Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

I ask instead from what our cognition of the unconditionally practical starts, whether from freedom or from the practical law. It cannot start from freedom, for we can neither be immediately conscious of this, since the first concept of it is negative, nor can we conclude to it from experience, since experience lets us cognize only the law of appearances and hence the mechanism of nature, the direct opposite
of freedom.

Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 29

1

Kantian freedom is weird all through. It is atemporal – whatever that means -; it is kind of the same as acting according to the moral law, but it must also accommodate evil; it is unconditional spontaneity, but it must respect the regularity of natural laws. If all of this wasn’t enough, though, it is also invisible. And that is a problem.

It is pretty easy to see why Kantian freedom needs to be “invisible” in a specific sense. Natural causality, under Kant’s conception, has universal validity because it is a condition of possibility of our experience. Everything that we experience is in time, and causality determines the “objective arrow of time”, so to speak. We can tell apart true successions in time from our mere perception of them because the former stand in necessary, asymmetrical, causal relations. To repeat Kant’s famous example, I can scan a house bottom-up or top-down, and it doesn’t make a difference: my temporal perception of a roof followed by a door, or vice versa, doesn’t constitute a real succession in the world. Now, the point about freedom is that it must be an “absolute beginning” of our actions, a free choice cannot be determined by its antecedents. Since natural causality governs our experience, freedom must be outside of our experience – it has to be invisible.

2

Joe Saunders has argued forcefully (2016, 2022) that this sort of quirk spells real trouble for Kant. Our moral practices require that we be able to tell whether others are free, and under which circumstances their freedom is actually effective. Especially given the absolutely central role that freedom plays for Kant’s account of moral standing, this is a pretty big deal. But not only is freedom, as a matter of principle, beyond our possible experience, but Kant is pretty explicit that we cannot cognize (theoretically) anything beyond experience; we lack intellectual intuition or any faculty of the sort that would make us able to know freedom directly.

But Saunders notes that this, problematic as it is (and ultimately hopeless), brings with it a very noteworthy advantage. If freedom is “invisible” in experience, we can rest assured that scientific discoveries won’t ever interfere with our status as free beings: freedom is shielded from what contingencies may empirically arise. I think that we can go even further, though; it may be that invisible freedom isn’t just a good insurance, but that it is actually the only sort of freedom we can have, given how things appear to be.

3

Let’s think of our pretheoretical notions about freedom. If I freely choose what song I listen to in order to stay awake whilst I write this post at midnight (it’s this album, btw), I ostensibly could have chosen several different songs, or to not listen to any song whatsoever. If we take this perhaps more seriously than reasonable non-philosophers would, we mean that, up until the point of our choice, our choice was really indeterminate, and, everything staying equal, we, still, could have gone down any of the many paths open to us.

There are many, very famous problems with this, but let’s focus on just one of them (see Pereboom, 1995). If the world actually were such that (i) before we act, several futures are open, and (ii) it is our action, our special free-willing power, that closes off the other alternatives, we should probably expect it to be much more chaotic and unpredictable than it actually is. If every human in the world were frozen, or put to sleep, or what have you, for 24 h, presumably the universe would keep on ticking by and states of events would transpire and give rise to new ones. The universe wouldn’t be stuck in an indeterminate crossroads until someone freely acted and decided it to go one way, the laws of physics are enough to decide among possible worlds, so to speak, as time goes by.

Reawaken all of our free agents, and have them exercise their unique capacities to choose among open futures, business as usual. It isn’t just that they won’t choose the same path the universe would’ve taken “on its own” – that’s a given, since that other path had every human incapacitated. It isn’t just, either, that they would change things around them in the same way that adding some other natural mechanisms around would do, or even other animals. These are meant to be strict future-choosing powers, undetermined by prior conditions and absolutely spontaneous. Natural laws would be constantly overridden by the fiat of the close to 8 billion free-doers on Earth. Why should we think that all of these local miracles should stay local? Starting uncaused exceptions to the laws of nature across the planet everytime someone acts of their own will is bound to stir up things, at least, throughout the whole planet – are we really to expect even inert things to follow any sort of regularity when they are being pushed and shoved, not only by highly chaotic organic systems, but by such systems with God-like powers to suspend the course of nature?

And of course, quantum mechanics is of no help here. If our power is a real power to choose among alternatives, we should ostensibly be able to choose consistently “against the odds” of the quantum wave function in question, that is, we should be able to waive stochastic laws as much as deterministic laws. If we are able to find regular laws in nature at all, that in itself lends credence to the idea that there are no such future-choosing powers.

4

Here would come, naturally, the compatibilist to save the day. If freedom isn’t about such weird things as “actually choosing a future”, but can be rather adjudicated in a courtroom by establishing whether there was duress, whether the defendant was under the influence of some drug, and so forth, then the regularity of nature is no problem. It might even be our friend! (Mumford and Anjum, 2018)

But many feel cheated by this solution. If all freedom amounts to is to certain natural conditions obtaining, we may fear that a sufficiently advanced being will induce those conditions on us, via brain implants, or atomic manipulation, or magic, and seamlessly make us do whatever they want us to while still checking off the boxes for freedom. Of course, we can always stipulate that freedom is all of that “plus no funny business”, but if an alien-caused action is identical to a really free action, this stipulation seems to be missing the mark – why should we care? They actually are the same!

5

Kantian freedom has the advantage that it respects the regularity of nature, but it also bypasses another potential source of scepticism. Namely, just as it seems that the laws of nature aren’t constantly being put on halt for our strict alternate-possibility-powered abilities to come into effect, we (or most of us!) don’t really see absolute spontaneity all that often. Maybe – maybe! – you could argue that you feel absolute spontaneity in yourself acting (Kant seemed to think as much for a while), but as far as our outer experience goes, aside from symbols and traces of spontaneity (like, say, those of art), claiming that we literally, directly, genuinely see absolute spontaneity is as tough a sell as our strict alternate possibilities. This leads to the worrying conclusion that, maybe, given what cards we were dealt, our chances for metaphysically distinct free action rely on granting some invisible properties.

6

A lot of metaphysics, especially the least minimalistic kind, relies on “invisible” traits that underpin and make possible what we can actually see. It isn’t that far of a reach to apply the same idea to freedom, but it is a really unwelcome result if it actually follows, because the point still holds: we should really want to tell apart free beings within our experience. There might be a solution as to how we’d manage to do that, but, whatever it is, it will carry with it the burden of filling our world with metaphysical spectres – which may, nonetheless, be worth it.