Herbert McCabe on Free Will

[VanDoodah]

Herbert McCabe OP was a Dominican priest and Thomist philosopher, and has been described as “one of the most intelligent Roman Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century.” His publications include “Law, Love and Language”, which focuses in the centrality of language in ethics, “God Matters”, which covers most of the basics of Catholicism, and “God Still Matters”, a posthumous publication of essays on sermons on everything from “The Logic of Mysticism” to “Christ and Politics”.

The question I have in mind is about McCabe’s essay (originally a lecture) entitled “Freedom”. In it, McCabe argues that:

“It is a fairly common and really quite understandable view that whereas inanimate and irrational creatures are determined by the will of God…human beings are to some extent free and to this extent independent of God’s causal action. God, it is thought, has endowed man with independence from him, so that a person may choose freely whether to serve or love God. This, it is thought, accounts for the possibility of moral evil, and indeed of moral good. God could not make man free, independent and loving, without allowing him the possibility of not loving and of sin; but it is a greater thing to have free people, even if they sometimes sin, than to have automata totally dependent on God.”

This, to me at least, seems a perfectly fair summary of the Christian concept of free will. I have heard this argument many times from Christian theists, including well-respected and influential philosophers like John Hick. However, McCabe then goes on to argue against this notion of free will:

“…this whole position involves a false and idolatrous notion of God. The ‘God’ here is an inhabitant of the universe, existing alongside his creatures, interfering with some but not with others. If what I have been saying (in the previous lecture/essay) is true, then we must conclude (I) that since everything that exists owes its existence to God, since he is the source of anything being rather than nothing, he must also be the source of my free actions, since these are instead of not being: there can be no such thing as being independent of God, for whatever my freedom means it cannot mean not depending (in the creative sense) on God, but (II) this kind of dependence on God is not enough to make me an automaton.”

He then goes on to argue that:

“We are free not because God is absent or leaves us alone; we are free because God is more present – not, of course, in the sense that there is more of God in the free being, but in the sense that there is nothing, so to say, to distract us. God is not acting here by causing other things to cause this act; he is directly and simply himself causing it. So God is not an alternative to freedom, he is the direct cause of freedom. We are not free in spite of God, but because of God.”

The entire essay is fifteen pages, and McCabe draws what he considers the logical conclusions of this initial argument. However, my question is this – do you agree with this argument? If so, why? If not, why? I for one find it compelling and cannot see any objections to it from a Christian viewpoint.

 

[tuviskazinai]

Thanks for posting this! It is certainly compelling.

I myself have not read any McCabe, so I’ll defer to anyone who has. (Although, do you know if it’s available online? I Googled it, but came up empty-handed.) I can only suggest how it might intersect with some thoughts I’ve had on the question of free will.

The best argument I’ve ever heard against the existence of any kind of free will whatsoever is from Galen Strawson. This argument is the reason I consider myself a “compatibilist” (who believes that free will and determinism, each understood in a certain way, are compatible), and it goes like this:

To possess free will means to be completely, morally responsible for what we do. But because what we do follows from who we are as people (people who make all our decisions based on our preferences and values), then to be completely, morally responsible for what we do, we would have to be completely, morally responsible for who we are (that is, for the preferences and values that we hold). Yet how should we become so? If we were to generate our personalities, our moral convictions, etc., in such a way that we could be held morally responsible for them, then it would have to be on the basis of some pre-existing set of criteria which would determine what sort of person we choose to make ourselves be. Therefore, in order to be completely, morally responsible for determining who we are, we would have to be completely, morally responsible for determining the conditions that would determine who we are, etc. etc…it is a reduction to absurdity, and Strawson’s logical conclusion is that we cannot in the end be completely morally responsible for who we are or for what we do.

My problem with his reasoning is that it is fatally dependent on a linear notion of time – one which Christian theologians, with their talk of the timeless and eternal, have always seen beyond and one which modern physicists are also in the process of debunking. To take an analogy: if we could not look outside of linear time in reckoning why things are the way they are, then the universe itself – as has been argued from Thomas Aquinas’s original “prime mover” proofs – could not possibly exist, since we would have to have a creative force which created every creative force which leads up to our having been created, and no such original creative force could logically be located in linear time.

Therefore, the “prime mover” of this series of creations (whose end result – reality – is experientially evident) would have to be essentially different from all the other creative forces, most markedly in the sense that it would have to exist outside of linear, contingent time. (And I see that McCabe is very keen on this kind of insistence on God’s “apartness” from the whole catalog of other “created things.”)

Now, one could coherently propose that the “prime mover” in the case of free will, which puts an end to the infinite regress, could be some physical thing which determines who we are. I do not think one can prove, through reason and logic, that we are self-caused; this is something that would have to be taken on faith. But what would it look like for us to be self-caused? From whom would we get such a power? It’s interesting that Strawson, as for him, can only quote Nietzsche (an odd choice for an analytic philosopher as concerned with reason as Strawson is) to suggest that we lack the spiritual capacity to determine the nature of our own selves.

I wonder if this is where McCabe comes in. His two main points that you cite are a) that God is the origin of our freedom, and b) that our deriving our freedom from God does not make us “automatons.” Genesis says that we are made “in God’s image.” No one believes that to refer to a physical image; the vast majority of theologians consider this to be a reference to our metaphysical freedom, our radical control over our own destinies, which is, in a profound way, “God-like.” I would be happy to believe that our constitution of our selves, our determination of who we are, takes place outside of time (such that the unfolding of our lives in time, where each act is “determined” by an original moral choice made outside of time, begins to resemble the unrolling of a pre-fabricated carpet onto the floor, covering the space, let’s say, from the doorway – birth – to the bedroom – death) and by the grace of God, who allows us the freedom to determine ourselves.

Does any of this make sense?
Would McCabe consider himself a compatibilist, I wonder? You mentioned in another post, elsewhere, that in your view McCabe is arguing against free will. In what way do you mean that?

Thanks for getting this discussion started!

Peace,
+AMDG+

 

[TheWhim]

“We are free not because God is absent or leaves us alone; we are free because God is more present – not, of course, in the sense that there is more of God in the free being, but in the sense that there is nothing, so to say, to distract us. God is not acting here by causing other things to cause this act; he is directly and simply himself causing it. So God is not an alternative to freedom, he is the direct cause of freedom. We are not free in spite of God, but because of God.”

This short exposition is nothing else than a poetic rewording of the Thomist/Augustinian doctrine on the fallen state of mankind and on saving divine grace. How can we be unfree and yet be free? Not be an automaton and still not infringe upon God’s ultimate sovereign purposes? That’s the question McCabe raises and his answer is the Thomist one: we aren’t really free though we feel free – so long as we are under no external constraint and feel like acting free we’re free indeed. (Modern philosophy has secularized this theory under the headline of ‘compatibilism’ and thrown it into the pool of debate surrounding the interpretation of neuroscientific discoveries).
‘We are free because there is nothing to distract us’ – this is a low-key approach to the Thomist idea of the total depravity of mankind after the fall. Enslaved to sin he can only acquire moral freedom again by God himself acting through him with irresistible grace.

I was never quite fond of compatibilism. I embrace free agent causation instead. Equivalent in content to this philosophical concept are the theologies of John Wesley, Jacobus Arminius and Molinus(catchword ‘Molinism’).

 

[tuviskazinai]

This short exposition is nothing else than a poetic rewording of the Thomist/Augustinian doctrine on the fallen state of mankind and on saving divine grace. How can we be unfree and yet be free? Not be an automaton and still not infringe upon God’s ultimate sovereign purposes? That’s the question McCabe raises and his answer is the Thomist one: we aren’t really free though we feel free – so long as we are under no external constraint and feel like acting free we’re free indeed. (Modern philosophy has secularized this theory under the headline of ‘compatibilism’ and thrown it into the pool of debate surrounding the interpretation of neuroscientific discoveries).
‘We are free because there is nothing to distract us’ – this is a low-key approach to the Thomist idea of the total depravity of mankind after the fall. Enslaved to sin he can only acquire moral freedom again by God himself acting through him with irresistible grace.

I was never quite fond of compatibilism. I embrace free agent causation instead. Equivalent in content to this philosophical concept are the theologies of John Wesley, Jacobus Arminius and Molinus(catchword ‘Molinism’).

I always found myself rooting for the free agent causationists in philosophy class, but to tell the truth (and this is probably just my own intellectual failing) I simply can’t get them to make sense to me. It seems to me that people like Chisholm are in the end saying something totally simple and unsophisticated while people like O’Connor are saying something insanely complex and far too abstruse. Yet all you can get both of them to boil down to is the statement that all or some of a human person’s actions are “causa sui,” or, causes of themselves. This is a statement that can only be taken on faith according, it seems, to the very nature of the argument: they cannot point to something else external to the self as a determining (or at least, wholly determining) cause, and the self which they point to instead is of course completely invisible and mysterious.

I see compatibilism (or at least, certain strains of it) as an attempt to describe how these “self-caused actions” (which can only be taken on faith) might be possible a) given the determinist “proof” of Galen Strawson, above, and b) without resorting to radical indeterminism, whereby Option A that a person has, and has chosen, could just as easily have been brought about as Option B, which might be the decision that’s brought about if at some future moment the entire set of circumstances surrounding the decision were to be duplicated exactly.

I guess what I am saying is that I don’t see why compatibilism is incompatible with free agent causation…nor why compatibilism has to take a purely secular cast. (I understand that most major compatibilist philosophers have been secular, but I don’t believe that any compatibilist argument necessarily is, and it would have been interesting to ask Fr. McCabe whether he believed in a more spiritual variety of compatibilism.) I haven’t read Wesley or Arminius, I’m afraid (thank you for the references!), but my impression is that de Molina was talking more about God’s knowledge than about hard determinism…no?

Peace,
+AMDG+

 

[MindOverMatter]

I for one find it compelling and cannot see any objections to it from a Christian viewpoint.

The problem is this. Its not that Herbert Macabe is wrong. Its not even necessarily the case that the other interpretation is wrong. Its the words being used that causes confusion. God is the cause of our freewill, this is necessarily true since nothing acts outside of that which is God, for God is existence. Therefore things necessarily act because of the nature that is “existence”, for outside such a nature there could be no action. Thus all things are predestined by the ultimate truth that is existence. But this statement, if it doesn’t wish to be contradictory with freewill, has to also mean that we make are own free choices out side the eternal will of God. Otherwise, we have no free-will. So to me, Macabe and Hick must be both correct depending on how you interpret the first paragraph on freewill. Otherwise this doctrine would be no different from a naturalistic determinism, only its spiritual rather then natural. This would also be wrong.

I cannot reject freewill and at the same time speak of moral responsibility for sin. The concept of Gods justice falls apart as soon as you take away human responsibility. In principle, in some respects, Macabe must be correct, but he is wrong if he is speaking about some kind of spiritual determinism. Life would become a puppet show. I feel there is a deep mystery in how it is ever possible that we have freewill, but it seems to me that we have freewill; at least i have no good reason to doubt if in reality i have no freedom to doubt, and if i have no freedom to doubt, then the present conversation is pointless. I can only assume that i have freewill if “i” wish to draw any real conclusions about my nature as a person.