Hobart's Mind paper is cited by many recent philosophers as defending the idea of determinism, but nothing could be further from the truth. Unfortunately, Philippa Foot's misquote of Hobart's landmark article led to its wide citation as support for determinism and compatibilism.

Foot titled her 1957 article for Philosophical Review "Free Will as involving Determinism," and in her references she substituted determinism where Hobart had said determination. Nevertheless, Foot read Hobart correctly and understood that he did not mean determinism, which she too argued against.

The correct title is Free Will as involving DETERMINATION and inconceivable without it {my emphasis].

Recent philosophers from libertarians to determinists routinely misquote this title (including Robert Kane, Galen Strawson, John Martin Fischer, Alfred Mele, Derk Pereboom, and Arthur Danto.

Nicholas Rescher gets the title right, and quotes several excellent passages from Miller/Hobart.

[F]reedom of the will is nowise at odds with a motivational determinism that places the locus of causal determination is located in the thought-process of the agent—with such determination as there is canalized through the mediation of the choices and decisions emergent from his deliberations. And there is consequently no opposition between freedom and causal determination as long as that determination is effected by what transpires in the principle of agents and the matter is one of agent-causality.

The crux here is whether there is an agent-external determinism — a determinism where all reference to the agent and his motivational deliberations can be left out of consideration of consideration in matters of explanation. Once again, Dickinson Miller has put the matter well:

[No one likes to think that their] mind is so small and simple that one can predict its ideas. That is the real reason why people react in such cases against predicting their conduct, for if present human knowledge, which is known to be so limited, can foresee their conduct, it must be more naïve and stereotypic than they like to think it. [But] it is no reflection upon the human mind or its freedom to say that one who knew it [completely] through and through (a human impossibility) could foreknow its preferences and its spontaneous choices.

The comprehensiveness at issue in these means that the information requisite for determination will not be available to others or indeed even to the agent himself. Reference to the point of decision is also crucial. For only then have matters gone too far for options still to be open. But this is so not because circumstances have constrained the agent but because at this point the agent himself has settled matters.

(Free Will, pp.94-95)

The dictum "Tout comprendre c' est tout pardonner" gets it dead wrong. To trace the causal antecedence of a person's actions into his character, personality, psychological make-up, etc. is not thereby to erase discredit from his misdeeds. At this point the analysis of Dickinson Miller is once more right on target:

[Consider the act of a sociopath.] It does not remove our sense of its vileness to reflect that he was acting according to his nature. That is a part of why we are indignant at him. We intend to make him fee that his nature is in that respect evil and its expression insufferable. We intend to interfere with the expression of his nature. That what he did proceeded from it is not a disturbing and praise-giving consideration in the midst of our conduct, but the entire basis of it.'

And this is surely correct, for as Kant rightly stressed, inclination is the very core of moral assessment.

The thief may possibly try to argue: "You cannot appropriately blame (reproach, punish) me for that theft. It was not a free act of mine: my cupidity made me do it." But this is absurd for even granting that his cupidity played a determinative role, the fact remains that it was his cupidity—this constitutive aspect of his own very self—that was determinative. And since freedom is self-determination, that act remains free.

(Free Will, pp.108)

When we say that...a person "is not himself' and analyze an internal aberration to an external composition we treat that person as morally unfree and subject to demanded responsibility. This is an act of charity, not a recognition of fact. It is based every bit as much on a socially benign fiction as is the idea that someone less than eighteen years of age cannot bear responsibility for a capital crime. "His illness made him do it" is something on the order of "the dog ate my homework," a plausible pretext to provide cover for an appeal for clemency.

In just this light Dickinson Miller rightly deplored:

This mode of speaking [that] distinguishes the self from its wishes and represents it as under their dominion.... [For] in fact the moral self is the wishing self. The wishes are its own. It cannot be discounted as under their dominion, for it has no separate predilections to be overcome by them; they themselves are its predilections. To fancy that because the person acts according to them he is impelled, a slave—the victim of a power from whose clutches he cannot extract himself—is a confusion of ideas.... I am not in my [free] acts passively played upon by forces outside me, but am enacting my own wishes ["choices" would have been a better term, since there may be reluctance] in virtue of a chain of causation within me.

This is substantially correct. The individual is not the passive victim of her motives, but their actively consenting implementer and exponent.

(Free Will, pp.110)

Free will and determinism can thus be reconciled through the consideration that determinism requires that "All occurrences are productively determined—volitions included," while free will requires that "My volitions are determined by—but not for—me."' For that second sentence rightly indicates that the "productively determined" of that first sentence cannot be glossed as having the qualifying addendum "by the causality of nature"—as classical determinism would have it. Authentic freedom of the will calls for distinguishing between the efficient causality of natural processes and motivativally mediated agent causality of choice and deliberation. And some such determination there must indeed be. For insofar as an agent's choices and decisions are not determined by his motives—by his likings and inclinations, wishes and purposes, and all the rest of it—they become disqualified from counting as his choices. As Dickinson Miller put it:

Insofar as this "interposition of the self" [this agent motivation] is undetermined, the act is not its act.... In proposition as it is [so] underdetermined, it is just as if this legs should suddenly spring up and carry him off where he did not choose to go. Far from constituting freedom, the will has, in the exact measure in which it took place, the loss of freedom.'

A will that does not extract its resolutions from the motivating considerations that figure in an agent's deliberations is arbitrary, feckless— "willful" is the most pejorative sense of the term. As was already noted, such a will is not free but frivolous.

(Free Will, pp.127)

Mind-Brain Interaction Works by Coordination, Not by Causality Here then lies the key to reconciling the two modes of causality that vexed modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant and beyond.' For the idea of a genuine partnership affords a key to how the mind comes to exercise physical causality. When I mentally decide to wiggle my fingers a few seconds hence for the sake of an example, how is it that my body responds to this purely mental transaction? The answer is that doesn't because no "purely mental" transaction is at issue. Thought always has its correlative in the domain of brain physiology.' And so an individual's so-called "purely mental intention" is not really something purely mental at all because it stands coordinate with a mind-brain amalgamating phsycio-physiological intention-state in much the same manner at issue with the mood/configuration duality of those smiley/frowny faces considered above. And the physical cause of that wiggling response is not something "purely mental" but the physical side of that dual-aspect amalgam. It must, however, be reemphasized that what actually occurs in such transactions is a matter less of causality than of coordination. In his classic paper of 1934, Dickinson Miller saw the matter quite clearly:

[In choosing or deciding] the mental process is paralleled in the brain by a physical process. The whole [two-sided] psycho-physical occurrence would then be the cause of what followed, and the psychic side of it—the mental struggle proper—a con-cause or side of the [overall, two-sided] cause. To-morrow's configuration of matter [i.e., the physical result of an action] will [then] have been brought about by a material [i.e., physical] process with which the mental process was inseparably conjoined.'

And so, when an agent acts there is no need to dream up a Cartesian category-transcending impetus of thought upon matter. The material eventuations are produced materially, by the physical side of the two-sided mind-matter amalgam at issue in psychophysical processes. And the same with thought processes.

(Free Will, pp.144)