On Not Being Able to do Otherwise

Winston Nesbitt; Stewart Candlish

Mind, New Series, Vol. 82, No. 327. (Jul., 1973), pp. 321-330.

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VOL. LXXXII NO. 3271 [July, 1973

MIND

A QUARTERLY REVIEW

PSYCHOLOGY A N D PHILOSOPHY

I.-ON NOT BEING ABLE

T O DO OTHERWISE

BY WINSTONNESBITTand STEWARTCANDLISH
WE shall call the following argument, " argument A " :
Premiss 1
If a man could not have done otherwise than he in fact did,
then he is not responsible for his action. (That is, ' He could
not have done otherwise ' is a recognised excuse.)
Premiss 2
If determinism is true, it is true of every action that the
agent could not have done otherwise.
Conclusion
If determinism is true, no one is ever responsible for his
actions.
Argument A sets out, in broad outline, the reasoning by
which those who think that determinism rules out the possibility
of moral responsibility have often arrived a t their view. The
attempted proof contains no obvious fallacy. We shall try to
show that it does, however, fail to establish its conclusion;
but also that this failure is not for the reasons usually presented by
critics of the argument.
The first premiss seems difficult to deny, and it has even been
suggested that it states a logical truth.l At any rate, philo-
sophers who wish to avoid the conclusion of argument A usually
accept the first premiss and concentrate their attacks on the
By Roderick Chisholm, in his contribution to Determinism and Free-
dom, ed. Sidney Hook (Collier Books, 1961), p. 157.
11 321
322 WINSTON NESBITT AND STEWART CANDLISH :

second. I t is assumed by these philosophers that the second

premiss will have been shown to be false if it is shown that,
whether or not determinism is true, we may still have the ability,
capacity, or power to do otherwise than we do. Two examples
will illustrate the point.
First, P. H. Nowell-Smith, in the course of an attempt to
reconcile the truth of determinism with our practice of holding
people responsible for their actions, notes that the truth of the
statement ' He could have done otherwise ' is a necessary con-
dition of the justifiable application of the judgment ' He deserves
censure ',I and then goes on to analyse ' He could have . . .',
as it occurs here, in terms of ' He would have . . . if . . .'. This
is the same analysis that he provides for the phrase when it is
used to assert the presence of abilities llke the ability to run a
mile or to play the Appassionuta2; and although he later accepts
certain of Austin's criticisms of his analysis of statemelrts about
abilities, he still remains convinced that ' the concept of being
able to do something . . . lies at the heart of the free-will p r ~ b l e m . ' ~
Austin himself did not question this conviction, and seems even
to endorse it by suggesting that his criticisms of Nowell-Smith's
analysis go some way towards showing that determinism is not
compatible with ' the things we ordinarily say about what we can
do and could have done '.4
Secondly, 11. R. Ayers, also intent on proving the second
premiss to be false, notes that ' can ' may be used to imply that
both capacity and opportunity are present, and claims that
" This, of course, is how we must take the phrase so dear to the

hearts of the freewill controversialists. ' He could have acted

otherwise ' ".5 Once more it is assumed that what is at issue
in the consideration of determinism is a man's capacity or power
to do otherwise in a given situation.
However, these philosophers fail to show that there is a
mistake in argument A. They fail because they misunderstand
the nature of the statement ' He could not have done otherwise.'
In demonstrating the misunderstanding, we shall begin by
P. H. ?\Ton-ell-Smith,Etllics (Penguin Boolis, 1964), p. 273.
"bid. pp. 275-278.

Op. cit., 1961 reprinting, p. 290.

J. L. Austin, ' Ifs and Cans ', Philosophical Papers (Oxford University

Press, 1961), p. 179.

"1. R. Ayers, Tile Refutation of Deternzinism (Methuen, 1968), p. 104.

The title of Ayers' book msy seem to cast doubt on our clsim that he

wishes t o prove the second premiss of Argument A t o be false. Such

doubt is illusion, caused by his use of the word ' determinism ' (see his

p. 4) in s sense which is not perhaps the most usual. We have chosen

his second sense, which we consider more usual. It is made clear in

Section I1 of this paper.

 ON NOT BEING ABLE TO DO OTHERWISE 323

noting what Ayers has to say about some cases in which people
are inclined to agree that the agent could not have done otherwise
because of the presence of factors of a certain sort which, accord-
ing to Ayers, nevertheless logically cannot limit a man's capacities.
(His reasons for claiming that they cannot are irrelevant to the
present purpose.) The cases he considers are those of a man who
said while drunk things which he later regretted; of a man who,
on being insulted, threw a bottle (presumably a t the person who
insulted him); and of a one-time patriot ~vhospied on his own
country after being captured and brainwashed by the enemy.
He deals with these ' apparent counter-examples to [his] thesis '
by pointing out that " ' I could not help it ' and ' He could not
do otherwise ' are used very loosely as what we rnight call
' excusing expressions ', even when the excuse offered is not
really that the agent was literally incapable of doing anything
else."l The suggestion here is clearly that these are non-
standard instances of the use of these expressions, and that in the
normal cases, the excuse offered i s that the agent was literally
incapable of doing otherwise. But this is precisely the reverse
of the truth, which is that the remark ' He could not have done
otherwise ' is inappropriate unless the agent did have the capacity
to do otherwise. This is made clear by the following considera-
tions.
It has already been seen that what Ayers means by ' literally
incapable of doing otherwise ' is ' lacking the capacity and /or the
opportunity to do otherwise '. A nlan is literally incapable of
doing otherwise, then, when what he does is something like
descending vertically to the ground after being pushed from a
high bridge, or remaining motionless while in a certain physio-
logical condition which causes paralysis-when, in short, his
doing other%-iseis empirically impossible.
Now it is peculiar, to say the least, to refer to the fact that a
man lacked both capacity and opportunity to do otherwise than
fall vertically from a bridge as his excuse for landing on and
killing a child. For talk of excusing to be appropriate, landing
on the child must have been a course selected by him in pref-
erence to others which were within his pourer. (Perhaps he
thought that he alone had in his head the formula which would
save the human race from extinction, and so deemed his life more
important than that of the child.) If n o other course was within
his power, he did not do anything, and a man can be excused only
for what he does. A corollary of this is that it is nonsense to
say that a man is not responsible for his action if he lacked the
power to do otherwise, for if he lacked this power then what he
Ibid., pp. 163 and 164.
324 WINSTON NESBITT AND STEWART CANDLISH :

" did " was not an action1; and the question of his responsibility,
in any sense stronger than that of mere causal instrumentality, for
what got done, can arise only on the mistaken assumption that it
was a result of his action. It is, of course, true that if one is
literally incapable of doing other than one does, then one cannot
be morally responsible for what gets done; but all this amounts
merely to the fact that a man is directly responsible only for
his actions as opposed to mere movements of his body.
In trying to show that determinism is compatible with our
having the power to do otherwise than we do, then, Ayers and
Nowell-Smith do not show that it is compatible with the ful-
filment of the condition of moral responsibility which is im-
plicitly stated in the first premiss of argument A. However, it
might be objected, why should they be criticised for failing to
show that determinism is consistent with the fulfilment of this
condition? They do show that it is consistent with the ful-
filment of a condition of moral responsibility, namely an agent's
capacity to do otherwise than he in fact did; and presumably this
is all that they were trying to do. Two points can be made in
reply to this objection.
In the first place, Nowell-Smith and Ayers do not distinguish
clearly, as we have tried to do, between these two conditions.
While discussing the analysis of uses of ' could have ' in ' moral
contexts ' . 2 Nowell-Smith considers ' excuses ' ranging
u u

from
physical compulsion to a bad upbringing, apparently assuming

1 There are many intermediate cases which might seem t o cast doubt
upon this contention. For example, if I stop running because of a bad
stitch, I have performed a n action, but one may want to say that I lack
the power to go on running. Whether I do or not, in fact, is unclear, but
what is clear is that if I undeniably lack the capacity to go on (e.q. I collapse
from exhaustion), my not going on is not a n action of mine in the sense,
e.q., elucidated by Charles Taylor on p. 29 of The Explanation of Behaviour
(Routledge, 1964), where ' it is not only necessary that it end in the result
or meet the criterion by which actions of this kind are characterized, but
it must also be the case that the agent's intention or purpose was to achieve
this result or criterion.' The addition of a further necessary condition
for action, namely that the intention be productive of the result (i.e. it is
not action if the intended result is accidentally achieved), makes the
point even clearer.
Nowell-Smith, op. cit., ch. 20. His implicit conflation of ' He could
not have acted otherwise ' with ' He lacked the c a ~ a c i"t vto do otherwise '
&

is shown also in ch. 19, in the following passage:

Capacities are a sub-class of dispositions. To say that a man ' can '
do something is not t o say that he ever has or ever will; there may be
special reasons why the capacity is never exercised, ... (p. 277).
The point is rendered conclusive when Nowell-Smith (1961 edn., p. 290)
accepts Austin's contention that ' in the relevant cases ', ' could have ' is
the past indicative of ' can '.
 ON NOT BEING ABLE TO DO OTHERWISE 325
that the form of the excuse in all these cases is essentially the
same. While Ayers, though he stresses that the ' excusing
expression ', ' He could not have acted otherwise ', is sometimes
used even when it is not meant that the agent was literally
incapable of doing otherwise, suggests by this that the sentence
is normally used with this meaning. Again, to say ' He could
have acted otherwise ' is not perhaps the most natural way of
saying that a man had the capacity to do other than he did (if
we should ever in fact mant to say such a thing), especially as a
man who literally lacked this capacity could not be said to have
acted. Yet both Ayers and Nowell-Smith choose this particular
formula to indicate the type of judgment with which they are
concerned in their discussion of capacities, and this is surely
because they have in mind that to say ' He could have acted
differently ' is the most natural way to reject the applicability
of the common ' excusing expression ' ' He could not have acted
otherwise '.
I n the second place, there is more than one condition of moral
responsibility: for example, it is a condition of an agent's being
fully responsible for his actions that they correspond to his
intentions. But if one's aim is to reconcile determinism with the
possibility of moral responsibility, proofs that determinism does
not entail that actions do not correspond to intentions would be
relevant only if there were some reason to doubt that this is so.
Now why should it be doubted that determinism allows for the
possibility of someone's being able to do other than he in fact
does? Determinism certainly rules out the possibility of any-
one's ever exercising his capacity, on any particular occasion,
to do other than he in fact does, but it is not inzmediately clear
why it should be thought that one's having this capacity is
similarly ruled out. An obvious retort to this leads on to the
next question which we mant to consider. It may be said that
it is relevant to demonstrate that determinism is compatible
with our having the capacity to do other than we do, because
determinists often deny this fact.

I t is true that many determinists have claimed that men

can never do anything other than just 1171iat they do. But one
should by nowr be wary of assuming that this must be inter-
preted as the claim that they always lack the capacity to do
otherwise than they in fact do. How else, though, might it be
interpreted?
Richard Taylor, who agrees with those who claim that deter-
326 WINSTON NESBITT AND STEWART CANDLISH :

minism is inconipatible with moral responsibility, reconstructs1

the argument which he thinks has led them to this conclusion.
The argument, which he believes to be sound, is essentially
our argument A. However, he interprets the second premiss, not
as the claim that determinism excludes one's having the capacity
to do other than one does, but as the tautology that, if determin-
ism is true all actions are necessary. Against those who assert
that causes do not necessitate their effects., he ~ o i n t sout that
A

there is ' a clear and common sense in which, for example, a man
who has been decapitated necessarily dies, or c a n not go on
living '.
0

We suggest that Taylor interprets the determinist's claim

correctly here. Pirst, to say ' He could not have acted differ-
ently' could be a legitimate way of saying ' His behaviour was
causally necessary '. Secondly, as we have already remarked,
it is not clear why determinism should be claimed to entail
that one always lacks the capacity to do anything but just what
one does. Finally, neither Ayers nor Nomell-Smith produces
an example of a philosopher who claims this, though the former
thinks that Hobbes was committed to the view, on the grounds,
significantly, that he held that ' everyone acts necessarily, and
could not act differently '.2 Ayers also quotes3 a remark from
Hunie's T r e a t i s e which implies that people never have the power
to do anything but just what they do, but Hume does not suggest
that one's having such power is ruled out by determinism; his
suggestion stems, rather, from his scepticism regarding un-
observable entities. Nevertheless, it may be that some philo-
sophers have meant to claim that determinism is incompatible
with one's having" the power to do other than one does. But if
they have, the appropriate response is not to set about an
elaborate refutation but rather to ask why on earth they expect
such a claim to be taken seriously.
In view of this, we shall turn to an examination of the reason-
ing which, according to Taylor, establishes that if determinism
is true: no one is ever responsible for what he does. He argues
that an agent is not responsible for what he does if he could not
have done otherwise, and that since determinism is the view that
all events are causally necessary this condition of moral res-
ponsibility is never fulfilled if determinism is true. Now as was
remarked earlier, even those who deny that determinism is
inconlpatible with moral responsibility accept this condition of
such responsibility. But they do not accept it if it means that
an action for 11-hich one is responsible is contingent, i.e. not
1 In
his contribution t o Hook (ed.), op. cit., p. 225.

Ayers, op. cit., p. 5 Ibid., p. 16.
 ON NOT BEING ABLE TO DO OTHERWISE 327
causally necessary. Yet according to Taylor the condition
means precisely that! For after stating that it is a condition
of a man's being held responsible for what he has done ' that
he could have done, or could do, something else ', he adds ' that
is, that the occurrence for which he is responsible . . . is contin-
gent '.l Now if this be a condition of moral responsibility it is
very simple indeed to show that such responsibility is incom-
patible with determinism, for the latter is just the thesis that
this condition is never fulfilled. Only those who have already
accepted that determinism is incompatible with moral res-
ponsibility are likely to accept that a nlan is not responsible
for what he does if his action is causally necessary, because for
such people these are different ways of saying the same thing.
Taylor introduces as if self-evident a premiss which presupposes
the conclusion for which he is arguing, and there is little doubt
that he is prepared to beg the question in this way because he
takes himself to be referring to the indisputable fact that the
statement ' He could not have done other\\-ise ' is always a sound
defence. Like Ayers and Nowell-Smith, however, he has mis-
interpreted this fact, with dire consequences for his argument.

We have argued so far that the defence ' He could not have
done otherwise ' is to be interpreted neither as ' He was in-
capable of doing otherwise ', nor as ' His action was causally
necessary '. Won-, then, is it to be interpreted? The question
has been partially answered in part I, but a further example will
clarify the issue.
Suppose that we are defending the action of a bank teller
who has handed money over to a bandit a t gunpoint, and we say
' He couldn't have done anything else; he had a gun pointed a t
him '. The person to whom we say this replies, ' K h a t do you
mean, couldn't have done anything else? He was quite capable
of hanging on to the money, wasn't he?' Assuming that this is
not intended as a joke in poor taste, a natural reply would be
' We don't mean that he \\-as i9zcapable of doing anything else.
What we're getting a t is that it would have been unreasonable to
have expected him to do anything else.' If we were then pressed
to explain why it would have been unreasonable to have expected
the teller to do anything else. we n~ouldprobably point out that
the presence of the gun provided him with overwhelming reasons
against doing anything else, that is, for doing what he did.
And this, we suggest, is what must be the case for the " excuqing
Taylor, op. cit., p. 225.
328 WINSTON NESBITT AND STEWART CANDLISH :
expression ", ' He couldn't have done otherwise ' to be approp-
riate: there must have been circumstances which provided the
agent with overwhelming, or very good, reasons for doing what
he did. For first, in all cases in which such an expression is an
appropriate defence, the factor which makes it a defence is in
fact such as to provide the agent with good or overwhelming
reasons for doing what he did. I t is difficult to imagine how this
contention might be proved; we have tried to show that it is
plausible, and can only ask anyone who thinks differently to
produce counter-examples. Secondly, to say ' He had over-
whelming (or good) reasons for doing what he did ' is itself a
sound defence, and it would be implausible to claim that although
this defence is a h a v s available whenever ' He could have done
otherwise ' is appropriate, some other defence is in fact invoked.
It may be thought that we have already had occasion to
mention some cases which constitute counter-examnles to what
has just been said. It will be remembered that ~ y & makes s his
remark, that the " excusing expressions " ' He could not help it '
and ' He could not have done otherwise ' are used even when it is
not meant that the agent was literallv inca~ableof doingw other-
w

wise, in connection with some examples in which the excusing

factors are, respectively, the agent's having been drunk, the
agent's having been insulted, and the agent's having been brain-
washed. Now being drunk. being insulted. and being brain-
washed do not, on: would' h a v c thought, ' provide &e with
overwhelming or even good reasons, respectively, for saying
things one later regrets, throwing bottles and spying on one's
country. However, Ayers is simply wrong in suggesting that
in any of these cases it is appropriate to defend the agent by
saying ' He could not have done otherwise '.l To say ' He
couldn't have done anything else-he was drunk ' might be in
order if what he did wis reffuvse to drive home, a course ?or which
his being drunk provided good reasons, but not if what he did
was something he later regretted, thereby acknowledging that
it was not a course supported by good reasons. The strangeness
of defending an act of bottle-throwing by saying ' He couldn't
have done otherwise-he'd been insulted ' and of defending
an act of spying with ' He couldn't have done otherwise-he'd
been brainwashed ' is sufficiently obvious not to need stressing.
We will remark only that neither would be strange if insults
and brainwashing were the sorts of things which provided people
with good reasons for the actions in question. For example,
the former would not be strange in a country where failure to
' He could not help it ' seems to be used, confusingly, in both kinds of
W8e.
 ON NOT BEING ABLE TO DO OTHERWISE 329
avenge an insult was considered cowardice and bottle-throwing
a recognised way of avenging insults.
Now the consequences of all this for argument A are disastrous.
For one thing, if the argument is not to involve equivocation,
its second premiss will have to be interpreted as the bizarre
claim that if determinism is true, we always have good reason
for doing what we do. But this is by no means the only difficulty.
We have so far allowed, though not explicitly condoned,
the references of Ayers and Nowell-Smith to ' He could not have
done otherwise ' as an excuse. But our account of the nature of
this defence shows that, in that strict sense of the word in which
excuses proper are distinguished from justifications, it is not an
excuse but a justification; for to claim that one had good or
overwhelming reasons for one's action is clearly to try to justify
rather than excuse it. Now as Austin has pointed out,l to justify
one's action is to accept responsibility for it but claim that it
was a good, right or sensible thing to have done; whereas to offer
an excuse is to concede that what one did was not good, right,
or sensible but claim that one was not responsible, or at least
not wholly responsible, for it. But this means that the first
premiss, though unquestioned by either side in the dispute over
argument A, is false. For if the defence that a man could not
have done otherwise is accepted, it does not follow that he was
not res~onsiblefor what he did-what does follow is that although "
he was responsible for what he did, it was in the circumstances
a good, right, or sensible thing to have done.
I t is tempting to dismiss this as mere linguistic hair-splitting,
and to say that it remains true that when we accept this defence
of a man's action, we accept at least that he is not to blame for it,
which is the crucial point. But this is confused. To accept
that an action was justified is not to accept that the agent was
not to blame for it; it is to accept that, since the action turns out
to have been a good, right, or sensible one, the question of blame
for it simply does not arise. We conclude that the first premiss
is false aid-argument A a non-starter.

To summarise the main points for which we have argued :

Argument A is often accepted as demonstrating the incom-
patibility of determinism and moral responsibility. Those
who wish to deny this incompatibility have in consequence
frequently advanced purported refutations of the argument.
1 J. L. Austin, ' A Plea for Excuses ', q.cit., p. 124.
Since the first premiss has seemed undeniable, they have con-
centrated on trying to show that the second premiss is false,
interpreting the key phrase ' He could not have done otherwise '
as ' He was incapable of doing otherwise '. But if this was how
those who accept argument A understood the second premiss,
proofs of its falsity would be superfluous, as the argument would
then involve a fallacy of equivocation; for ' He could not have
done otherwise ', as it occurs in the argument's other premiss,
does not mean ' He was incapable of doing otherwise '.I How-
ever, what those who accept the second premiss have meant by
the phrase ' He could not have done otherwise ' is ' His action
was causally necessary '; that is, they have meant this premiss to
be understood as the tautology that if determinism is true, all
actions are causally necessary. But this also is a different
sense of ' He could not have done otherwise ' from that in which
the phrase is used in the first premiss, so that on this inter-
pretation the argument still involves an equivocation, though a
different one.
'IThat is meant bv ' could not have done otherwise ' in the
first premiss is ' had good or overwhelming reasons to do what
he did '. This means that, if the argument is to avoid equi-
vocation, the second premiss must be interpreted as the claim
that if determinism is true we alwavs have " good reason for what
we do, a claim which, presumably, no one would wish to make.
[For the consequences of, alternatively, re-writing the first premiss,
see footnote below.1 Worse still. it means that the first
premiss is false; for ' He could not have done otherwise ' turns out
to be not an excuse but a justification, so that to offer this defence
of an action is not to deny the agent's responsibility for it but
to claim that it was not a bad thing to have done.
There is, therefore, nothing but sophistry in argument A
in its usually discussed forms, and this means that the appeal
to the fact that ' He could not have acted otherwise ' is a sound
defence, is a broken reed in the dispute over the compatibility
or otherwise of determinism and moral responsibility.
Unicersity of Adelaide
Unicersity of Westeryz Australia
1 One may wish to ask here whether it could mean this. The short
answer is that it could; that if it did, no action, and thus no responsibility
for action, is in question; hence that argument A thus rewritten demon-
strates the incompatibility of determinism with the notioil of huinan action,
which entails far more sweeping revisions than the mere closing of prisons;
and that the question of the truth of the seco~ldpremiss is worth re-
opening. Yor qualifications, cf. note 1, p. 324.