Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Double Meant is not Double Good: A Problem for Kane’s Response to the Chance Objection - James Petrik
rather, it can be described meaningfully as something the
agent was “wanting and trying to do all along.”
2. The Incoherence of Doubling Up the
Austin/Foot Strategy
But is it so clear that Kane can legitimately make use of a
simple doubling-up of the situation involved in an
Austin/Foot scenario? To see why it is doubtful that he
can, it needs to be recalled that in an Austin/Foot scenario
the agent does have a clear intention to secure the
outcome for which he/she is ultimately held responsible,
despite the indeterminism between the intention and its
successful execution. But this means that if Kane’s SFAs
are a straightforward doubling up of such scenarios, he is
committed to the supposition that an agent can
simultaneously and consciously intend each of two
incompatible choices. And this is problematic for at least
three reasons. In addition to making incoherence essential
to an agent poised before an SFA 1 -- a strange condition
for an action alleged to capture the essence of libertarian
freedom and one that seems to validate all the usual
suspicions compatibilist’s have for the notion -- it also
seems to introduce an incoherence into the account itself.
That the businesswoman was not intending to make
specifically one or the other of the choices during the
period of indecision is true ex-hypothesi. Part of what it
means to be in a state of indecision with respect to which
of two choices to make is that one hasn’t yet formed an
intention to make one of the two choices in question.
Given these difficulties, one might well wonder
whether Kane really had in mind such a strict doubling up
of the Austin/Foot strategy. While he never explicitly says
that an agent in an SFA intends each of the choices, it is
natural to hear this claim as an implied echo of his
tendency to characterize the agent as “trying” to make
each of the incompatible choices in an SFA. As trying is a
concept that typically involves intent to do what one is
trying to do, Kane’s account does suggest, at least prima
facie, that SFAs have the aforementioned incoherence of
the agent as an essential feature. A particularly striking
instance of Kane’s use of “trying” in this context occurs in
his account of a businesswoman torn between making it to
a meeting on time and stopping to help a stranger in need.
The businesswoman who wants to go back and help the
assault victim is the same ambitious woman who wants
to go on to her meeting and close the sale. She is a
complex creature, like most of us who are often torn
inside; but hers is the kind of complexity needed for free
will. And when she succeeds in doing one of the things
she is trying to do, she endorses that as her resolution of
the conflict in her will, voluntarily and intentionally
(emphases mine) (Kane 1999, 232)
Though it is natural to read intent into the effort
mentioned in passages such as the one just quoted, Kane
has since indicated 2 that to do so would be to
misunderstand his argument and this for the reason that
he was using the locution of “trying to x” in a way that does
not suggest the locution of “intending to x”. This means, of
course, that Kane need not worry about the precise charge
of incoherence developed earlier in this section. In the next
section, however, I argue that the cost of avoiding this
charge is too high.
1
Randolph Clark discusses briefly this implication of Kane’s position in Clark
2002, 372.
2
In personal correspondence regarding Kane 1999.
3. Trying Without Intending
Though he grants that trying to do something often implies
that the agent is intending the same something, Kane
maintains that the two do not always go together. In some
cases, while the act of trying is itself intentional, that which the
agent is trying to accomplish is not specifically intended.
Returning to Kane’s businesswoman with this understanding
of “trying” in hand, we can characterize her pre-choice
psychology as follows: during the crucial period of indecision
she is a) motivated to make each of two incompatible choices
(to help a person in distress or proceed to her business
meeting in a timely manner) and is b) intentionally trying to
make each of the choices in the sense that she wants to give
each an equal chance of being made, but c) is not intending
either specific choice.
That this way of viewing the pre-choice psychology
does resolve the alleged incoherence of intention is clear;
however, it does so only by diminishing significantly the
intuitive force that Kane’s argument derives from its similarity
to the Austin/Foot strategy. It is important to remember that
the intuitive appropriateness of assigning culpability in an
Austin/Foot scenario stems from the stipulation that the
outcome is intended by the agent. Kane, of course, believes
that whichever choice is made in the case of an SFA, it is right
to see it as a choice that was made “intentionally” and that
because the choice – again, either way – is something that the
person was intentionally trying “to do all along.” But if it is the
case that the competing “tryings” in an SFA do not each
involve an intent to bring about that choice with which it would
normally be correlated, then it would seem more appropriate
to say that the choice made was the “product of a process
involving intention” than it would be to say that the choice was
intended or even made intentionally. But to be the product of a
process involving intention is a linkage between intention and
outcome that is too soft to shoulder the burden of solving the
chance objection, for all sorts of outcomes, including ones that
aren’t intended in any way (such as a slight rise in blood
pressure), might be the product of a process involving
intention. The damage this does to Kane’s argument emerges
when the softness between intention and outcome in an SFA
is contrasted with that found, for instance, in Austin’s case of
the shaky assassin. Here we have no hesitancy in saying flatly
that the assassination was intended. This is, moreover, the
principal reason that we are intuitively comfortable assigning
moral responsibility for the outcome when the assassin
succeeds. And this means that Kane can deploy a doubling
up of the Austin/Foot strategy only by forfeiting that element
that makes the Austin/Foot line so intuitively plausible. 3
References
Austin, J.L. 1961 “Ifs and Cans”, in Philosophical Papers, New
York: Oxford, 153-180.
Clark, Randolph 2002 “Libertarian Views: Critical Survey of
Noncausal and Event-causal Accounts”, in Kane, Robert (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
356-385.
Foot, Philippa 1966 “Free Will as Involving Determinism”, in
Berofsky (ed.), Free Will and Determinism, New York: Harper and
Row, 95-108.
Kane, Robert 1999 “Responsibility, Luck, and Chance: Reflections
on Free Will and Determinism” in The Journal of Philosophy,
Volume XCVI, No. 5, 217-240.
3 I am indebted to Robert Kane, Mike Wreen, Mark Lebar, Tad Zawidzki,
Alyssa Bernstein and Al Lent for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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