| | Tibor Machan wrote: "The "just because" is something Bissell invented--nothing in my post or anything Rand has said about free will has a "just because" clause in it."
Tibor, I assume that you are referring to me, Roger Bissell (remember me -- your friend of 35 years?), rather than SOLO's editor, Andrew Bissell...
Rand's and Peikoff's "could have done otherwise, just because" is no more an invention than Kant's "ought to do something, period." It is just a way of stating the categorical (rather than conditional) nature of Rand's and Peikoff's view of volition.
Let me say it more clearly: when you assert that you could have done otherwise than you did, and that that ability is not conditioned upon your having valued doing otherwise than you did, but simply upon an arbitrary choice, then you are advocating the categorical volition model.
Peikoff, with Rand's approval, stated this view of volition quite openly, when he said that the choice to focus "is a first cause within a consciousness which cannot be reduced to or explained by anything earlier or more fundamental," and that "you cannot try to explain the choice to focus in terms of a person's values or ideas." In other words, nothing determines whether you are going to focus or not -- not even your valuing focusing more than not focusing in a given situation. This is nonsense. Focusing is not an arbitrary act. It is motivated and determined by one's valuing it more than not focusing. If one values focusing more than not focusing -- and one is not incapacitated by disease, injury, or coercion -- then one will (and must) focus.
Tibor continues: "Bissell shows his hand when he asks "What motivates that choice?" This is precisely the kind of question that arises from a reductive materialist, exclusively efficient causal framework. The assumption, which is unproven, is that something apart from the person had to have motivated the choice, that the individual person cannot be a cause of it, that something apart from the individual person must have been the cause."
That is not what I assume or argue. See below!
Tibor: "This is assumed, not proven, so when a person acts badly, for example, it is deemed as a given that the act was caused by something other than that person. This is how individual responsibility is dropped from morality and law and explanation, in terms of some (promised?) efficient causation, is substituted for it. But the evidence for agent causation is strong, manifest, among other places, in these discussions where the parties are exhibiting it all over the place.The idea that they are doing what they are doing because they value something--like finding the truth about some matter--fails to account for why they value that goal rather than another, alternative one. Unless credit is given for someone's having chose a value, as a result of having chosen to inquire into what's what in the world, there is no adequate and coherent account of the actions that result. It's just this factor producing that factor, ad infinitum, with no initial cause in play."
Nothing in this presents any difficulty for my analysis of human choice. We pursue one goal rather than another, because we value it more highly than the other. Accounting for this value-preference is simple. If the reason that we value it more highly is because we engaged in a process of seeking the truth about some matter, then it is also true that we engaged in the truth-seeking process because we valued it more highly than not doing so! However, not all values arise from a process of rational deliberation. Some of them are wired-in to our nervous systems and readily assert themselves, if upbringing and circumstance have not beat them out of us. Seeking to understand (rather than to evade) is one of them. So, some of the things that we choose are the result of natural human drives, rather than a deliberative process. The "initial cause in play," the "first cause" in human choice and value is that kind of choices and values, which stem from earliest childhood -- not the arbitrary choice to focus "just because" (for no reason, motivation, preference, value, etc.).
Nor does any of this present a difficulty for the status of morality on the perspective of value determinism. It is still the human being choosing and acting, and he is doing so by the constraint and empowerment of his highest values, which are part of his nature/attributes. Would you rather be held responsible for actions determined by an unmotivated, arbitrary choice -- or by a choice constrained and empowered by your highest operative value? I have no problem at all in casting my fate with the latter, and I would be highly suspicious of anyone who did have a problem with it.
Tibor: "In a universe with a highly diverse ontology, of many types and kinds of beings, the kinds of causes are bound, also, to be varied. One such cause that is reasonable to take seriously is what human beings with their very complicated minds are capable of, namely, agent causation. There is nothing mystical about this and to keep up labeling it as such as not an argument but an effort to undermine the idea by a process of guilt by association, as it were. If we label agent causation "mystical" (Bissell) or "spooky" (Dennett), we spare ourselves the trouble of having to actually think through whether such a thing can and does exist in the world."
Where have I denied agent causation? Where? I am saying that value determinism is how agent causation works! Look: an entity is its attributes, and what it is (what attributes it has) determines what it can and will do in a given situation. An entity cannot act in conflict with its attributes, its nature. That's simple Causality, which is inescapable. A human being is his body and his soul -- his soul being not an entity, but an attribute of the human being, one of its sets of capacities to act. And as Rand stated it, the soul is "the mind and its values." Thus, a human being (entity) cannot act in conflict with his values, i.e., his highest values in a given context (and this will not always be his espoused highest values). And that is all that I mean by "value-determinism." Value determinism is how agent causation or self-determinism works!
And please: value determinism is not some kind of efficient causation, where the values are little entities making our bodies go through certain actions. Our values are part of our attributes, our nature, that by the Law of Causality constrain (while empowering) our actions. And since they constrain (and empower) our actions in the pursuit of goals or ends, it is precisely final causaion (not efficient causation) that they involve. The efficient cause of our actions is not our values, but ourselves, the acting entities.
It is when self-determinism or agent-causation is divorced from value-determinism that models of agent-causation start to take on a "mystical" and "spooky" odor. How else are we to interpret someone's saying "Nothing made me focus, no dominant value or motive or desire, I just decided to, just because." Sounds a whole lot more like God's arbitrary cosmic whims, rather than something determined by one's strongest operative value. You focus not because you want to be moral, or to be happy, or because you desire it more than being unfocused, or for any reason -- just because you choose to. No reason, just a blind, arbitrary choice. That's Objectivism? Spare me! Yet, this is what we have been fed by Rand and Peikoff since at least the 1970s.
I am sorry that my terminology is offensive to Tibor, or that it strikes him as an attempt to evade grappling with the existence of volition. Nothing could be further from the truth! Volition exists! It's just conditional, not categorical.
Best to all,
REB
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