Causation and Compatibilist Free Will (SACE Stage 2 Philosophy)

What this dot point is asking

You need to explain Hume's analysis of causation, contrast it with a necessitarian view, and evaluate compatibilism as a response to the threat determinism poses to free will.

Hume on causation

When one billiard ball strikes another and the second moves, what do we actually observe? David Hume answered that we see only one event followed by another. We never perceive any necessary connection, any glue, binding the cause to the effect. All experience gives us is constant conjunction: events of the first kind have regularly been followed by events of the second. The idea of necessity, Hume argued, is projected onto the world by the mind, arising from the habit of expectation built up by repeated observation.

This is a regularity theory of causation. To say A causes B is, roughly, to say events like A are regularly followed by events like B. The view is empirically modest, but it has counterintuitive results: it seems to leave out the productive, bring-it-about character of causation, and it struggles to distinguish genuine causes from mere accidental regularities, such as a factory whistle that always precedes the workers leaving.

Necessitarian accounts

Against Hume, necessitarian or realist views hold that causation involves a genuine relation of production or necessitation in the world, not merely in our minds. Some appeal to causal powers that objects have in virtue of their natures; salt has the power to dissolve in water. Others, following thinkers like David Armstrong, hold that causal laws are relations of necessitation between properties. These views capture the intuition that causes really make their effects happen, but they face Hume's challenge to say where in experience this necessity is found.

Determinism and the threat to freedom

Determinism is the thesis that every event, including every human choice, is the necessary effect of prior causes together with the laws of nature. If true, then given the state of the world long before your birth, only one future was ever possible. This appears to threaten free will: if your choices were causally fixed in advance, how can they be free, and how can you be responsible for them?

Compatibilism

Compatibilism denies that determinism rules out freedom. The classic version, again from Hume, redefines freedom not as the absence of causes but as the absence of constraint. A free action is one that flows from your own desires and is not compelled or coerced; an unfree action is one done under compulsion, like being pushed. On this view determinism is actually required for freedom, since responsible action depends on character reliably causing behaviour. Harry Frankfurt refined this with the idea of higher-order desires: you act freely when you act on a desire you reflectively endorse wanting to act on.

The main objection is that compatibilism changes the subject. Critics say real freedom requires the genuine ability to have done otherwise, and mere absence of external constraint does not give you that if your desires were themselves determined. Frankfurt-style cases reply that the ability to do otherwise is not in fact necessary for responsibility, since we hold people responsible even when they could not have acted differently but acted for their own reasons.

Evaluation

The two debates connect tightly. If Hume is right that causation is only regularity, the threat of determinism softens, since there is no iron necessity dragging your choices along, only patterns. If necessitarians are right, the threat is sharper. Compatibilism offers the most popular reconciliation by relocating freedom in the source of action rather than the absence of causation, but it must answer the charge that it has redefined freedom into something less than we wanted. A strong answer links the account of causation to the strength of the determinist threat and judges whether compatibilism preserves a freedom worth having.