say ‘This is what an explanation is’.
Seymour: Free Will: Looking back in time, I see that everything I do is conditioned by what I did and experienced linked together in time by the fact that they happened to me, nonetheless, I feel that I am free to decide what I will do next. Am I?
Martin: I would say yes. But our freedom is limited by what we have done and experienced in the past, often in ways that we are quite unaware of. It usually takes the form of just not realizing all the alternatives that are, in fact, open to us.
Seymour: Less hygienically, what do you say to an alcoholic whose entire past has conditioned him to continue drinking?
Martin: I have heard many alcoholics, and loved ones of alcoholics, describe their experiences, and their stories present many example of behaviour that falls on the border line between free and unfree action. Philosophers who hold different philosophical theories about the correct account of human free will, will agree that these borderline cases are difficult to classify, but may well agree, in the end, about how to classify them as free or unfree.
Seymour: Anecdotally, many recovering alcoholics say that they decided not to drink. Were they deluded?
Martin: Even if we achieve clarity about the nature (or the idea) of the thing we call free will, we can be deluded about whether we are actually exercising free will on a particular occasion. There will be examples, too, of freely making a certain decision and then being unable to carry it out when the time comes, because of factors that curtail your free will.
Seymour: Theology always begins by assuming some kind of a god, whereas philosophy usually goes along with Laplace in saying “I have no need for that hypothesis.”
My Venn diagram of the relationship between Philosophy and Theology would have an overlapping area in which I would enter FREE WILL. How do you unravel this long-standing problem without recourse to theology, be it Christian or whatever?
Martin: For me, the theological problem came first. Faced with the difficulty of saying how the existence of the god of monotheism could be consistent with the existence of evil in the world, I found myself thinking along the same lines as Alvin Plantinga, who argues that in the last analysis, all the evil in the universe needs to be attributed to the wrong choices made by Satan and other fallen angels. (Short version: Why is there evil? Because God loves Satan, God values the free will of his rational creatures very highly, and therefore will not rob Satan of his power of free choice, despite the terrible consequences this has for all concerned.)
If this is even a logical possibility, then the existence of the god of monotheism is not inconsistent with the presence of evil in the world. However, I believe I detected an important gap in Plantinga’s argument: if it is to succeed, one needs to employ a very robust notion of free will, and to argue for that view of free will from first principles. My work on the free will problem began as an attempt to fill that gap in Plantinga’s reasoning. But the philosophical arguments about free will and the other topics have to stand on their own feet.
(You can see how that combination of Descartes, Dostoevski and Milton that I was exposed to in Grade 12 really bore fruit later.)
Seymour: Can you avoid (or at least stipulate) your assumptions?
Martin: Stipulating them is the only option. I think you will find me trying to do that all through the book.
Seymour: All that said, what satisfies YOU, Martin, about your examination of Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will?
Martin: At the risk of sounding horribly arrogant, I will say that I think this book makes a small but not insignificant contribution to Western philosophy that is not to be found anywhere else in the literature.
Seymour: If you could talk to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell the younger you to do/think/research/experience differently?
Martin: It’s hard to say. Naturally, I find myself thinking that there must have been a way to complete this work sooner if I had tried; but maybe not. Maybe it just had to mature very slowly, like a fine cheese.
Seymour: What haven’t I asked you that you were hoping to talk about? (Ask yourself a question and answer it.)
Martin: You might have asked why anyone would want to spend so much time and effort grappling with questions that are so abstract and so far removed from the concerns of everyday life. And I would have to answer that for myself, I can’t think of a way I would rather have spent my time than doing philosophy. It brings you the thrill of being creative, and also a balance between solitary work and the fun of conversation with others. The only thing that might compare, in my experience, is making music.
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