DON’T PANIC: SELF-AUTHORSHIP WITHOUT OBSCURE METAPHYSICS 1

Philosophical Perspectives, 26, Philosophy of Mind, 2012

DON’T PANIC: SELF-AUTHORSHIP WITHOUT OBSCUREMETAPHYSICS1

Adina L. RoskiesDartmouth College

Many people claim that the folk are intuitive Libertarians: they believe thatfreedom is incompatible with the truth of determinism, and that determinism isfalse (Ekstrom, 2002; Kane, 1999; Nichols, 2004, 2006). Others respond that thefolk are intuitive compatibilists (Nahmias, 2006; Nahmias, Coates, & Kvaran,2007; Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2005; Turner & Nahmias, 2006;Vihvelin, in press). While it is difficult to map the folk views cleanly on to anysophisticated philosophical position on free will, I think it is uncontestable thatthe folk believe they at least sometimes have the ability to choose freely andthat they have a significant measure of control over their choices. They believein moral responsibility, in the idea that people’s characters are relatively stableand morally assessable, and that people’s actions are often a reflection of thosecharacters. Moreover, they believe that people are in a sense responsible for theircharacters, and that they are able to shape themselves in a way that is, in animportant sense, “up to them”. It is this common intuition about malleability ofcharacter and the link between character and action that underlies approaches tomorality as diverse as Aristotelian or virtue-centered approaches to ethics, andRobert Kane’s attempt to ground responsibility in indeterministic “self-formingactions” (Kane, 1996, 1999). This is the intuition that I am particularly concernedwith in this paper.

Philosophical views that purport to capture and respond to the folk conceptsof freedom and responsibility are diverse. Incompatibilists — those who thinkthat determinism is incompatible with freedom — argue that certain criticalaspects of freedom are threatened by determinism. On one crude way ofslicing the pie, there are possibility incompatibilists2 and source incompatibilists.Possibility incompatibilists are particularly bothered by the alleged inability ofthe compatibilist to make sense of the notion of real choice or “being able todo otherwise” in a deterministic world, where the evolution of the universe isentirely specified by the complete state of the universe at some time and the

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laws of nature.3 Source incompatibilists, in contrast, are more troubled by theinability of the compatibilist to give an account of authorship or autonomy ofthe agent in such a world.4 The general worry of the source incompatibilist isthat if every event — including events that are decisions and actions — is a resultof the physical laws acting upon the state of the world, then there is no relevantsense in which the agent’s action is really “up to him”. Moreover, if determinismis true, the agent himself is merely a product of outside forces. And if an agent’sactions and character are not up to him, if he lacks a measure of control, then itis difficult to justify holding that agent morally responsible for his actions, and itwould be inappropriate to blame or praise him (except perhaps insofar as praiseor blame could be justified on utilitarian grounds). It is the intuition that wecan be held responsible for the people we are and for how that influences whatwe do that drives Libertarians like Kane to base his theory of freedom around“self-forming actions”(Kane, 1996, 1999), and Chisholm and O’Connor, to positsui generis agent-causes (Chisholm, 1964, 1976; O’Connor, 2003).

In this paper I attempt to respond to the worries of the source incom-patibilist, and try to sketch a naturalistically plausible, compatibilist notionof self-authorship and control that I believe captures important aspects of thefolk intuitions regarding freedom and responsibility. It is my hope to thus offerthose moved by source incompatibilist worries a reason not to adopt what P.F.Strawson called “the obscure and panicky metaphysics of Libertarianism” (P. F.Strawson, 1982) or the panic-inducing moral austerity of the hard incompatibilist(Pereboom, 2001). I am well aware that many great minds have sunk their teethinto this problem and have not prevailed, but at the very least, I hope to becomeclearer on where the sticking points are.

In what follows, I will draw upon philosophical resources developed todescribe causal structures that rely upon the connection between causation andcontrol. These approaches, developed by attending to the practices of experi-mental science, are aimed at both identifying and manipulating causal processes,and they eschew the heavy metaphysical commitments that characterize someapproaches to causation. Interventionist theories of causation identify causes byfinding pairs of variables that covary, and for which alterations or interventionsin one lead to (or would lead to) concomitant changes in the other (Hitchcock& Woodward, 2003; Woodward, 2005; Woodward & Hitchcock, 2003). Interven-tionist approaches to causation thus provide a thoroughly naturalistic resourcefor understanding and identifying causal processes. They rely on the existence ofrich counterfactual structure, yet are legitimately deployed even if determinism istrue. They thus provide a promising model of causation and causal explanationfor discussions of causation related to the debate between compatibilists andincompatibilists.

I also make use of a related framework for identifying loci of control, de-veloped by John Campbell. Drawing inspiration from interventionist approachesto causation, Campbell elaborates the notion of a control variable, which is

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a causal factor that not only bears the right kind of covariation relation to avariable of interest to be a cause on the interventionist account, but also has otherfeatures, which make the covariation “systematic” and thus a potential locus ofcontrol (Campbell, 2010). Although a full explication of Campbell’s frameworkis beyond the scope of this paper, two features are of particular interest to us:1) control variables do not exhibit “gratuitous redundancy,” and 2) they are“manipulable by local processes.” The meaning and importance of these featureswill be explained in due course.

Campbell uses the notion of control variables to give an account of mentalcausation. His goal is to defend the notion of mental causation as it plays a role ininteractions with other beings and objects in the world, and to provide an accountof how both objects and others can causally affect and be affected by mentalstates. Our problem is not the problem of mental causation writ large, but moreprecisely the problem of self-causation. However, the kinds of considerationsthat Campbell musters to argue for the reality of mental causation in socialinteractions and in epistemology strike me as particularly helpful in explicatingthe kind of causation involved in self-causation.

The Problem(s)

As I see it, there are two primary problems to address when trying to offera positive picture of what it is to have control over oneself and to be, in animportant sense, the (or an) author of one’s character.5 On the one hand, there isa forward-looking problem: How can an agent shape his or her self in ways thatlegitimate notions of responsibility, even in the face of determinism? Secondly,there is a retrospective problem: When we assign responsibility we are typicallylooking for causes. But causes can be traced back to prior causes. Given that weare assuming that the agent is embedded in a causally closed world, what reasondo we have to stop at the agent as the relevant cause, rather than tracing theagent’s decision back to earlier causes having to do with, for example, the stateof the universe at some time in the past and the laws of nature? Both problemspoint us toward the same underlying puzzle: why should we see the cause as theagent or self, rather than the forces or components that make up and influencethat agent? And as we will see, both problems point us toward the same answer.I take for granted a fairly standard picture of rational behavior, in which agentsexercise their rational capacities to deliberate about possible actions, and choosefor reasons.

In this paper, I will be primarily concerned with giving an account of howan agent can have control over the kind of person she is. I leave aside the moreoften discussed point of being the source or author of individual actions, thougha similar story can be told for control of actions. In any case, I take it that theshaping of oneself, or character, at least sometimes affects and is reflected in


one’s actions. The focus on character is an essential one for those who favorvirtue-theoretic approaches to morality, but even those who doubt that peoplehave stable characters (Doris, 2005; Harman, 2000) do not necessarily have toreject the basic insight of virtue theoretic notions (Kamtekar, 2004), nor needthey deny that one can deliberately shape oneself in ways that matter to futurebehavior.

Looking Forward: Shaping Actions and High-Level Control

In one sense, there is no mystery regarding how an agent can have causalinfluence over its future states: My stepping into traffic caused the accident thatled to my walking with a limp for the rest of my days. Had I not stepped in frontof the car, the accident wouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t have brokenmy leg. This is true regardless of whether or not the accident was the inevitableresult of the laws of nature and the state of the world. Determinism does notrob us of causal efficacy: the things that we do are part and parcel of the causalnexus of the world; we affect the world and the world has effects upon us. Butthis kind of causal efficacy is not sufficient to ground the self-causation thatsupports autonomy or responsibility. Non-agents are also causes in this sense:the acorn’s falling from the tree was a cause of it growing into an oak.

Why is mere causal efficacy insufficient? For two reasons: on the one hand,agentive causes should be goal-directed and forward-looking, and on the other,those causes should in some sense be identified with the agent. In other words, wewant the agent to exert control over those causes. Importantly, causation is notequivalent to control: control is an intentional notion, whereas causation is not.We can think of control as being goal-directed or teleological, and as assessablefor efficacy according to whether the interventions aimed at controlling states orbehaviors result in the system’s parameters conforming to the intended or goalstate. Although control is effected via causal relations, many causal processesare not control processes. If we are looking for a locus of control, then, merelyidentifying causal relations seems to miss the point. Instead, we should be lookingat elements of the world that can properly be interpreted as intentional or goal-directed.

Our target should thus be intentional actions (construed broadly) resultingfrom choice or deliberation that are like interventions on one’s current self. Wethus have to look to a range of abilities that normal agents have, including theability to formulate and evaluate options, to mentally project themselves into thefuture, to reason about how to have a desired effect on the self and the world,to plan and to execute those plans. What distinguishes agents from objects isthat they exert a kind of control over the way in which they cause their futurestates: Through deliberation an agent can forecast the effect of various actions,and form an intention to act on the basis of the means that best accords with


their goals. Via these intentions and subsequent actions they deliberately shapetheir future selves in virtue of their decisions.

On the view that intentions are often (if not always) the outcomes ofdecisions, we can see one reason that the acorns and agents are not causallyon par: the acorn’s falling was not the result of an intention to fall resulting froma decision. But what makes decisions special? Given what we know so far aboutthe neuroscience of decision-making, decisions appear to be as much happeningsas are acorn-fallings (Gold & Shadlen, 2007). On some accounts, it is themechanistic view of physical causation, increasingly supported by neuroscientificunderstanding, that threatens our notion of agency (Nahmias, et al., 2007). AsNagel evocatively describes the predicament,

The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seemsto shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point. Everything seems toresult from the combined influence of factors . . . that are not within the agent’scontrol . . . The effect of concentrating on the influence of what is not under hiscontrol is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by theorder of mere events. (Nagel, 1993, p. 66).

Causation and determinism both seem to rob us of agency or autonomybecause we imagine that they make impossible relevant kinds of control. Webecome mere cogs in the wheel of the evolving universe, an acorn falling from atree. The picture that supports this intuition is one in which low level physicalprocesses such as brain states control our actions, while “we” passively or evenhelplessly look on from the sidelines, unable to intervene or alter the course ofour own lives.6 On this picture, we and our mental states are merely hitchhikersalong for the ride.7 This view should be combated. Mechanism does not entailmindlessness, and not all causes have the requisite structure to be considered lociof control.

In what follows I hope to make plausible the view that we exert control overourselves by deliberately intervening on our future selves, thus effecting changesin the selves we come to be. It is part of our folk view that deliberation and choice,and the resultant formation of intentions are ways in which we can act as causesof ourselves. The notion is familiar from Kantian approaches. For instance,Korsgaard writes, “When you deliberate, when you determine your own causality,it is as if there is something over and above all of your incentives, somethingwhich is you, and which chooses which incentive to act on.” Korsgaard, 2009,p. 72). The challenge is to show how can this be true, even if decision-makingat the neural level is a purely mechanistic affair, the outcome of which dependsupon the firing rates of various populations of neurons. In what sense can ourdecision-making be seen as deliberation, or even as an activity of the self? Theanswer lies in the relation between those decisions and the goals and reasonswhich we recognize.


Intervention on Oneself

So let us frame the problem as one of intervention on future states of oneself.An immediate problem confronts us: Intervention in the standard scientificmethodological sense requires that we delineate a system and act upon it fromthe outside. We idealize by viewing the system of interest as a closed system.But if such idealization were necessary, self-intervention would require that aclosed system acts upon itself. Intervention thus threatens to collapse into merecausal evolution. In order to understand how self-intervention is possible, it isimportant to conceptualize the system that is the agent in particular ways:

1) the agent is not a closed system: it is constantly being impinged uponby other influences from the environment (including social informationsuch as moral norms and cultural expectations), as well as from its ownintrinsic activity.

2) the agent is not a static system. It is a system with its own recurrentdynamics. Even if external conditions are held constant, internal variablescan change.

3) the agent has limited and indirect access to its own physical substrate.The access it has is largely via mental content, which supervenes on, butis not identical with, the neurophysiological.

4) The agent’s self-conception, as it figures into deliberation, projection, anddecision, is constrained by that which is subjectively accessible, eitherdirectly, or through reflection, external information, and reason.

5) The agent can project her own current self-conception into the future(otherwise called mental time travel, or simulation) and thus establishesthe baseline or non-interventional condition. By mentally simulating theeffects of various hypothetical behaviors, actions, situations, etc., that areforeseeable outcomes of potential choices, the agent can form expectationsabout the consequences of potential interventions. From her perspective,all the options she recognizes as real options are open to her (see thedigression on the agentive perspective).

6) The agent deliberates among her options, and chooses what to do basedon reasons and desires, including second-order desires, or desires aboutthe kind of person she would like to be.

7) Because the agent has access to the content of her mental states, as wellas feedback from the external world, she has the ability to reflect andreconsider, and to modify courses of action over time.

Intervention on one’s future self is the result of a self-reflective decision. Butwhat legitimates thinking of it as an intervention of a causally efficacious agentwho exerts control? I postulate that attention to the nature of control variablesaccomplishes this.


Recall that Campbell defines control variables as parameters which, whenchanged, lead to systematic changes in other variables of interest. For example,he points to the gear-shift and steering wheel as control variables for a car:interventions on these lead to systematic changes in the behavior of the car. Letus suppose that the variables of interest here (the effects) are certain types ofintentional behavior. Campbell argues that the relevant control variables, at leastfor some instances of behaviors that matter to us, are at the psychological level(Campbell, 2010). That is, the correct identification of some putative causes ofhuman behavior in terms of control variables will refer to psychological states,and not to physical ones.8

One reason that this is the case is that psychological states, and not physicalones, satisfy the manipulability constraint. The constraint can be thought of asrestricting potential control loci to features of the world to which the system inquestion has the kind of access such that it can actually intervene to producea desired outcome. For example, although there are potentially many physicallypossible interventions in the internal physical states of a radio that could producealterations of volume, most of us cannot manipulate the radio’s internal statesdirectly: twiddling the volume knob is the one that is accessible to the user.The knob functions as the control variable for volume. Analogously, althoughthe mental supervenes on the physical, agents cannot intentionally directly altertheir brain states: we cannot control our brain states by forming intentions whosecontent makes reference to particular brain states.9 (We can alter them indirectly,however, by taking drugs, for example). But normally, the control we have of bothphysical and some mental states is indirect, and effected via our psychologicalstates (e.g. mental states to which we have introspective access). These are thecontrol variables.10

Campbell argues that:

(a) psychological variables function as control variables for the outcomes inwhich we are interested, (b) what is going on at a psychological level ofdescription supervenes on what is going on at a physical level of description,but (c) at the physical level, there are no control variables for the outcomes inwhich we are interested. (Campbell, 2010, p.26)

The reason why this is so is that 1) the subject has access to the content of hisor her mental states, and not to their physical nature, and indeed, it is in virtueof the content and not the physical realization that the agent makes her choice;and 2) systematic changes to the mental content of a state result in systematicchanges to behavior. 1) conforms to the requirement that the control variable bemanipulable by local processes; it restricts the control variables to those that arecandidates for self-intervention. 2) expresses the importance of systematicity tothe notion of prediction and control. It is by manipulating mental content in waysthat have foreseeable consequences that we control our own behavior, and areaccountable for how we do it.11 What legitimates thinking of such manipulations


as interventions of the agent is the fact that the relevant control variables aresubjectively accessible intentional mental states, and not the physical states onwhich they supervene.12

Here I present a few examples of ways in which the mental can serve ascontrol variables for both mental and physical states.

Examples of interventions:

1) Engineering the physical world:

It is a sad fact that I love potato chips. I know I love potato chips, andthat once I start eating them, my desire to have just one more is virtuallyunconquerable. You might consider me a compulsive potato chip eater. But Ialso have a standing desire to not gain weight, and to eat a healthy diet. Basedon those desires, which are my considered desires, and knowledge of my potato-chip-eating habits when in the presence of chips, I have developed a strategy forcontrolling potato-chip-eating behavior: I avoid putting myself in environmentsthat are conducive to potato-chip-eating. I control my behavior by engineeringmy environment so that it elicits or makes manifest dispositions I value and doesnot realize those I disvalue.

Engineering my environment can be the result of forming intentions to be ornot be in certain places (i.e. not to spend time in rooms at parties that have thosesnacks); to act in certain ways that I know may be easier for me than to refrainfrom eating chips when they are in front of me (I can relatively easily refrainfrom buying chips at a store, though I may not be able to resist eating themif they are in my house); to seek the company of people who value fitness. Bydoing these things I deliberately foster some aspects of my self and seek to alterothers. Through normal processes of learning and association, these temporaryinterventions can lead to the alteration of some dispositions and have lastingeffects. Pascal had a similar insight when he counseled nonbelievers how to cometo believe in God (Pascal, 1670).

2) Influencing the mental

I can intervene on myself by intervening on my future mental states.Commitment, or forming an intention to do something in the future, is a wayof intervening on my future self. I can pledge now to do something in thefuture, when certain conditions hold. I can avoid potato-chip-eating not just bymanipulating my physical environment, but also by committing to a cognitivestrategy: “I will, when faced with chips, think about x”, where x may be mygoals for performance in an upcoming race, or how I will look in a bathingsuit this summer (see also Mele, 2009, Ch. 7). I may rehearse something so asto deliberately store it in memory, to ensure or increase the chance that it willplay a role in future deliberation and action. In addition, and perhaps most


importantly, I can set overarching policies (“value accuracy over speed”), orexplicitly weight variables in deliberation, both of which can also be thoughtof as mental interventions (Shadlen & Roskies, 2012). By virtue of these kindsof decisions, I reconfigure neural circuits such that at a future time, a desiredmental process unfolds. It is quite clear that I could not have achieved the samereconfiguration by operating or trying to operate directly on my brain states;neuroscientists do not even know what brain states would lead to the desiredfunctional changes.

3) The plasticity of control

One important aspect of agentive control is that it is not static: controlvariables themselves can be learned, adjusted, and deliberately engineered.Consider the case of biofeedback. The heart is not a voluntary muscle, andI cannot directly intentionally manipulate my heart rate by willing it to go up ordown. There is no innate psychological control variable for heart rate. However,there are other control variables for heart rate that I do have access to: I canvoluntarily act in ways that modulate my heart rate, such as run, rest, or breathedeeply. I may think thoughts that may as a downstream consequence affect myheart rate, although I may not initially know that those mental contents havecontrol powers over heart rate. However, with appropriate feedback, I can learnwhat thoughts (e.g. imagine floating in a warm sea, recall scenes from ScreamII, etc.) will reliably modulate my heart rate in desired directions, and throughthese I can indirectly manipulate and exert control over my heart rate, despitethe fact that I have no direct access to it. Over time and with training thesepsychological states or processes will become control variables for heart rate. Inanalogous ways we can exert control over aspects of our selves, including ourbehaviors and our dispositions. This example illustrates a number of importantpoints: 1) The importance of feedback and continuous reciprocal interactionwith the environment in establishing control; 2) that control skills can improvewith practice; 3) that control variables need not (all) be innate; some can beacquired.

In sum, it is in virtue of the content, and via the appreciation, valuation,and weighing/prioritizing of reasons that we can affect our own decision-making. Intervening by affecting mental content corresponds to Campbell’sdesideratum that the control variables that delineate a cause be manipulableby local processes. In essence, the control panel for our own minds, or thetoggles that we have for ourselves are in terms of the contents of our mentalstates and their rational relationships. Through deliberately thinking and actingin strategic ways we can exert control, modulate and intervene in our futurestates, both physical and mental. It is this that allows us to shape ourselves inways that make it the case that we are in some very real sense responsible for whowe are.


Digression: The Agentive Perspective

Decision looms large in the interventions described above. One might worrythat if determinism were true, I could predict my choices by calculating themfrom the state of the world, and thus be freed from the necessity of making achoice. But this is impossible. From the position of the agent, the result of hisdeliberation in a choice is unknowable prior to choosing. This is true both forthe hard decisions we typically think of as genuine or “torn” decisions (Balaguer,2004; Kane, 1999), and for trivial ones. In order to choose, I must know whatthe options are to choose from, and have some access to reasons that bear uponthe choiceworthiness of various options, but I cannot know with certainty priorto choosing what I will choose.

Suppose I believe that my choices are determined, and if they are sodetermined, they are ultimately determined by facts about the physical state ofmy brain. The physical state of my brain is objective, and thus at least in principleknowable. Could I, even in principle, employ this knowledge to guide my choices,and thus to make otiose the position of the chooser? No. First, I have no access tothe state of my brain, other than indirectly, via the content that I have epistemicaccess to through thought and introspection, and the emotional responses thatI can access via my perception of bodily changes that accompany or partlyconstitute those emotions. Though my physical state may determine my choice,it cannot do so by influencing my act of choosing through explicit adoption.Moreovoer, as MacKay so effectively argues, any measurements of my physicalstate that one might theoretically postulate would determine my behavior, ifthey were to become known to me, would nullify themselves (MacKay, 1960).Hilary Bok very lucidly makes a similar point when she argues that from theagentive perspective, a Pocket Oracle — an external device that could unfailinglypredict your choices and actions — could do so only if you refused to consultit (Bok, 1998). In other words, although objective measurements of the brainmight enable others to predict my actions,13 they can reliably do so only if theycannot influence me. Epistemic access to such information is sufficient to negateits value, so that an agent cannot become predictive of itself.

This frames the problem in an important way: there is no sense, even in adeterministic world, in which the agent can opt out of the agentive role by relyingon the physical world to tell him what to do. From the standpoint of the agent,there are choices — moments which require decisions, and any way of movingforward requires a decision, and the decision must be taken on the basis of thecontents to which the agent has access (e.g. the agent’s reasons).14 This is onereason that the process of deciding is an active, not passive process. It requiresthe agent’s attention, input, awareness, in ways that other kinds of happeningsdo not. Finally, its outcome is limited by, and thus causally influenced by, theepistemic position of the agent. So in what sense are decisions really decisions,if determinism is true? In a very real, lived sense. These are all reasons to thinkthat decision (and subsequent intention-formation) are processes that, in animportant sense, originate with the agent.15


So far I have tried to argue that the forward looking part of the problem canbe addressed by recognizing that the intentional aspect of control is addressed bythe agent’s own awareness of her psychological states which constitute reasonsfor her decisions, and the effective aspect of control is accounted for by herability to influence her future states by affecting changes via control variables,which are often mental states. However, an issue remains regarding the sourceof this control. Causal accounts tend to trace causation backward to ever earliercauses. If causal closure is true, then there is a sufficient cause for any physicalevent, including events we can identify as sources of agentive control. Isn’t thatanother way that we lose agency in a mechanistic world?

Looking Backward: The Threat of the Causal Regress

When we attribute responsibility for something we look for its causes. Thetransitivity of causation encourages us to trace causes backwards in time. Becausewe are agents embedded in a causal world, for any event that is an agent’s choiceor action we quickly find this process leading us to causes that are outside, andnot up to, the agent. It is this assumption that makes incompatibilist argumentslike van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument seem like a compelling challenge tomoral responsibility (van Inwagen, 1983).

Recognizing this, Hilary Bok has noted that compatibilists must claimthat “because we or our choices have some particular natural property, wehave reason to disregard the general rule that responsibility flows backwardsalong the causal chain when we encounter the choice of an agent.” (Bok, 1998,p. 33). This is precisely what I intend to do. When we look backwards to attributeresponsibility, we are looking for a certain kind of explanation, a reason to say,“The buck stops here.” Although all physical events can be traced backward toprior causes, not all causes have equal status in explaining a phenomenon. Forexample, we might explain the trajectory of a ball by citing the force with whichit was thrown, its mass, and the acceleration due to gravity. But prior causesare responsible for those causes, including the birth of the person that threwit, her conception, the meeting of her parents, the coalescing of the rock andgas that now make up our planet, and the fabrication of the ball. Nonetheless,those causes are simply not relevant to an explanation of the ball’s trajectory,not even that particular ball’s trajectory, once the relevant physical parametersare specified. There are reasons, pragmatic and otherwise, to limit the backwardprogression in the causal chain when giving an account of events, even whengiving a purely causal account. Similarly, there are reasons to pick out somecauses as the relevant ones when giving an account of an agent’s choice oraction.

Why is the relevant cause identified with the agent? As I have argued, thekind of cause we are interested in is an intervention by the deliberative agent ona candidate locus of control, and the relevant control variables for behaviors andfor the character they stem from are contentful mental states to which the agent


has conscious access and upon which the agent can intervene (the manipulabilityconstraint). The agent is the source of this intervention: she deliberates andchooses by considering her reasons, and not by considering or directly actingupon their physical basis.

The requirement for control variables of what Campbell terms “no gratuitousredundancy” provides another reason to look to the psychological level for causalexplanations. It is generally recognized that mental states can be multiply realized,and neuroscience supports the view that physical states are more fine-grainedthan the mental states they realize. Thus, the same psychological state maysupervene on different physical states. To give an account of mental causationin terms of the physical supervenience base would thus involve gratuitousredundancy: one would have to make reference to a disjunction of physicalstates. The same is not true if we take the control variables to be psychological:the grain of the psychological captures much more succinctly the relevantcounterfactuals. This argument for locating the relevant level is similar in spiritto Yablo’s argument using the determinable/determinate relation for identifyingthe psychological level, and not the physical, as the appropriate level for causalexplanation of behavior (Yablo, 1992), and to Jackson and Pettit’s argument forthe causal relevance and efficacy of mental states (Jackson & Pettit, 1990). Inother words, reasons-explanations or explanations at the level of psychologicalstates capture the right level of generality to capture relevant counterfactuals;explanations invoking the subvenient brain states do not. This, I believe, is thestrategy for addressing Kim’s famous exclusion problem (Kim, 1998).16

Parfit worries that accounts of action in terms of reasons always give wayto a question of physical determination by some event or other, deterministicor indeterministic. Since he believes that neither determinism nor indeterminismleaves room for free will, Parfit thinks freedom is impossible.

When someone acts for some reason, however, we can ask why this person actedfor this reason. In some cases, the answer is given by some further reason. . .Butwe shall soon reach the beginning of any such chain of motivating reasons. Myultimate reason for telling my lie may have been to avoid being punished formy crime. When we reach someone’s ultimate reason for acting in some way, wecan ask why this person acted for this reason, rather than acting in some otherway for some other reason. If I had a self-interested reason to try to avoid beingpunished, and a moral reason not to tell this lie, why did one of these reasonsweigh more heavily with me, so that I chose to act as I did? This event didnot occur for some further motivating reason. So the suggested third alternativehere disappears. This event was either fully caused or partly random. And thereis always such an event at the start of any chain of motivating reasons. Sinceour decisions to act as we do all involve such events, there is no coherent thirdalternative. (Parfit, 2011, Ch. 11)

In a way, Parfit’s problem is our solution. I am not denying that there willalways be some kind of non-reason, physical explanation for the presence of a


reason, but what I am suggesting is that that is not the place to look. Certainly,our reasons may be elements of us that are in some sense given. But they are notunchangeable. The agent, in appreciating the content of a reason, can intervenein the way in which that reason operates in his deliberation, in loops of agentialcontrol. If he or she did not, and by not doing so the agent accepted and endorsedthat reason and its role in his deliberation, then for reasons discussed above, thatis the appropriate place to stop. Agents control themselves via conscious accessto mental content. We therefore have a convenient way of locating the source ofthe control: at the agentive, aware level.

I should emphasize that to fully understand the picture I sketch here onemust be able to shift perspective fluidly between a purely naturalistic frameworkand the more commonsensical framework usually adopted by those concernedabout such things as freedom and responsibility. The shift, however, is nota metaphysical one. Some naturalists will object that I reify a non-naturalentity, “the agent”, in an attempt to give a naturalistic compatibilist accountof agency and responsibility, and that my account of self-intervention invokesthe agent as a causal intervener into her own mind/brain processes. On thecontrary: I do not mean to deny that an agent-in-control is metaphysicallyspeaking anything over and above a certain kind of complex physical systemwith appropriate representational and metarepresentational resources, wheresome meta-representational processes play a role in modulating or regulating theway other processes unfold. But an account of such structure in terms of brutephysical processes does little to illuminate the two problems I identify, and I thinkit is a mistake to do away with the language of the folk metaphysics of agencyin this context. It is only by retaining the commonsense notions that inform ourintuitions about freedom and responsibility and showing how these relate to anaturalistic account that the worries of those moved by source incompatibilismcan begin to be alleviated.

How does this ground Responsibility?

Thus far, I have argued that we can innately use or learn to use psychologicalstates as control variables for intervening on our future states. However, onemight question whether the ability to control grounds responsibility. Clearly,how I act ultimately depends on the state of my brain; the state of my brain,as specified by the occurrent configuration of millions or billions of neurons, isnot something I can know, and consequently it is not the kind of object thatI can, as such, directly intentionally shape. But the previous argument aboutcontrol variables suggests that it is not the case that I do not have any controlover the state of my brain. I do, indirectly, via mental content. That is, just as Ican voluntarily modulate my heart rate by thinking certain thoughts, I can haveaccess to certain brain states by virtue of becoming introspectively aware of thecontent or representations instantiated by those brain states. Over the course of


a lifetime, we can learn to intervene on our own brain states and to deliberatelyalter them. And insofar as we are able to manipulate or regulate our contentfulstates, we are able to affect, through choice, the people we come to be, to shapeour diachronic selves, and to affect our future choices. It is this that Parfit seemsto have in mind when he says,

What we do often depends on our beliefs about what we ought to do. And ifwe come to believe that some act of ours was wrong, or irrational, because weought to have acted differently, this belief may lead us to try to change ourselves,or our situation, so that we do not act wrongly, or irrationally, in this kind ofway again. These changes in us or our situation may affect what we later do. Itdoes not matter that, for us to have acted differently in the past, we would havehad to perform some miracle. If we come to believe that we ought to have acteddifferently, this change in our beliefs may cause it to be true that in similar cases,without any miracle, we do in the future act differently. (Parfit, 2011, Ch. 11)

My argument has been that if we focus on control variables for behaviorthen the proper point to stop looking backward for prior causes is at the level ofthe mental. In virtue of exercising high-level control, or playing with the controlvariables available to the agent, he or she can be understood to be interveningin her self. Focus on control variables places attention on the appropriate levelfor identifying causes, via the “no redundancy constraint” in terms of the levelof explanation for mental causation as intervention, and, via the “manipulabilityconstraint”, on the nature of the states that do the causing. Although we canlegitimately ask questions about prior causes for reasons, and specifically forphysical causes for reasons, we are not then asking about the kinds of causes thatconstitute viable control variables for human agents, or the kinds of behaviors wecare about. Because of this, when thinking about the question of responsibility,we are not compelled to move beyond reasons to a purely physical event forwhich we cannot be held responsible.

Determinism Revisited

All this may seem to gain little traction if one hypothesizes that determinismis true. After all, isn’t it the case that a person’s reasons, values, and deliberationare determined if determinism is true? That even if an agent does exert thiskind of control, she had no control over whether she would? This is certainlywhat lies at the foundation of all incompatibilist worries. But the desire forwhat might be called “ultimate” control is misplaced. Our concepts of freedomand responsibility are concepts whose function is to regulate human action andinteraction. Determinism is not action-guiding, nor is it constraining in a waythat impedes what most people mean by freedom. The causal laws merely providethe backdrop against which our lives are lived. In living them, as I argued inmy digression on the agentive perspective, determinism has no special relevance.


In contrast, the potential for self-intervention and the necessity of deliberationand decision are paramount. It is because taking account of causal processes(deterministic or not) usually cannot obviate the need for deliberation that theagent is the source, and the proper locus of responsibility, of her decisions,character, or actions.

Being a Causa Sui

I hope to have provided a potential refuge for those tempted by sourceincompatibilism. In closing, I want to look back at alternative notions to the kindof self-causation that I propose that some incompatibilists have thought necessaryto ground freedom and responsibility. I argue that nothing as metaphysicallyproblematic as these notions is necessary to ground moral responsibility.

In “Free Agents” Galen Strawson outlines a kind of freedom that couldground desert, or as he says, “justify heaven and hell,” which he calls “U-Freedom” (short for Ultimate freedom) (G. Strawson, 2004). He contends thathis Basic Argument establishes that U-freedom is impossible because it requiresthat the agent be self-caused, self-created, or, as he terms it “a causa sui”. Butbeing a causa sui, he argues, is impossible. He continues:

The notion CAUSA SUI has nothing hidden about it. If it feels obscure, that is onlybecause it is so evidently paradoxical. The feeling of obscurity does not showthat the concept CAUSA SUI does not come clear before the mind (the feelingmay stem principally from the fact that the notion presents vividly as somethingimpossible, but without the obvious visualizable impossibility of ROUND SQUARE).(G. Strawson, 2004, p. 362)

Strawson’s claim that the concept CAUSA SUI is clear is surely mistaken. Theunease we feel about the concept CAUSA SUI is due at least in part to the factthat it is not at all clear what precisely is meant by it, quite independent ofthe question of whether self-causing is possible. There are a variety of differentcandidate notions, some more paradoxical than others.

Strawson is not the first to argue against the possibility of self-causation.Nietzsche dismissed its coherence long before:

The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, whichstill holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desireto bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and toabsolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing lessthan to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Munchhausen’saudacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps ofnothingness . . . (Nietzsche, 1886, Section 21)


One clearly paradoxical way to cash out what it is to be a causa sui is tocause oneself to exist or to bring oneself into existence ex nihilo. This is whatNietzsche alludes to when he ridicules those who want an account of free willthat enables us “to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps ofnothingness . . . ” Indeed, if this is what were necessary for ultimate responsibility,the prospects seem very dim. Causes are rarely if ever forces that create somethingout of nothing. As I have argued above, however, it is not necessary to createoneself out of whole cloth. Continual shaping of the given over time establishessufficient control of the agent to suffice as a grounding kind of self-causation.

A second way in which being a causa sui may be misunderstood is to imagineit requires a type of synchrony that is uncharacteristic of causal relations. Thatis, what it is to be a causa sui is to cause oneself now to do something now. Butcausation is a diachronic relation, with the causes temporally prior to effects. AsI have argued, self-causation should not be expected to be a kind of synchroniccausation, as having some effect on one’s current self, but rather in terms ofdoing something at one time to affect oneself at a later time.

A third, common, way in which being a causa sui is (mis)understood, isas being an uncaused cause. It is this notion that is elaborated in the kind ofagent causal accounts we see from, for example, Chisholm, who writes, “But ifa man is responsible for the occurrence of a certain event, then there is someevent that is caused, not by other events or states of affairs, but by the manhimself, by the agent. If this is true, then each of us, when we really act, is aprime mover unmoved.”(Chisholm, 1964). Agents are seen as entities which arein some important respect unbound from the laws of nature, such that in choicesituations those laws fail to provide sufficient conditions to determine the agent’schoice: the agent himself determines the outcome. Accounts of agent-causationeither postulate sui generis kinds of causes unknown to science (Chisholm, 1964;O’Connor, 2003), an approach that I reject on naturalistic grounds17, or theyposit an indeterministic element in the agent, which threatens to collapse intoan event-causal Libertarian account (i.e. not a source incompatibilist account)(Kane, 1999). Because on such views agents seem to lack control, but rather seemto be controlled by random events, this strategy seems unsuitable as an unpackingof CAUSA SUI. Again, my version of self-causation is in no way predicated on theagent being the first or uncaused cause.

One last way I’ll consider in which one might think a causa sui must manifestis by contravening or nullifying all other causes, such that the causal influence ofthe agent trumps all other causal forces. But that is a much stronger criterion thanis required: causes can be mere influences that lead to deviations in an alreadyestablished path for already existent objects, yet they are causes nonetheless, withindisputable influence over future events. To act autonomously, I have suggested,does not require anything as drastic as negation of the causal influence of all orany of the other factors that undoubtedly play a role in shaping our behavior.Autonomous action is action that can coexist with partial determination by amyriad of other forces.


In my view, none of these traditional ways of unpacking the notion of causasui accurately captures what is important for self-causation or authorship, andindeed their lack of plausibility is what may have led so many to jettison thenotion of self-causation as impossible or incoherent. Instead, I have argued thatthere is a coherent and naturalistic notion that captures the essence of whatpeople want in an account of self-origination that serves to ground freedomor responsibility. What it is to be self-caused is to use one’s own mental statesas control variables to affect one’s future mental and physical states, and tointentionally take steps now to affect one’s future self. Self-causation is thus lessmetaphysically demanding than has been previously noted. In brief, to be a causasui, in any sense that we need it, is to be a self-conscious or deliberate shaperof one’s character through time. This condition is rather frequently fulfilled byordinary human beings, and it is sufficient to ground the kind of accountabilitythat we humans are accustomed to bearing and attributing.

Notes

1. I thank Princeton University Center for Human Values for the support that madestarting this project feasible. I am very grateful for the invaluable comments ofTori McGeer on an earlier and much inferior version of this paper. Discussionswith Paul Benacerraf, Mario de Caro and George Sher were also extremelyhelpful. The paper has benefitted from the feedback of the 2011–12 LSR fellowsat the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and from comments fromRobert Kane, Mario de Caro, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

2. Also called “leeway incompatibilists.”3. For the purposes of this paper, I ignore the problem of giving an account of

being able to do otherwise, even though this too interacts with the problem ofautonomy. Vivehlin does a nice job of this (Vihvelin, in press); It is just too muchto bite off here.

4. Not all source incompatibilists are Libertarians. Galen Strawson, for example,we might consider a source impossibilist in that he thinks that our conceptionof agency is equally threatened by indeterminism. To be sure, the distinctionbetween source and possibility incompatibilists is usually a matter of emphasis;some authors are both. Most source incompatibilists are so presumably becausethey think that lack of alternative possibilities makes self-authorship impossible,but their arguments focus primarily on the importance of authorship orautonomy.

5. This is roughly what I intend by “self-causation.”6. This problem is closely related to Kim’s (1998) exclusion problem for mental

causation, applied to higher-level constructs of agency more generally.7. The notion that control comes from the bottom accords with much about our

21st century folk views of science, where altering the microscopic world can havemassive effects on the macroscopic world, from the devastating explosions thatcan result from the fission of atomic nuclei, to the ravages of cancer that aregenerated by point mutations in the DNA. And indeed, by focusing on gaining


control of our microscopic world, we have altered the course of human history(or fulfilled it), and have ratified reductionist approaches.

8. I variously refer to events, states, and agents as causes. To say that some state Sis a cause is shorthand for the obtaining of [physical or mental] state S being thecause. To say that an agent A is a cause is shorthand for saying that the obtainingof a [physical or mental] state S of A is the cause, where (1) A has subjective accessto the content of S, and (2) where that access is important to the explanationof or identification of S as the cause. Also, I do not mean to intimate thatpsychological states are not also physical; rather, that when identifying controlvariables, the variable, properly picked out, will be a psychological state that mayhave multiple physical instantiations, and thus cannot be identified with a singlephysical state.

9. This is certainly the case now, though may be possible exceptions, such as in acase of supremely advanced brain science.

10. I pause briefly to flag a problem: The argument above seems to require notonly that we access, but also directly manipulate our mental states. However, weoften cannot directly control the contents of our mental states. I cannot, as amatter of course, choose to believe an arbitrary proposition, nor can I typicallychoose to desire one thing rather another. The dynamics of thought appearsto be largely automatic. The extent to which we can intentionally direct thetrajectory of our mental states is an important empirical question, and no doubtwill be of intense interest for this and other philosophical projects. Nonetheless,I think we can grant that we often do not choose the content of our next thoughtwithout granting that we have no control over mental states. I can manipulatethem diachronically, both by setting parameters for contents (choosing high levelpolicies), and by acting in certain ways and engineering my environment so asto affect the future course of my desires and beliefs. These ways of thinking andacting can be thought of as ways to intervene in the course of one’s own life. Andeven if we have no fine-grained forward control over mental content (which wemay), I argue that we do have backward-looking, revisionary control that we canemploy in forward-looking ways. Mental content can be regulated by training,association, learning. So even if we do not choose what our initial mental roughdraft looks like, we are still editors of our selves (Pettit, 2007).

11. For another account of why it is mental content and not the physiological statesthe content supervenes on, see (Jackson & Pettit, 1990).

12. Some may argue that the only reason that we need to think of self-manipulationin mental terms is because of epistemic limitations, and that the argument socouched reveals nothing about the underlying causal relations or the metaphysics.This is too fast: even if we knew the nature of the brain states at issue, the causallevers that would operate would still be levers of mental content, only the contentswould be neural-state contents rather than psychological-state contents. It is alsonot clear that the effective control relationships would come to rely on purelycausal relations, rather than remain at a higher level.

13. This would not be so, of course if indeterminism were true (but here we areassuming determinism as we appeal to the incompatibilist intuitions aboutautonomy); it may also not be so, if, as many think, chaotic processes wereto make prediction in principle impossible, even in a deterministic brain.


14. This is so even if you acknowledge that there are circumstances in which theagent might use a strategy of self-prediction in order to make a decision. To theextent that this is a hard strategy, the decision has already been made. As longas the agent truly considers the other option open, and sees it as a possibility, hecannot predict the outcome.

15. This perspectival aspect of the problem of agency also accounts for at least oneother important aspect of agency: its phenomenology.

16. Kim’s exclusion problem: Assume mental states supervene on physical states andcausal closure is true (for every physical event there is a sufficient physical cause).These are basic tenets of physicalism. Then there is a sufficient physical causalexplanation for any event, physical or mental, and the physical causal explanationexcludes or makes otiose any reference to mental events as explananda. Theupshot is that the mental is epiphenomenal.

17. O’Connor claims his view is naturalistic, but it hard to see why, since he postulatesa new kind of event, an agent-causal event, not subject to causal laws.

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