What’s up with “up to”?
As I’ve often noted, incompatibilism says that we never choose freely if determinism is true. When explaining what free choice requires, incompatibilists often rely on the idiom of a choice being “up to” the agent. Indeed, the idiom appears twelve times in the main SEP entry on incompatibilism. Nor is this reliance on the idiom superficial or incidental. Rather, it seems to me to lie at the heart of the incompatibilist’s discomfort with determinism.
The initial idea is right: Your choice was free only insofar as the choice was up to you. But in our everyday talk about agency, we use “up to you” in a way that pays no heed to whether determinism is true. Instead, we say that a choice is up to you when you (rather than someone else) have the final say, you have the relevant information, and you’re not coerced or manipulated. All those conditions can hold in a deterministic world.
Judging by how often they use it, incompatibilists must think that “up to” carries an implicit commitment to indeterminism. They sometimes try to motivate this thought by using reductive metaphors to describe determinism’s effect on agency. If your choice was necessitated by long-ago conditions, then (they say) you’re just a cog in a mechanism or just a biological domino. Don’t be taken in by such metaphors. Determinism doesn’t diminish at all your capacity to reason and deliberate, a capacity that of course no mere cog or domino has. And remember that the chain of necessitation from long-ago conditions to your eventual choice crucially includes your reasoning and deliberation.
So incompatibilists are right that a free choice must be one that it’s up to you to make. But they fail to see that a choice can be up to you even though the conditions that collectively necessitate the choice aren’t all up to you.
