Category: Free Will

Backpacking solo in California's Sierra Nevada range some years ago, I had occasion to exult: "I'm free!" What did I mean?

I meant that I was doing what I wanted to do as I wanted to do it. I was not subject to any external or internal impediments, or any external or internal compulsions. An example of an external impediment would be a snowstorm or an uncooperative companion, while an example of an internal impediment would be acrophobia. An example of external compulsion would be being forced at gunpoint to hike. And if I suffered from cacoethes ambulandi, a pathological itch to ramble, a syndrome I have just invented, then that would count as an internal compulsion. But unencumbered as I was by any such impediments or compulsions, I was doing what I willed (wanted, desired, chose, . . .).

Continue reading “I’m Free! Some Thoughts on Compatibilism”

Near the end of Thursday night's symposium, Philoponus, animated but not rendered irrational by the prodigious quantity of Fat Tire Ale he had consumed, stated that he is really only interested in practical and existential topics in philosophy as opposed to theoretical ones.  He is concerned solely with questions on the order of: How should we live?  What ought we do? But he also took a hard determinist line on the problem of free will, based on his study of recent neuroscience.  He tells me he has been reading Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will.  It occurred to me the next morning that there is a certain tension between these two Philoponian commitments.

Continue reading “Free Will Again: A Tension in Philoponus’ Doxastic Network”

Is the will free or determined? This is a crude way of posing the traditional problem of free will and determinism. But the traditional problem presupposes that free will and determinism are incompatible. Since this cannot be legitimately presupposed, the fundamental problem is the compatibility problem: Are free will and determinism compatible or incompatible?

I view them as incompatible, and, influenced by Kant, I see compatibilism as a 'shabby evasion' of the underlying difficulty. But since one cannot shame a philosophical position out of existence, pace Daniel Dennett, I had better present an argument. An argument one finds in the literature is the Consequence Argument. (See for example Peter van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will.) Here is a version of it that draws upon van Inwagen and also this discussion by Tomis Kapitan.

Continue reading “The Consequence Argument Against Compatibilism”

Determinism is the view that whatever happens is determined by antecedent conditions under the aegis of the laws of nature. Equivalently, past facts, together with the laws of nature, entail all future facts. It follows that facts before one's birth, via the laws of nature, necessitate what one does now. The necessitation here is causal, not logical. Could a determinist have a use for 'could have done otherwise'? Yes, if he gives the phrase a weak or conditional interpretation. No, if he gives it a strong or unconditional interpretation.

WEAK READING. Agent A could have done otherwise than action X =_df A would have done other than X had A had a sufficiently strong desire to do other than X (or had a sufficiently strong desire together with a different set of background beliefs, etc.)

Example. A man insults me and I insult him back. Could I have "turned the other cheek" and done otherwise? Yes, under conditions like the following. Had I been a better man, I would have let the insult pass unanswered. If I had not perceived the insult, I would not have answered it. If I had had a desire to impress a bystander with how forebearing I am, I would have remained silent. And so on.

STRONG READING. Agent A could have done other than X =_df A could have done other than X even if every factor prior to X had been the same.

I will use 'could have done otherwise' only in the STRONG sense. This will allow me to define libertarian freedom (L-freedom) in terms of 'could have done otherwise': An agent A is L-free in respect of action X =df (i) A performs X; (ii) A could have done otherwise. It is clear that L-freedom is incompatible with determinism. For if I am L-free in respect of just one action, then it is not the case that whatever happens is causally necessitated by antecedent conditions via the laws of nature.