A couple of years ago I advanced the idea that rocks are free, if the compatibilists are correct. Although this suggestion was called “ridiculous” by the esteemed Jeff G, the three detractors of my view mostly convinced me that it is a very useful way of illuminating the issue.
According to compatibilism, humans act freely when their actions are determined by their own desires rather than by outside forces. So, if I wanted to eat donuts for breakfast then I did it freely, but if you force-fed me donuts then I was not free. Seems fine. The problem is that the premise of compatibilism maintains that internal desires are ultimately expressions of your internal physical structure. In the end, everything is explainable by particles bumping into each other. It is all reducible to physics.
This is where my rock enters the picture. Rocks have internal physical structure which determines how they act in a given situation, just like humans do and in the compatibilist worldview we can call them “desires” with the same legitimacy that we speak of humans as having desires.
Suppose we hit a rock with a hammer and the rock breaks into pieces. Since desires are nothing more than description of internal physical states that determine how a person/thing responds to a situation, we can conclude that the rock wanted to break into pieces and when hit with the hammer it chose to do so. A different rock, with different internal physical structure, would have taken the same blow without breaking.
Ability to do otherwise
Along comes a person who believes in libertarian free will, scratching their head, objecting that the rock did not make a real “choice” because it didn’t really have the ability to do anything different than what it did. The compatibilist completely rejects such an argument. According to the compatibilist, “the ability to do otherwise” is ultimately an incoherent concept and is not required for free actions.
The LWF (Libertarian Free Will) advocate complains that we should not call it a free action because althought the outcome was determined by the internal structure of the rock, that internal structure couldn’t have been anything different than it was. The rock had no control. The compatiblist disagrees, pointing out that the internal structure of the rock could very easily have been different if conditions had been different during the formation of the rock. It could have formed to be strong like granite instead of the weak sandstone that it is. The rock could have acted differently if it had different desires. Because it acted according to its own desires, it acted freely.
A person gets a leg cramp and starts struggling to stay above the surface of the water. Walking by, I decide to help him out so I throw him a small slab of granite which he is able to get a hold of. It drags him to the bottom and he dies.
That slab of granite is an evil slab of granite. In fact, it is a murdering slab of granite. When thrown into the water it chose to sink rather than float, causing the drowning person to die. In a different part of the world, a similar thing happened but in this other case a small slab of pumice was thrown into the water. The pumice chose to float, thereby saving the drowning person. That slab of pumice is a heroic slab of pumice. It is a morally good slab which should be praised and rewarded for its excellent choice. It chose to save a human life.
The common sense objections to treating slabs of granite or pumice as behaving morally are easily refuted by compatibilist arguments.
1. Saying that “the slabs were just obeying the laws of physics” won’t help, because the premise of compatibilism is that everyone is merely obeying the laws of physics and moral accountability is compatible with all actions being determined by physics.
2. Saying that “the slabs didn’t really choose to sink or float because they’re rocks” won’t work because according to compatibilism choice is simply how a thing acts based on its internal physical structure.
3. Saying “they didn’t really choose because everything that went into making that rock what it is was determined long before its formation” will not help because, according to the compatibilist, this is simply unrelated to whether we should hold something morally accountable. It is what it is and we can judge its actions to be good or evil regardless of how it got to be the way that it is. A slab of rock that would do something as unconscionable as dragging a drowning person to the bottom of a pool is an evil slab of rock, pure and simple.
4. Saying that “this concept of choice is just a fiction we are imposing on the situation” won’t help either. According to the compatibilist, choice is absolutely *not* a fiction. To say it is a fiction is to say that granite behaves the same way as pumice. Things behave differently and those different actions have very real and sometimes grave consequences.
In my mind, the compatibilist should feel perfectly comfortable holding these slabs of rock morally responsible. They acted based on their own internal desires and their actions had moral consequences. Of course, real compatibilists don’t generally want to concede that rocks are free in the same sense as humans nor that they are morally accountable. But despite my best efforts so far, I have been unable to figure out what is (in principle) different between a rock and a human in the compatibilist view. It seems to me the compatibilist plays a linguistic game in which they apply certain words to humans but are then unwilling to apply the same words with the same definitions to inanimate objects. There are some compatibilists who will readily admit what I am saying and happily concede that the concepts of freedom and accountability as they are commonly understood by non-philosophers are fictions. Those compatibilists don’t show up at this site very often though. For the rest of the compatibilists, I offer this post as a place to set me straight. In the mean time, I will continue to wonder if I am a rock.
 Compatibilist proponent Adam Greenwood ended up appealing to a non-physical “spirit” or “soul” which differentiates humans from rocks and gives humans “Will. The ability to act.” (Here. See also my comment pointing to previous similar arguments).
Compatibilist proponent JNS also appealed to a preexistent spirit to differentiate us from rocks and credited our spirit with introducing steps in the causal chain that are not attributable to physics or chemistry (here).
(If you are confused at how those could be considered defenses of compatibilism, so am I.)
Jeff G’s critique was more complicated and I can’t do it justice here, but it hinged on whether or not rocks qualify as “computationally robust” such that they would lend themselves to a Turning Table description.