5.2 Multiple Viewpoints Compatibilism
One influential contemporary defense of compatibilism is Daniel Dennett's. In his 1984 book Elbow Room, as well as in several important papers, including On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want, (1981c) and Mechanism and Responsibility (1973), Dennett advances compatibilism by drawing upon important developments in the philosophy of mind.
5.2.1 Intentions and Stances
Dennett argues for the legitimacy of folk psychological notions in the explanation of intentional action. His view turns upon the range of stances adopted towards a system, stances that are legitimated by their effectiveness in understanding, predicting, and interacting with the system. According to Dennett, even a thermostat can be interpreted as a very limited intentional system since its behavior can usefully be predicted by attributing to it adequate beliefs and desires to display it as acting rationally within some limited domain. For example, the thermostat desires that the room's temperature (or the engine's internal temperature) not go above or below a certain range. If it believes that it is out of the requisite range, the thermostat will respond appropriately to achieve its desired results.
But surely, it might be objected, a thermostat does not really have intentions, not like titmice, toddlers or college freshmen. According to Dennett, this starts one down the wrong path (1973, p. 155).[22] To seek a clean distinction between some metaphysically authentic intentional beings from simulacra like thermostats presupposes that there is more to any intentional system than adopting a stance toward it as an intentional system. If that stance genuinely pays off if it facilitates a fruitful exchange, allows for helpful predictions, allows one to engage rationally with it then it wins the status of an intentional creature. No special metaphysical tag is needed. Hence, for Dennett, the propriety of adopting the intentional stance towards a system is settled pragmatically in terms of the utility of its application in interacting with the system. Along with this thesis goes Dennett's claim that folk psychological explanations (appealing to the intentional stance) are entirely consistent with more basic stances such as the design or physical stances, the former appealing to the intentions, not of the system, but of its designer, the latter appealing only to the basic mechanistic processes that cause the system from moment to moment to move from one physical state into another. Once a system becomes sufficiently complex, as with even a chess playing computer, the intentional stance will become indispensable for successful interaction (1973, p. 154).
5.2.2 The Intentional Stance and the Personal Stance
Dennett makes use of his treatment of the intentional stance to argue for compatibilism. Just as the decision to adopt towards a system the intentional stance is a pragmatic one, so too is it a pragmatic decision to adopt towards a system the stance that it is a morally responsible person. Dennett calls this latter stance the personal stance (1973, pp. 157-8). As with the intentional stance, there is nothing metaphysically deep required to interpret legitimately a system as a person (no special faculty of the will for instance). Such systems are morally responsible agents if interpreting them according to the personal stance pays off (1984a, pp. 158-63). And of course, just as the physical (or the deterministic) stance is compatible with the intentional stance, so too, according to Dennett, is it compatible with the personal stance. Furthermore, just as he treats the intentional stance, Dennett argues that, due to the complexity of such systems, it is practically impossible to interpret and predict the system purely from the physical (deterministic) stance. Hence, the physical stance will never supplant the personal stance. We persons involved in the everyday commerce of interacting with each other need the personal stance; it is not threatened by the specter of determinism. Let us call Dennett's view, Multiple Viewpoints Compatibilism.
5.2.3 Dennettian Free Will
What is free will on Dennett's account? Dennett explicitly rejects regulative control (1984a, 1984b), arguing for a point that he shares with Frankfurt (1969), namely, that the ability or inability to do otherwise is irrelevant to the control pertinent to moral responsibility. But how does Dennett account for guidance control? For Dennett, free will consists in the ability of a person to control her conduct on the basis of rational considerations through means that arise from, or are subject to, critical self-evaluation, self-adjusting and self-monitoring. That is, free will involves responsiveness to reason. Dennett certainly has many useful observations about how this sort of control might have naturally arisen from less sophisticated sorts of creatures through a process of evolution (1981b). Later on other philosophers offered careful explications of control understood as such. (See John Martin Fischer's work, discussed below in section 5.5.)
5.2.4 Dennett versus the Source Incompatibilist
But what about the Source model of control, as well as the Source Incompatibilist Argument (section 2.2)? How does Dennett's multiple viewpoints compatibilism stack up against them? Against the crucial first premise of the Source Incompatibilist Argument A person acts of her own free will only if she is its ultimate source in his book Elbow Room, Dennett, it seems, wants to place the incompatibilist on the defensive, arguing that it is only confusion driven by appeal to what he calls intuition pumps that makes the premise seem at all plausible. Intuition pumps, according to Dennett, are examples designed to sway our philosophical intuitions, but are themselves philosophically suspect. Such examples involve cases of (apparently) normally functioning agents being manipulated, for example, as if like a puppet hooked up to some wires. But Dennett's polemical approach might seem dialectically unfair. Not all worries about the sources of action are groundless, even those arising from intuition pumps built on cases of ghastly manipulation. Dennett's incompatibilist opponent deserves more credit than he seems willing to give her. Regardless of his dismissive attitude towards the notion of ultimacy, and of an argument like the Source Incompatibilist Argument, Dennett's positive account of morally responsible agency certainly does take very seriously a source model of free will. By appealing to views on intentionality, rational action, agency, and personhood, Dennett offers a suggestive account of how it is that an agent can be an authentic source of her action (1984a, pp. 50-73).
