Freedom, Indeterminism and Imagination1

Michael M. Pitman

Psychology – School of Human & Community DevelopmentUniversity of the Witwatersrand

Private Bag x3WITS 2050

michael.pitman@wits.ac.za

AbstractA suspicion about libertarian free will is that freedom is undermined,rather than supported, by the positing of indeterminism within pro-cesses of volition. In response, this paper presents a way in whichmoments of indeterminism can enhance freedom, by showing howsuch moments can genuinely belong to the agent. The key idea is thatof putting the imagination to work in the service of free agency. Thesuggestion is that indeterministic processes of imaginativegenerativity can both belong to an agent, and provide a ground forclaims of freedom. In contrast to Robert Kane’s libertarian proposalof locating critical self-forming actions in special moments of rationalchoice, freedom-friendly indeterministic moments of self-shaping areinstead posited within processes of imaginative generativity in whichour future possibilities are imagined. This incompatibilist alternativeto traditional libertarianism is briefly compared to Mele’s modestlibertarianism, and defended against a selection of likely criticisms.

Introduction

An optimistic incompatibilist is someone who thinks we have free will (at least someof the time), but who thinks our having such free will is incompatible with the truth ofdeterminism. Their optimism about free will contrasts with the pessimism of scepticalincompatibilists (including hard determinists) whose scepticism extends to bothcompatibilist and incompatibilist attempts to defend claims about our having free will.Their incompatibilism contrasts with the convictions of compatibilists, with the latterbeing convinced that we can have varieties of free will worth wanting2 even if deter-minism turns out to be true. As a position, optimistic incompatibilism is dominated byvarious libertarian positions that, despite their differences, tend to share one feature: in

1 An earlier version of the ideas in this paper appeared in Pitman (2011). I am grateful to Mark Leon, Da-vid Martens, Eddy Nahmias and Saul Smilansky for comments on this earlier work. I am also grateful tothose attending the presentation of this paper at the 2012 PSSA conference hosted by UCT, and espe-cially for comments and questions from Simon Beck, Deepak Mistrey, John Ostrowic, David Spurrett,and an anonymous reviewer for this journal. Special thanks go to Lucy Allais for encouraging the origi-nal idea, and for comments, suggestions and support at every stage of developing the central proposaland arguments.

2 To borrow Daniel Dennett’s (1984) expression.

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breaking with determinism, they posit some variety of indeterministic process withinthe will of the agent that is critical to their freedom3.

Optimistic incompatibilists hold that indeterministic processes are needed to disruptbackwards stretching deterministic causal chains. However, introducing indeterminisminto the psychology of the agent is notoriously problematic. Probably the most widelyshared criticism of libertarian accounts – what I would call the anti-libertarian suspi-cion – is that inserting indeterminism into the will of the agent does not secure theagent’s claim of having free will, because it tends to undermine more basic claims ofownership and control that the agent might have made for their choices, decisions andactions. To defend optimistic compatibilism, a positive proposal is needed as to howindeterministic processes could both play the necessary role in breaking backwardsstretching deterministic causal chains and, at the same time, be plausibly thought of asbelonging to the agent.

But if this is right, where does that leave optimistic incompatibilism? More specifi-cally, if the anti-libertarian suspicion is correct, is there any prospect for positing a dif-ferent role for indeterminism within the psychology of agents, such that freedom is en-hanced (or, more ambitiously, secured) without agency first being undermined?4

This paper will explore one such possible role – a freedom-enhancing role forindeterminism within the imaginative capacities and activities of the agent. Section Iwill briefly outline the anti-libertarian suspicion and some of its implications. In Sec-tion II, a preliminary case will be made for thinking that imagination, andindeterministic processes involving imagination, should find an important place withinan optimistic incompatibilist account of free will and agency. In Section III, this ideawill be developed into a specific hypothesis about a role for indeterministic momentsof imaginative generativity in freedom-grounding moments of self-shaping. Section IVbriefly introduces Mele’s modest libertarianism, and highlights some salient points ofconvergence and difference with the proposal of Section III. Finally, in Section V, theproposal will be defended against a selection of likely compatibilist and scepticalincompatibilist criticisms. This paper does not argue against compatibilism or deter-minism, nor attempt to prove that indeterministic processes exist. Rather, the goal is toanswer the anti-libertarian suspicion by providing a freedom-friendly positive accountof the role of indeterministic processes within agents.

I

Probably the most well-discussed version of the anti-libertarian suspicion comes in theform of what Peter van Inwagen (1983, 2000) and others have called the Mind argu-ment5 against libertarianism. This latter argument can be stated as follows:

If indeterminism is to be relevant to the question whether a given agent has freewill, it must be because the acts of that agent cannot be free unless they (or per-haps their immediate causal antecedents) are undetermined. But if an agent’sacts are undetermined, then how the agent acts on a given occasion is a matterof chance. And if how an agent acts is a matter of chance, then the agent canhardly be said to have free will...[If] an agent is faced with a choice between[,

3 This strategy is characteristic of what I refer to as ‘traditional libertarianism’.4 In other words, what are the prospects for optimistic incompatibilism outside of traditional libertarian-

ism?5 Because of the regularity with which it was repeated in the pages of Mind.

for example,] lying and telling the truth, and if it is a mere matter of chancewhich of these things the agent does, then it cannot be up to the agent which ofthem he does. (van Inwagen 2000: 10; italics in original)

Of course, the Mind argument as stated above puts the matter rather strongly: insertingindeterminism into the process by which an agent comes to act is claimed to render theoutcome of their choices and efforts a mere matter of chance, something that cannotbe up to the agent. But even if this is too strong, the argument does capture very wellthe kind of concern that non-libertarians tend to share about inserting indeterminisminto moments of volition. Of course defenders of free will want certain acts of theagent to count as free, but those acts must first sensibly qualify as acts of the agent(free or otherwise). If the process by which the agent comes to choose and act involvesindeterminism, such that the act itself is undetermined, then claims of ownership andcontrol that the agent might have made for the choice and the act seem to be under-mined, or at least weakened. Even if, for a given choice situation, we don’t go quite sofar as saying that ‘it cannot be up to the agent which of them she/he does’, the anti-lib-ertarian suspicion is that we have nevertheless moved in the wrong direction. At leastfor many of our more weighty and ethically significant choices and acts, we wouldsurely want these to look more like decisive moments of an agent asserting their willand less like coin tosses if they are to count as products of a free will?

There are many kinds of libertarian accounts, and so far we have approached themas if they were univocal, which (of course) they are not. We should make at least twodistinctions amongst libertarian accounts: (a) between agent-causal and event-causallibertarian accounts; and (b) between regularist and occasionalist libertarian accounts.Agent-causal libertarian accounts (what Robert Kane calls extra-factor theories6) pos-tulate a special kind of agent-causation, a mode of causation unlike those encounteredelsewhere in science, in which an agent’s causing their free action cannot be fully ac-counted for in terms of causation by events, processes and states of affairs involvingthe agent. That is, the agent-causal theorist sees a free action as something left unde-termined by preceding events, processes and states of affairs, including the agent’sprojects, commitments, reasons, emotions, and other aspects of their character; and itis only through the special exercise of agent-causal powers that the free agent comes toresolve the indeterminacy and decide what their will shall be. By contrast,event-causal libertarians generally want to make do with the same processes, events,states of affairs and modes of causation that are to be found elsewhere in science, andfind a place for the operation of an indeterministic free will within the events,processes and states of affairs that precede an agent’s actions.

Regularist libertarian accounts see indeterminism as a regular feature of a freeagent’s activities, and typically as a necessary feature of their free choices and actions;whereas occasionalists tend to see indeterminism as a more limited characteristic ofthe free agent’s activities – there needs to be enough of it to ground the agent’s free-dom, and it will generally be found in special character-shaping moments of choice;but indeterminism need not be a common feature of the agent’s choices and actions,and it is not a necessary feature of all actions that qualify as being free. On the whole,agent-causal libertarians tend to be regularists, while event-causal libertarians may beeither regularists or occasionalists.

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6 See, for example, Kane (1996, 2002a).

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These distinctions map important features and differences amongst libertarian ac-counts, but they make little difference (in the eyes of non-libertarians) to the threatposed by the anti-libertarian suspicion. Perhaps the agent-causal theorist might be ac-cused of making it even more mysterious as to how an action belongs to the agentwhen the sum of their character and events, processes, and states of affairs involvingthe agent left the action undetermined. And perhaps the regularist has more instancesof indeterminism to accommodate, suggesting (to the non-libertarian) a more perva-sive disconnection between the agent and their (supposedly free) actions. Yet the fea-ture shared by what I am calling traditional libertarian accounts is that, in each case, anindeterministic free will is proposed in which the relevant indeterminism is positedwithin moments of volition. For the traditional libertarian, certain choices and actionsare undetermined because they, in some way or other, involve a freedom-groundingdegree of indeterminism. Someone who shares the anti-libertarian suspicion thinks thisundermines the degree of ownership and control that the agent could claim over thesechoices and actions, because it looks like a matter of chance that things turned out theway they did. Indeterministic processes of volition undermine agency rather than se-curing free agency.

If we assume that, despite the best efforts of libertarians, this suspicion is correct,where does this leave optimistic incompatibilists? More specifically, if the optimisticincompatibilist has to say something about how indeterminism figures in their accountof freedom, and inserting indeterminism into processes of volition is ruled out, whatplausible options remain open to them? It seems to me that there are at least two op-tions that remain. First, it should be recalled that the optimistic incompatibilist holdsthat (i) we have free will, and (ii) free will is incompatible with determinism. To hold(i) and (ii) need not also imply a commitment to the further claim (iii) that to accountfor free will, we must locate some indeterminism within the volitional processes of theagent. Someone might propose, for example, that we have free will, that it is incom-patible with determinism, and that free will needs to be understood against a back-ground of general indeterminism (where, by tradition, indeterministic accounts of freewill tend to be sketched against a background where determinism is the norm, and freewill the indeterministic exception). This is not an idea I will pursue here7.

A second option would be to posit some form of indeterminism within the psychol-ogy of the agent, but not in moments or processes of volition per se. Perhaps there isan indeterministic process within agents that is not itself the process of decision andaction, but which has relevance to the agent’s character and status as a free agent, andwhere the open-endedness of the indeterministic process is more plausibly valuableand virtuous than seems to be the case when it hovers around the brink of decisionsand actions. It is this second option that I wish to explore. Specifically, I want to ex-plore the idea of positing indeterminism within the exercise of the imagination as apossible basis for claims of free agency within an incompatibilist framework.

7 See, for example, Dupré (1993). This approach to defending free will on incompatibilist terms wouldrepresent a third optimistic incompatibilist strategy, alongside what I am calling traditional and non-tra-ditional libertarian positions.

II

Discussions of imagination and its contributions to agency appear notably absent fromthe free will literature8,9. There are some exceptions10, but even these tend to involvelittle more than suggestive remarks that require (indeed, deserve) far greater explora-tion and development. I cannot attempt a comprehensive discussion of all such ideas.My goal in this paper is far more modest: I wish to focus on a combination of threeideas linking imagination and free agency: (i) we are able to imagine alternatives – foraction, for our future, for the kind of person we think we ought to be, and for the con-text in which we find ourselves11; (ii) we can respond to imagined scenarios and con-texts12; and (iii) the exercise of imagination is itself a free act in which we spontane-ously create ‘all manner of marvellous mental products’ (McGinn 2004: 195)13.

The primary motivation for looking at imagination in the context of a non-traditionallibertarian incompatibilist framework comes from thinking about claims like (iii). Theapparent spontaneity of imagination makes it look like a plausible candidate for a men-tal process that could be indeterministic, and where some degree of indeterminismmight be valued as a welcome and necessary part of the imaginative efforts of theagent, rather than a threat to their claims to ownership and control of those efforts.

Consider the activity of engaging with a work of fiction – reading a novel, for in-stance. This process involves an extended exercise of imaginative effort, as a world ofcharacters, places, histories and unfolding events is brought to life in the mind of thereader. It strikes me as plausible that the unfolding of this exercise of imagination isindeterministic. Exactly what shape these imagined worlds will take in the mind of theengaged reader is not something fully determined by the work and the character and

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8 This is not an original claim, nor one unique to the free will debate. The Harvard University Press publi-cation blurb for Colin McGinn’s (2004) book on imagination, Mindsight, claims that the topic of imagi-nation has a rich history of exploration in philosophy until the rise of contemporary analytic philosophyof mind.

9 The claim is ultimately an empirical one, and it receives some degree of confirmation by way of a rea-sonably wide-reaching and representative online keyword search of The Philosopher’s Index (early in2011, via the EBSCO portal) combining “free will” and “imagination” as search terms. The searchyielded just three hits: two with a historical and interpretive focus (one on Spinoza, one on Schiller),and the third being a work on symbolism in fiction. Further suggestive evidence can be found throughcursory surveys of some significant texts published in the last decade. Robert Kane has edited two im-portant volumes on free will –OUP’s Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Kane 2002c), and Blackwell’sFree Will (Kane 2002b). Neither of these texts has an entry for ‘imagination’ in their index. An elec-tronic search of the Blackwell volume (via Amazon UK) revealed not a single reference to the term‘imagination’ in its 310 pages; while a similar electronic search of the 638 page OUP volume revealedjust two uses of the term: one in a footnote to Russell (2002), in which imagination is listed as one ofthe ‘natural abilities’ discussed by Hume, and the other in Ted Honderich’s (2002) contribution to thisvolume, where “abstract concepts of the imagination” (Honderich 2002: 463) is one of a long list ofspeculative ideas discussed by physicists with regard to the nature of quantum events. So, in 948 pagesof collected historical and contemporary discussions of free will, not one contributor saw fit to discussimagination (certainly not by name) as an important capacity or faculty within human psychology thatmight have relevance to how we understand, account for and defend free will.

10 See Dennett (2003: 179, 267), McCrone (1999: 257) and McGinn (2004: 153, 195).11 See, for example, Dennett (2003: 267) and McGinn (2004: 195).12 See, for example, McCrone (1999: 257).13 David Martens has also highlighted to me the Kantian tradition linking the exercise and experience of

imagination with the exercise and experience of freedom. See, for example, Guyer (1993; 2006: 311)and Kneller (2007). Further development of the current proposal will require more extensive engage-ment with this tradition.

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context of the reader – there is a genuine degree open-endedness to the process. Atleast, it strikes me as plausible that there is such open-endedness; and far more plausi-ble than the alternative hypothesis that the process is entirely deterministic. Further, itstrikes me as plausible that the impact on the reader of this imaginative engagementwith a novel also has an element of indeterminism. It seems plausible to think that thelasting impact of these imagined worlds and virtual experiences on the reader is notsomething fully determined by the work or the agent and their context. Once again, itis not that I can prove this (empirical) claim about indeterminism, but it seems farmore plausible than the deterministic alternative14.

Of what possible relevance is this kind of example to the general case of freeagency? The exercise of imagination involved in reading a novel is generative – it in-volves the generation of mental ‘products’ – and spontaneous. The exercise as a wholeis something under the control of the agent – for example, taking up the book, howlong to read for in a session, whether to pause to consider and imagine something ingreater detail – while its spontaneity also implies a level at which control is neither ex-erted nor desired – the reader allows themselves to be open to wherever the interactionof the work and their imagination takes them. Yet the open-endedness of such an exer-cise, any ceding of control that might be involved, its spontaneity – none of these rep-resent a plausible threat to the ownership that the agent might claim over the exercise,its products and its impact. The reader intentionally engages in the activity, directs itsoverall course and duration, and values both the experience and its products. I contendthat all of this would remain the case if it were to turn out that such imagination exer-cises involve ineliminable indeterminism, the value of which lies largely in theopen-endedness of the process that is thereby assured.

If we generalise this idea, the above example suggests that in the exercise of imagi-nation, a free agent’s activities could be marked by an appropriate indeterminism – avaluable indeterminism – that does not at the same time undermine their integrity as anagent, or the ownership and control they might claim over any such indeterministicprocesses. More specifically, if an agent employs their imagination to open-endedly(because indeterministically) imagine future possibilities for themselves, for their ac-tions, and their interactions with others, perhaps the incompatibilist can find here theright kind of indeterminism to help ground freedom without threatening the integrityof the agent.

The core of this proposal thus develops the idea that in the case of the imagination,and unlike processes such as reasoning, deliberation and choice more generally, wemight welcome the open-ended generativity and possibilities for novelty that could re-sult from a degree of indeterminism without thinking that this probabilistic elementwithin the process somehow undermined claims of origination, ownership and controlon the part of the agent. The open-ended generativity of imagination when conceivedof as a partly indeterministic process could be seen as a virtue and an aid to freeagency, not as some kind of shortcoming. Conversely, we might think the freedom of

14 Ardent determinists, sceptics and agnostics might not yet be persuaded. Complexity, chaotic dynamics,and our ignorance of so much human psychology can all too easily leave us with an appearance ofindeterminism whose source is really only epistemic. I have no decisive argument to offer. I could sug-gest that a deterministic hypothesis would outstrip the available evidence to a greater extent than anindeterministic one; and I would further propose some open-minded self-reflection on the reader’s ownexperience of fiction, poetry, music and art in general. I don’t expect easy converts, and the question isultimately an empirical one that cannot be settled without the relevant evidence from psychology, neu-roscience and elsewhere being in.

an agent has been restricted, curtailed or otherwise undermined when there has been aforeclosing on the generativity of various imaginative processes at play in not onlycontexts of decision and action, but also in processes of agent shaping or formationmore generally.

In the realm of imagination, then, perhaps we may find a process (or processes) infree agents where the insertion of indeterminacy brings (i) the added values ofgenerativity, novelty, an expansion of perspectives and of imagined possibilities, while(ii) the associated ceding of some degree of control over such imaginative processesseems not only tolerable, but indeed desirable, to the extent that (iii) attempts at reas-serting too much control, thereby foreclosing on the unfolding imaginative activity,would tend to constrain or threaten freedom of agency.

III

To develop these ideas, I contrast them with the libertarian account developed by Rob-ert Kane15. Kane’s libertarian account is occasionalist and event-causal. The centralidea I want to draw on derives from his occasionalism. Kane proposes to help groundclaims of what he calls Ultimate Responsibility16 by positing occasional, special mo-ments of self-shaping – Self-Forming Actions or SFAs – in which undeterminedevents within the agent might come to shape their future reasons and decisions,determined or not:

…[I]ndeterminism does not have to be involved in all acts done “of our ownfree wills” for which we are ultimately responsible… Not all such acts have tobe undetermined, but only those by which we made ourselves into the kinds ofpersons we are, namely “self-forming actions” or SFAs…[T]hese undeterminedself-forming actions or SFAs occur at those difficult times of life when we aretorn between competing visions of what we should do or become. (Kane 2002a:227-8)

It could thus be sufficient that, in free agents, we can in part trace their choices back tothese special, undetermined moments of self-shaping that break any relevant back-ward-extending regresses of deterministic causation.

Suppose, then, that there is a subset of important moments of self-shaping that occurin agents, both in early development and across the lifespan. Contra Kane, this subsetof occasions of self-shaping is not comprised of Self-forming Actions (SFAs) involv-ing choice between competing alternatives under conditions of plural voluntary con-trol17. Instead, on the model of the impact of a poem or a work of fiction on an individ-ual consciousness, or the creative maelstrom that gives birth to a work of art or an in-vention, these special moments of self-shaping activity are moments of imaginativegenerativity in which options and possibilities for the future are conjured and con-structed as scenarios in the imagination. By hypothesis, these moments of imaginative

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15 See especially Kane (1996, 2002a).16 ‘The basic idea [behind the condition of ultimate responsibility or UR] is this: to be ultimately responsi-

ble for an action, an agent must be responsible for anything that is a sufficient reason (condition, causeor motive) for the action’s occurring. If, for example, a choice issues from, and can be sufficiently ex-plained by, an agent’s character and motives (together with background conditions), then to be ulti-mately responsible for the choice, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices oractions voluntarily performed in the past for having the character and motives he or she now has.’ (Kane2002a: 224).

17 See, for example, Kane (2002a: 227-232).

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generativity are indeterministic in some significant sense. The possibilities and scenar-ios imagined emerge as a complex probabilistic function of the psychology,psychosocial history and context, and brain dynamics of the individual agent.

The hypothesised indeterminism involved in these moments of imaginativeself-shaping is internal to, and indeed a function of the history and internal dynamicsof the agent. These works of the imagination represent the creative, novelty-producingconfluence of all the influences in the individual agent’s life – their experiences, ideas,emotions, values, hopes and fears; their history of decisions, projects, actions, suc-cesses and failures; their second and third hand experiences imagined on the experi-ence and testimony of others; their experience and know-how and knowledge gainedin the make-believe worlds of pretend play, fantasy, fiction, poetry and art; and theirparental and societal context (to name just some of the potential variables). The proba-bilistic and chaotic dynamics that I suggest are at play in these moments of creativelyimagining options for the future will be as uniquely individual as the pattern of neuralconnections in the brains of even genetically identical individuals18. For this reasonalone, the internality and ownership of these indeterministic dynamics matters a greatdeal as an expression of who that individual is, and it matters also to the possiblecreative outputs of the process.

There are further important differences to note between this proposed idea of imagi-native self-formation and the account of SFAs offered by Kane. Unlike SFAs, occa-sions of imaginative self-formation are not choice situations. What emerges fromthese indeterministic moments in an agent’s life are imagined options and possibilitiesfor the future. These, in turn, are likely to influence subsequent imaginings, reflectionsand deliberations, including reflections and deliberations leading to choices. By shift-ing the focus away from choices, the proposal attempts to avoid the traditional libertar-ian move (and resulting anti-libertarian critique) of inserting indeterminism into mo-ments of volition. The proposal involves no particular account, at this stage, of howchoices might be made between imagined possible futures.

Furthermore, because this is not an account of self-forming choices, it is also not aproposal that would look to make or ground claims of Ultimate Responsibility (in thespecific sense of this term defined by Kane) in these undetermined moments of imagi-native generativity19. From an incompatibilist perspective, it is enough that such mo-ments can make a meaningful contribution to the possibilities for choice and action inan agent while at the same time breaking any backwards-extending chain/s of deter-ministic causation20 that might be claimed to run through an agent’s lifeline21.

Finally, because the proposed moments of undetermined self-shaping are notchoices, it is most important that the agent can claim ownership of the process and itsproducts. Unqualified questions about control22 are not as critical to either the overallsignificance of these moments of self-shaping, or to the claims of ownership that canbe made, as might be the case with Kane’s SFAs. When a work of art flows from theimagination of an artist, or an agent engages with a work of literature, we do not querythe ownership of the products of such activities on the basis of quibbles about the ex-

18 See, for example, Edelman (2004).19 The proposal does relate to questions of ultimacy, but these are more fruitfully understood in terms of

Mele’s notion of ultimate control – see Section IV below.20 See below, as well as the discussion of Mele’s modest libertarianism in Section IV.21 To borrow Rose’s (1997) evocative term for the life cycle of an individual organism.22 Again, see below and Section IV for finer distinctions about control based on Mele’s work.

tent of control an agent might have during the imaginative process. Based on thislogic, any ceding of control that might be thought to come with the influence ofindeterministic dynamics does not present the kind of problem for agency that it argu-ably does in the case of Kane’s SFAs (or, for that matter, in an agent-causal account ofthe moment of choice)23.

Self-shaping moments of indeterministic imaginative generativity are thus posited astimes in a free agent’s life when more than one future is genuinely open to them be-cause the outcomes of these exercises of imagination are undetermined. The productsof these self-shaping moments, and their impact on the psychology and actions of theagent, would provide a critical ground for claims of free agency within anincompatibilist framework.

We might, however, anticipate an immediate objection to the current proposal,based on the above contrast with Kane’s theory.24 Perhaps the proposed account ofimaginative self-shaping can avoid certain difficulties associated with Kane’s SFAsqua choices. However, in the context of discussing and defending free agency, ques-tions about decision-making and choice cannot be avoided, and the concern might beraised that the current proposal does not (yet) adequately answer these. In particular, itmight be objected that if the account is not one of choice, it leaves the agent poten-tially determined in their choices and actions, stuck in the same causal straightjacketthat incompatibilists worry threatens free will.

A comprehensive response to this objection no doubt requires further incorporationand development of the current proposal within a theory of free agency. Nevertheless,the immediate concern about causal straightjacketing can be addressed. For a start,note that compatibilists, occasionalist libertarians, and non-traditional libertarian pro-posals such as Mele’s25 all accept that, in and of itself, causal determination of a givenchoice and action is not problematic. The minimum that an optimistic incompatibilistwants from a successful account is to at least have disrupted any backward stretchingdeterministic causal chains in ways that are freedom friendly – that is, to secure somedegree of ultimate control26 that would, for example, block determination of choiceand action by conditions pre-dating the agent’s birth. I have argued thatindeterministic moments of imaginative generativity would break such chains success-fully – the outcomes are not determined by all the conditions that precede the process,such that while the process unfolds, the agent has more than just one possible futurecourse open for their lifeline.

Thereafter, imaginative outputs will provide novel and undetermined inputs to futurereflection and contemplation, as well as deliberation, choice and action. Having imag-ined a range of possible futures that they were not causally determined to imagine, thecharacter of the agent is changed: they are now someone who has recognised certainpossible futures and not others, and who can consider, re-evaluate and adjust their pro-jects, commitments and values in the light of what has been imagined. Such adjust-ments will then also figure in their future deliberations, choices and actions, while in-heriting some degree of the causal regress-stopping indeterminacy of the generativeimaginative act. Finally, the process is iterative. The products of imagination feed not

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23 See Section II above.24 The priority of addressing this objection (over the others considered in Section V below) was suggested

by an anonymous reviewer.25 See Section IV below.26 To use Mele’s framework of distinctions between proximal and ultimate control, discussed in IV below.

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only into future deliberations and choices, but also into future exercises of imagina-tion, along with the products of self-examination, deliberation and choice that have al-ready been coloured by these earlier imaginings. So one expects a kind of bootstrap-ping effect over time whereby the agent increasingly takes shape as what we mightcall ‘their own person.’ And contra many varieties of compatibilism, this kind of free-dom-friendly self-shaping does not depend on especially strong assumptions about theagent’s capacity for reflective self-awareness or rational deliberation27.

IV

In the preceding sections, I have suggested that the proposed incompatibilist account isdifferent from what I have called traditional libertarianism in so far as free-dom-friendly indeterminism is held to find a place in the agent’s psychology otherthan in (either regular or occasional) moments of decision and choice per se. Giventhis difference, it is worth noting one other non-traditional libertarian account that pur-sues a relevantly similar strategy, but with some important differences. The account Ihave in mind is Alfred Mele’s modest libertarianism (Mele 1995, 2006)28.

Mele’s work is partly notable because he is ‘officially agnostic about the truth ofcompatibilism’ (Mele 2006: 4). He thus develops what he regards as a plausiblecompatibilist account of freedom-grounding autonomy that he thinks can be supple-mented by an additional incompatibilist requirement to yield a plausible, modest (andnon-traditional) libertarian account of autonomy/free agency29. On his modest libertar-ian account, as with the current proposal, Mele thinks a plausible libertarianism shouldinsert indeterminism somewhere other than at moments of decisive judgement and in-tention formation30. His proposal is that freedom-friendly indeterminism might be atwork in influencing what things (especially beliefs) come to mind during deliberation.

Mele’s modest libertarianism is thus also an optimistic incompatibilist position thatembraces the anti-libertarian suspicion. To understand Mele’s take on the matter, it ishelpful to consider his distinction between proximal and ultimate control:

When x is an action of S’s — a particular, dated occurrence — S’s having ulti-mate control over x, I will say, requires that there not be any point in time at

27 Simon Beck posed the question as to why a compatibilist could not just take on board the proposal re-garding imagination without thereby abandoning compatibilism. My first response is that the project inthis paper is not to mount a case against compatibilism, but rather to propose and explore a promisingoption for an indeterministic incompatibilism. I have thus far left it open that much of whatcompatibilists might have to say about proximal control could be on the right track; and someone whoendorses the anti-libertarian suspicion tends to think that local level determination of choice and actionis not necessarily a bad thing for free agency. But my second response is that the compatibilist wouldfind difficulty in granting the value of the ultimate control (in Mele’s sense) that flows from anagent-internal indeterminism. If the compatibilist cannot recognize the value of ultimacy, then whilethey could recognize the contribution of imagination to agency, it is not clear how they could recognizeor frame its contribution to free agency.

28 Eddy Nahmias suggested the value of a comparison between my account and Mele’s libertarian pro-posal. My preference would be to refer to my own and Mele’s proposals as non-libertarian incom-patibilist positions, reserving ‘libertarian’ as a label for what I have been calling traditional libertarian-ism. But since Mele has favoured ‘modest libertarianism’, I would class his and my proposals asvarieties of ‘non-traditional libertarianism’.

29 See Mele (1995, 2006). For the purposes of this paper, I will ignore his more ‘daring’ libertarian pro-posal developed in Chapter 5 of Mele (2006).

30 Mele thus also thinks that a plausible indeterministic account need not be an account of choice – see myresponse to the objection considered in Section III.

which minimally causally sufficient conditions satisfying the following condi-tion are present for S’s x-ing at t: the condition is that the minimally causallysufficient conditions include no event or state internal to S. An agent’s havingproximal control over an action of his, however, is compatible with the truth ofdeterminism—as is an agent’s having proximal control over what he intends att, what he judges best at t, and so on. (Mele 1995: 211)

Proximal control is thus, for the most part, local-level compatibilist control over judge-ment, intention and action, and Mele thinks that compatibilists are right to want morerather than less proximal control over these processes. Ultimate control, however, is anotion of control that would block the kind of regress incompatibilists worry about inthe Consequence Argument31: if an agent can claim some degree of ultimate control,then there will be no causally sufficient conditions for their choices and actions that,for example, pre-date their birth.

Mele proposes that a modest libertarianism posit some form of agent-internalindeterminism that will help secure ultimate control while not compromising proximalcontrol in any way that would not also affect the compatibilist:

In principle, an agent-internal indeterminism may provide for indeterministicagency while blocking or limiting our proximal control over what happens onlyat junctures at which we have no greater proximal control on the hypothesisthat our universe is deterministic. (Mele 2006: p11)

Meles focuses on the deliberations that precede decisive judgement and intention for-mation. He thinks that the course of deliberation is clearly ‘influenced by at least someof the considerations that “come to mind”—that is, become salient in conscious-ness—during deliberation and by our assessments of considerations’ (Mele 2006: 11);while it is also clearly false that we can claim control over the coming to mind of ev-ery consideration that influences deliberation, even if determinism were true. But ifthere is a subset of considerations whose coming to mind during deliberation is subjectto an internal indeterminism, then there is a period of time during which alternativepossible outcomes of deliberation are possible for the agent without them havingceded any more control over deliberation than a compatibilist agent might claim. Thus,the modest libertarian can posit an ‘ultimacy-promoting indeterminism’ (Mele 1995:235) without compromising or reducing ‘the nonultimate control that real agents exertover their deliberation even on the assumption that real agents are internally determin-istic’ (ibid.).

At one level, Mele’s proposal is one that an optimistic incompatibilist should wel-come: all attempts to make indeterminism both freedom- and agency-friendly (in waysthat escape the apparent problems of traditional libertarianism) are likely to advancethe incompatibilist cause. Further, Mele provides a useful framework within which tocharacterise other non-traditional incompatibilist proposals, including the one beingadvanced in this paper. Indeterministic moments of imaginative generativity contributeto freedom in part because they help secure a degree of ultimate control; and it is notclear that a compatibilist could or would want to claim greater proximal control for theagent over their exercises in imaginative generativity. Finally, there is the possibilityof overlap between Mele’s account and the current proposal, especially in so far as de-liberation might be thought to include both (a) the exercise of imagination (esp. in the

S. Afr. J. Philos. 2012, 31(2) 379

31 See, for example, van Inwagen (1983, 2000).

380 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2012, 31(2)

comparison of alternative possible futures), as well as (b) occasional moments ofimaginative generativity per se in which possible futures are imagined and compared.

The primary difference I would highlight between Mele’s account and the currentproposal is that Mele posits indeterminism where he thinks the compatibilist cannotplausibly claim any greater level of proximal control, even if there was reason to thinkthat more control over what comes to mind in deliberation would be a good thing forcompatibilist autonomy/ free agency. It might be false to claim that we control every-thing that comes to mind in deliberation, but the compatibilist might nevertheless wishfor more control, and think that this would further enhance claims of autonomy. Incontrast, the proposal about imagination posits indeterminism where a compatibilistwill struggle to convince us that more control is desirable, let alone possible. We valuethe generative open-endedness of imagination because it promotes creativity, noveltyand spontaneity. Exerting greater control over imagination seems an unlikely meansby which to enhance these features of imaginative processes. Thus, even compatibilistagents should recognise the value of not having too much proximal control over theirimagination. In short, genuine indeterminacy in imagination seems to be valuable bothbecause of what it means for imaginative processes and because it promotes ultimacy;whereas genuine indeterminacy in deliberation might seem important if you valueultimacy, but otherwise looks like some kind of deficiency (because considerationsthat would otherwise influence deliberative outcomes can fail to come to mind).32

V

It is inevitable that, beyond the objection considered at the conclusion of Section III,further objections will be levelled at the core proposal of this paper, most notably bycompatibilists and sceptical incompatibilists. I will restrict myself to considering andbriefly responding to three such objections. First, in what way does the hypothesis es-cape or remove the worry that, if things are undetermined, then they are not up to us?

The question of whether or not events that are undetermined can be up to us is, inthe context of my proposal, ambiguous. In the sense of ‘up to us-ness’ that requires anagent to have a requisite amount of control over how things turn out, I have already al-lowed that we do not have complete control over the process and outcomes I have de-scribed. But this is as it should be – when it comes to open-ended imaginativegenerativity, what we want is for imagination to ‘run free’. At the same time, on thebasis of the analogy with reading a novel, we do exert control over other aspects of theprocess, including when we engage in imaginative activity, for how long, what we dowith the products (e.g. thinking about them, memorising them, talking about them orexternalising them in some other way), etc.

32 My more general concern about Mele’s position is that it adds a (non-traditional) libertarian conditionfor free agency to an already demanding set of compatibilist conditions for autonomy. There are a num-ber of problems that might arise from this, and I cannot mention all of them here. At bottom, however, isthe concern that on Mele’s account, ultimacy-enhancing indeterminism only matters once compatibilistautonomy is in place. But if optimistic incompatibilists (including traditional libertarians) have beenright to value and pursue ultimacy-enhancing indeterminism, is that not partly because it can groundclaims of freedom in less rational, less-than-ideally-self-controlled agents than those sketched in variouscompatibilist accounts? (I discuss these kinds of concerns in Part II of Pitman 2011). Moreover, ifcompatibilism is, as Kant (1788/2010: 96) thought, a ‘wretched subterfuge’, perhaps saving only partsof compatibilism is a much more prudent strategy than presupposing the integrity of a full set ofcompatibilist conditions.

On a second sense of ‘up to us-ness’, the process and outcomes are up to us because,in so far as they represent the dynamic confluence of a unique set of variables in theagent’s lifeline, there is a very strong sense in which the outcomes of the imaginativeprocess are an expression of who that agent is. Moreover, as is evident when compar-ing moments of imaginative generativity to our interaction with a work of fiction, orthe production of a work of art, the products of these moments of constructing imag-ined futures need be no more or less up to us than our reactions to the novel, or the art-ist’s expression of themselves in their art.

A second objection might follow Dennett (2003) in his criticism of Kane: it mightbe alleged that randomness is just randomness. Perhaps we can imagine a range of al-ternative functional arrangements for the imagination that outsource theindeterministic element to other genuinely random processes (a Geiger counter) orpseudo-random processes (a computer generated pseudo-random number). But if theinternality of the indeterminacy doesn’t matter functionally, then how can it matter toclaims of freedom-friendly ultimacy33?

In response, I would claim that it matters a great deal that the indeterminism in-volved in these moments of imaginative self-shaping is internal to, and indeed a func-tion of the history and internal dynamics of the agent. As noted in Section III, theseworks of the imagination represent the creative, novelty-producing confluence of allthe influences in the individual agent’s life – their experiences, ideas, emotions, val-ues, hopes and fears; their history of decisions, projects, actions, successes and fail-ures; their second and third hand experiences imagined on the experience and testi-mony of others; their experience and know-how and knowledge gained in themake-believe worlds of pretend play, fantasy, fiction, poetry and art; and their parentaland societal context (to name just some of the potential variables) – and would be as-sociated with probabilistic dynamics as uniquely individual as the pattern of neuralconnections in the brains of even genetically identical individuals34. For this reasonalone, the internality and ownership of these indeterministic dynamics matters a greatdeal as an expression of who that individual is, and it matters also to the possible cre-ative outputs of the process35.

Third and finally, what about the core of the anti-libertarian suspicion, and specifi-cally the conclusion to the Mind argument – that indeterminism in choice or the causalantecedents of choice renders the choice a matter of mere chance? My preceding re-sponse to the claim that randomness is just randomness already indicates much of whatI think it wrong with this idea. That the products of imagination are products of proba-bilistic causal processes does not remove all ‘up-to-usness’, and does not make them amere matter of chance. But the objector usually has something more, or something elsein mind here – usually an example of a counterpart faced with the same choice situa-tion but who, because of the indeterminacy of antecedent events, lacks something thatour agent has. So here we might consider the counterpart not having imagined one of anumber of possible futures for themselves that our agent did, thus leaving them with-

S. Afr. J. Philos. 2012, 31(2) 381

33 In Mele’s sense of ultimate control, rather than Kane’s notion of Ultimate Responsibility.34 See Edelman (2004).35 To be fair to Dennett (2003), his argument against Kane was focussed on the idea of indeterminism

playing a role in a knife-edge choice situation between a restricted range of known alternatives. I wouldhope that, in the context of a multidimensional and dynamic process of imaginative generativity,Dennett would not propose that remote radioactive decay could functionally substitute for internal braindynamics.

382 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2012, 31(2)

out the influence of this factor in their future deliberations and choices. Isn’t this dif-ference just a matter of chance, such that any outcomes of the difference are not credit-or blame-worthy (qua matter of chance)?

It seems to me that the incompatibilist might offer a two part response. First, itseems right that the lifelines of counterparts should very quickly diverge on this ac-count – that is what the genuine open-endedness and novelty of exercises of the imagi-nation would predict. But then, second, having diverged, the two agents are no longerrelevant counterparts when it comes to future choice situations. As I argued in SectionIII, there is likely to be a bootstrapping effect in how the products of imagination im-pact on the psychology of the agent, including the impact on further indeterministicexercises of the imagination.

Perhaps this sounds like a dodge – perhaps we have to allow tracking of the counter-part for long enough to see what an allegedly chance difference of imaginative outputmakes to some future choice. So suppose, down the line from a process of imaginativegenerativity, our agent has imagined options a, b and c, while their counterpart imag-ined only a and b (or they imagined a, b and d). Our agent, in their choice situation,chooses c (relative to a and b). Obviously the counterpart does not choose c. If wegrant that the difference between the agents in having c as an option is, in part, a mat-ter of chance, does that make the agent’s choice of c a matter of chance – or, stronger,a mere matter of chance? It seems to me that the incompatibilist would respond thatthis does not follow, because the agent chose c relative to the availability of imaginedfutures a, b and c, and relative to any impact that imagining those futures optionsmight have had on their psychology (again, in ways that make their deliberative posi-tion different to their counterpart). And it is presumably not a matter of chance that theagent chose c relative to this deliberative context, whatever their relationship to theircounterpart.

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