Topics in Free Will, Misc

If we lack deep free agency, like that supposed by metaphysical libertarianism, should we view life as meaningless, pointless, or not worth living? Here I present a new argument in support of meaning-compatibilism, or the view that life can indeed be meaningful without our having deep free agency. I show that this argument secures meaning-compatibilism more effectively than an argument provided by Derk Pereboom. In the process, we learn that Susan Wolf’s hybrid theory of meaning in life is not equipped (...) to handle the question of meaning-compatibilism, which a broader approach to meaning in life should help us to grasp. On the alternative approach I present, judgments about meaning in life involve a sensitivity to whether giving up on life, or “agency defeat”, is justified. I argue that, so long as we are able to exist in reality, giving up on life is difficult to justify, and even without deep free agency, we do indeed exist in reality. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the incompatibility of three claims, each of them quite attractive to a theist. First, the doctrine of deep dependence: the universe depends for its existence, in a non-causal way, on God. Second, the doctrine of true transcendence: the universe is wholly distinct from God; God is separate and apart from the universe in respect of mereology, modes, and mentality. Third, the doctrine of robust creaturely freedom: some creature performs some act such that he could (...) have done other than he in fact did. After laying out the claims, I show that their conjunction has its adherents—most clearly, the medieval Jewish philosopher, Maimonides. I then argue in detail that the claims are in fact incompatible. I conclude with a discussion of which of the claims is best jettisoned, drawing in part on the work of the Absolute Idealist, Mary Calkins. (shrink)

We examine here how the Syrian philosopher and theologian Bardaisan conciliates necessary fate and free will in man. Our study is based on an examination of the Book of the Laws of Countries, a dialogue on free will and astral fate, featuring Bardaisan, a few of his disciples and an opponent. Résumé Cet article examine la manière dont le philosophe et théologien syrien Bardesane concilie la nécessité du destin et le libre arbitre de l’homme. L’étude est menée sur la base (...) d’une étude du Livre des lois des pays, dialogue sur la liberté et le destin astral mettant en scène Bardesane, quelques-uns de ses disciples et un adversaire. (shrink)

Debate on free will with Christian List, Gregg Caruso, and Cory Clark. The exchange is focused on Christian List's book Why Free Will Is Real.

Critics of synergism often complain that the view entails Pelagianism, and so, critics think, monergism looks like the only live option. Critics of monergism often claim that the view entails that the blame for human sin ultimately traces to God. Recently, several philosophers have attempted to chart a middle path by offering soteriological accounts which are monergistic but maintain the resistibility of God’s grace. In this paper, we present a challenge to such accounts of the resistibility of grace, namely that (...) they imply that human beings are praiseworthy for omitting to resist God’s grace. Even if such views escape Pelagianism as it is typically defined, they fail to avoid the worry at the heart of prominent criticisms of Pelagianism concerning the praise for a human being’s salvation. At the end of the paper, we suggest three possible solutions to this problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore René Descartes' conception of human freedom. I begin with the key interpretive challenges of Descartes' remarks and then turn to two foundational issues in the secondary literature: the philosophical backdrop of Descartes' remarks and the notions of freedom that commentators have used to characterize Descartes. The remainder of the paper is focused on the main current debate: Descartes' position on the relationship between freedom and determinism.

While philosophers have worried about mental causation for centuries, worries about the causal relevance of conscious phenomena are also increasingly featuring in neuroscientific literature. Neuroscientists have regarded the threat of epiphenomenalism as interesting primarily because they have supposed that it entails free will scepticism. However, the steps that get us from a premise about the causal irrelevance of conscious phenomena to a conclusion about free will are not entirely clear. In fact, if we examine popular philosophical accounts of free will, (...) we find, for the most part, nothing to suggest that free will is inconsistent with the presence of unconscious neural precursors to choices. It is only if we adopt highly non-naturalistic assumptions about the mind (e.g. if we embrace Cartesian dualism and locate free choice in the non-physical realm) that it seems plausible to suppose that the neuroscientific data generates a threat to free will. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that defenders of Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities do not need to construct a metaphysically possible scenario in which an agent is morally responsible despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. Rather, there is a weaker (but equally legitimate) sense in which Frankfurt-style counterexamples can succeed. All that's needed is the claim that the ability to do otherwise is no part of what grounds moral responsibility, when the agent is indeed morally responsible.

Contains the author's responses to comments by the three named authors on her book, 'A Metaphysics for Freedom'.

C. Stanley Kane’s book, Anselm’s Doctrine of Freedom and The Will, is the only monograph in English on this topic. It will therefore influence a wide array of students and scholars. The book advances five theses: that Anselm operates with a general ontological principle to the effect that the essential nature of anything is determined by its purpose in existing; that Anselm’s theory of the will is not determinist but a variant of indeterminism; that human freedom, for Anselm, consists in (...) the ability either to do or not do what is unjust; that, on Anselm’s view, God alone directly causes all just volitions in human beings; and that Anselm regards the imparting of grace as solely dependent upon God’s offer and man’s response, without regard to the influencing effect of circumstances.I show that Anselm does not adhere to a single one of these allegedly Anselmian theses. (shrink)

Elinor Mason draws on ethics and responsibility theory to present a pluralistic view of both wrongness and blameworthiness. Mason argues that our moral concepts, rightness and wrongness, must be connected to our responsibility concepts. But the connection is not simple. She identifies three different ways to be blameworthy, corresponding to different ways of acting wrongly. The paradigmatic way to be blameworthy is to act subjectively wrongly. Mason argues for an account of subjective obligation that is connected to the notion of (...) trying - to act rightly is try to do well by morality, to act wrongly (and to be blameworthy) is to fail to try hard enough. Trying involves understanding morality, those who do not grasp morality are in a different category. So agents might also be blameworthy for being oriented away from what really matters. In that case, agents are blameworthy in a different sense, the detached sense. Finally, we can become blameworthy by taking responsibility in cases where our agency is ambiguous. In the final section, Mason gives us an account of taking responsibility and agues that that is an important art of our responsibility practices. (shrink)

The article, first, reconstructs and criticizes Sandro Nannini’s incompatibilistic concept of freedom of decision and, second, develops a compatibilistic alternative, a synthesis of a rationalistic and an autonomous approach. Nannini justifies his conception primarily from a naturalistic point of view: it reflects our sense of agency, so he says. This is criticized as empirically wrong and methodically mistaken: The theory of freedom of decision is, actually, normative; it is about good decisions; naturalism cannot establish normative claims. The alternative is based, (...) methodically, on an idealizing hermeneutics, which tries to reconstruct the point of free decisions, and then justifies the resulting concept practically: Free decisions, conceived in this way, realize optimally our autonomous desires. (shrink)

The Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility is so christened because this argument allegedly circumvents any appeal to the principle of alternate possibilities – a person is morally responsible for doing something only if he could have avoided doing it – to secure incompatibilism. In this paper, I first summarize Peter van Inwagen’s version of the Direct Argument. I then comment on David Widerker’s recent responses to the argument. Finally, I cast doubt on the argument by (...) constructing counterexamples to a rule of inference it invokes. (shrink)

This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will--a "two-way" power which ...

Elizabeth Anscombe's most important philosophical work has been on intention and action: in her book Intention and in many of her articles. To read Intention is like watching somebody hew a path with a machete through a jungle of confusion and mythology. Such work is never done, for the jungle grows apace. Here I take up some of the task.

How is the problem of free will related to the problem of moral luck? In this essay, I answer that question and outline a new solution to the paradox of moral luck, the source-paradox solution. This solution both explains why the paradox arises and why moral luck does not exist. To make my case, I highlight a few key connections between the paradox of moral luck and two related problems, namely the problem of free will and determinism and the paradox (...) of self-creation. Piecing together intuitions, arguments, and insights from recent work on each of these three problems, I argue that the type of control necessary for moral responsibility can only be satisfied by someone who is a genuine source of his own actions, but the relevant notion of sourcehood admits no coherent characterization. If our commonsense view of moral responsibility is incoherent, it is unsurprising that our commitment to the existence of morally responsible agents commits us to some paradoxical things—e.g. to both the existence and impossibility of moral luck. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga has famously responded to the logical problem of evil by appealing to the intrinsic value of significant free will. A problem, however, arises because traditional theists believe that both God and the redeemed who go to heaven cannot do wrong acts. This entails that both God and the redeemed in heaven lack significant freedom. If significant freedom is indeed valuable, then God and the redeemed in heaven would lack something intrinsically valuable. However, if significant freedom is not intrinsically (...) valuable, then Plantinga’s reply to the logical problem of evil fails. In this paper, we assess three contemporary solutions to the dilemma above. The first is the love solution, which proposes that significant freedom is necessary for agents to love, and loving others is intrinsically good. The second is the soul-making solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for self-developing one’s moral character, and having a self-developed moral character is intrinsically good. The third is the derivative free will solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for derivative free will in heaven, and derivative free will is intrinsically good. We raise problems against all three solutions and instead defend a fourth solution – the ultimate responsibility solution. That is, SF is instrumentally valuable as it gives agents ultimate responsibility with regards to morally significant acts. Finally, we defend the ultimate responsibility solution against two major objections. (shrink)

Anselm is known for offering a distinctive definition of freedom of choice as “the ability of preserving uprightness of will for its own sake.” When we turn to Anselm’s account of the devil’s fall in De Casu Diaboli, however, this idiosyncratic understanding of freedom is not at the forefront. In that text, Anselm seemingly assumes a traditional understanding of free will defined in terms of alternative possibilities for the angels. These alternative possibilities must be present so the angels can engage (...) in ‘self-determination.’ God, however, does not face alternative possibilities to achieve His self-determination. Anselm thus explicates his notion of free will in terms of three different concepts: his distinctive definition of free choice, self-determination, and the principle of alternative possibilities. Despite attempts (by both scholars and Anselm) to explain how these three concepts are related, I argue that their relationship is problematic. In particular, I argue that Anselm is guilty of conflating and equivocating with regard to these concepts. I further importantly claim that the conflation obscures the fact that his understanding of self-determination calls into question God’s excellence over that of the good angels. (shrink)

IN THE DISCUSSION on education in the Republic, Socrates lays down the principles which those who speak about the gods must follow if they want to avoid the errors of traditional mythology. The first typos of this rational theology is this: "God is the cause, not of all things, but only of the good." For "God, being good, cannot be responsible for everything happening in our life, as is commonly believed, but only for a small part. For we have a (...) far smaller share of good than of evil, and while God must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some other factors than God as cause of the evil." Rightly celebrated, this passage has set the agenda for ages of reflection in Western thought on the cause of evil. In contrast to traditional mythology where the gods are seen as the origin of both good and evil--as Homer says, "Zeus has two jars standing on the floor of his palace, full of fates, good in one and evil in the other"--the divinity is now freed of all responsibility for evil. God, who is entirely good, can only be the cause of well-being. If this answer sets God free of all responsibility for evil, it seems to be at the cost of limiting God's power: for God is no longer responsible for "most things in human life," since most of them are evil. What, then, may be the cause or causes of evil? Do bad things have a cause? Or do they just happen? Plato's formulation seems to suggest that he favours a dualistic solution to the problem of evil: God is the cause of all good, but for evil we have to find other causes. What could those causes be: matter, cosmic necessity, an evil soul? Various answers of this type were developed in later Platonism and in later mythological philosophies. Without denying that Plato often uses a dualistic discourse and uses elements of it in his cosmology, I do think that Plato had something different in mind. After all, he was not primarily interested in the problem of theodicy. For in this passage of the Republic, he is not concerned with the problem of evil in the universe as a whole, which is really the theodicy question, but with evil in "human life," that is, evil insofar as human beings experience it and suffer from it: the fact that we are not at all living well but are instead miserable and unhappy. (shrink)

Noel Hendrickson, in “Against an Agent-Causal Theory of Action” (this volume), carefully and intelligently probes aspects of the agent-causal account of free will I present in Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will. The central target of his criticism is my contention that agent-causal events, by their very nature, cannot be caused. Here, I respond to his argument on this point.

Evidence from experimental philosophy indicates that people think that their choices are not determined. What remains unclear is why people think this. Denying determinism is rather presumptuous given people’s general ignorance about the nature of the universe. In this paper, I’ll argue that the belief in indeterminism depends on a default presumption that we know the factors that influence our decision making. That presumption was reasonable at earlier points in intellectual history. But in light of work in cognitive science, we (...) are no longer justified in sustaining the presupposition that we know what influences our choices. As a result, I’ll suggest, our belief in indeterminist choice is unjustified. (shrink)

I discuss two claims defended in Fischer’s recent work. The first is the default status of compatibilism. This is part of a conception of our agency and moral responsibility as being independent of the truth or the falsity of the thesis of determinism. I try to further bolster Fischer’s arguments in favor of this position. The second is Fischer’s defense of the narrative conception of moral responsibility, according to which the value of self-expression supports and explicates the value of being (...) morally responsible. I argue that the cases and insights taken to support the idea that our lives have a distinctive kind of narrative value are best accounted for in other terms. (shrink)

Anselm defines free will as “the ability to keep uprightness of will for the sake of uprightness itself ” rather than as the ability to sin or not sin. I fulfill two objectives pertaining to his definition. First, I show that his definition should be interpreted as a hierarchical account of free will, one that emphasizes the idea that an agent’s will is free if she is able to have the will she wants to have. The interpretationis based on Anselm’s (...) hierarchical account of the structure of the will. Secondly, I show that Anselm’s theory of ultimate responsibility, when added to the hierarchical interpretation of his definition, provides an answer to one of the primary objections to the hierarchical approach to free will. (shrink)

In the midst of even the most tragic circumstances attending the aftermath of disaster, and co-existing with a host of complex emotions, arises a practical consideration: how might similar tragedies be prevented in the future? The complexity of such situations must not be neglected. More than mere prevention must usually be taken into consideration. But the practical question is of considerable importance. In what follows, I will offer some reasons for being concerned that efforts to fix the problem -- efforts, (...) that is, directed toward insuring that similar tragedies do not occur in the future -- can easily be obstructed by attempts to fix blame -- that is, efforts directed toward determining which agent among those involved is guilty of wrong-doing. This is the case, I shall contend, even where some agent or another really is guilty of wrong-doing. The problem is further complicated by a pervasive human tendency to imagine that some agent or another must be responsible in some way for any tragedy that occurs -- even when this is not really true -- but its influence is not at all limited to such cases. As I shall suggest, philosophical attitudes toward issues of determinism and free will may be implicated in the different approaches people take to the problem of assessing what has gone wrong in a particular case and how to fix it, but such deep philosophical problems need not be resolved here. The point is not that humans are never guilty of wrong-doing (since their actions, the argument might go, are all products of outside forces), but rather that whatever the case may be about guilt, tracking down guilty persons is a different business from fixing institutionally-embedded problems so as to lessen the likelihood of their recurrence. (shrink)

Ramana Maharsi is one of the lesser lights of modern Indian thought but a major figure in the context of modern Advaitic thought in Hinduism. Modern Indian thought in general is distinguished by a robust confidence in the efficacy of effort as an expression of free will, a confidence it shares with the temper of the West in general and which it may have imbibed by coming in contact with it. Modern Advaitic thought, as represented by its popular modern exponents (...) such as S. Radhakrishnan and T. M. P. Mahadevan, shares this confidence. Ramana Maharsi, however, strikes, at least at first glance, a somewhat discordant note. The purpose of this paper is to present his view on the time–honoured debate between predeterminism and free will and to analyze its philosophical implications. (shrink)

This article shows that the concept of choice is central to Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism. It argues that his valuing of choice is anchored in a particular conception of human nature, one that assumes and presupposes free will. Berlin’s works sketch a metaphysics of choice, and his reluctance to situate himself openly in the debate on free will is unconvincing. By introducing the theory of autopoiesis, this article further suggests that there is a way to take Berlin’s value pluralism seriously, by (...) considering sets of values as autopoietic conscious systems. Drawing on the works of Maturana and Varela in biology and Luhmann in sociology, autopoiesis strengthens value pluralism and acts as a critique of liberalism. By putting objectivity in parenthesis, autopoiesis finally allows for value systems to coexist side by side in a stronger sense than Berlin’s liberalism ever could. (shrink)

Sceptics standardly argue that a person lacks knowledge due to an inability to know that some dire possibility is not being actualised in her believing that p. I argue that the usual sceptical inventory of such possibilities should include one's possibly having had some freedom in forming one's belief that p. A sceptic should conclude that wherever there might have been some such freedom, there is no knowledge that p.

The chapter presents Anselm’s incompatibilist account of human freedom within the context of his theodicy and presents two arguments against his account. Both arguments aim to show there is a genuine conflict between his account of freedom and the role of God’s grace in making agents just. The first argument, the problem of harmonization, highlights the conflict within the soteriological context where an agent changes from being unjust to being just. The second argument, the problem of just creation, highlights the (...) conflict within the context of the creation of agents prior to the presence of evil. Holding fixed his incompatibilist account and the necessity of divine grace, the upshot of both arguments is that Anselm must endorse a version of Pelagianism. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump claims in her book 'Wandering in Darkness' that the problem of evil can be solved best by the help of narratives. In this review her argumentation for this claim is explicated.

The starting point of this essay is the theological problem of evil and the argument known as the Free Will Defence. I argue that the construction of a successful Free Will Defence requires one to adopt a libertarian account of human free will; and the attempt to defend libertarianism leads to an examination of causality and explanation. ;The theory of explanation developed here is pluralistic, in that it recognizes differing patterns of explanation as valid. At the same time it is (...) a realist type of theory, in that it holds that there are criteria associated with each schema of explanation which are objective and not context-dependent. ;Corresponding to different patterns of explanation are different types of causation. What is common to all the varieties of causation is that certain conditionals hold which link cause to effect; what differentiates them is that these conditionals may be either uniformly strict or variably strict conditionals. ;I argue that all causal concepts are tightly linked to concepts pertaining to agency. The 'can' of agency is formalized in a tensed, modalized propositional logic, System TA; this is then used to define causal necessity and possibility. Causal priority, the asymmetrical relationship obtaining between cause and effect, is defined by means of the notion of an agent's doing one thing by doing another. The result is a non-Humean theory of causality, according to which we have empirical knowledge of necessary connections in nature. ;This theory of causality becomes the basis of a defence of libertarianism which will supplement the Free Will Defence. ;The stage is set for the discussion of the problem of evil and the Free Will Defence by a preliminary chapter on the divine attributes. A definition of omnipotence in the tradition of Aquinas is defended. In the section on omniscience, I take alleged episodes of precognition on the part of humans as the model for God's knowledge of future contingencies and counterfactual conditionals. ;The final chapter takes up the problem of natural evil, and considers four different approaches which might be taken, supposing the Free Will Defence to have been successful in countering the argument from moral evil. The only approach which survives critical examination is the one which posits the existence of fallen angels, whose misdeeds are at the root of those evils not due to the misdeeds of humans. (shrink)

Though the problem of divine freedom is thus resolved in Chapter III, several closely connected difficulties remain. In Chapter IV, I discuss three of these issues. Though I argue for the traditional view that God was free to refrain from creating and is both omnipotent and morally praiseworthy despite his inability to do evil, I concede that an Anselmian libertarian could coherently reach different conclusions on each of these matters. ;The dissertation concludes with a brief closing section wherein I defend (...) the orthodoxy of the picture of God presented in the previous chapters and suggest additional areas in which the type of approach I have adopted might prove beneficial to the believer. ;In Chapter III, I present what I see as a more reasonable solution. I begin by noting that both sides to the problem of evil controversy make the reasonable supposition that God's creative activity would be guided by his knowledge of counterfactuals which indicate how free creatures would act if placed in various circumstances. I then define a world-type as a maximal consistent set of such counterfactuals. Three important facts regarding world-types can then be demonstrated: first, whichever world-type is true is only contingently true; second, God cannot cause a particular world-type to be true; and third, every world-type determines a unique set of worlds, which I refer to as a galaxy. After proving that there are only four kinds of galaxies--singular, monarchic, oligarchic, and anarchic--with which God might have been presented, I show that God would not have been compelled to actualize any particular world had he been presented with any of the latter three kinds of galaxies. Since the Anselmian libertarian can also offer strong reasons for thinking a singular galaxy to be impossible, it follows that he can consistently hold God to be free--indeed, even essentially free. ;This apparent incompatibility of Anselmian libertarianism with the thesis that God is free constitutes what I call the problem of divine freedom. It is this problem which serves as the primary focus of my dissertation. Having introduced the problem in the first chapter, I examine six alleged solutions which one might be tempted to extract from the writings of philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, Robert Adams, and Nelson Pike, but conclude that none of them provide the Anselmian libertarian with a plausible means of upholding divine freedom. ;Many modern theists endorse the Anselmian notion of a God who exists necessarily and possesses his perfections essentially. Many such theists would also respond to the atheological argument from evil by appealing to the Free Will Defence, a defence which seems to presuppose a libertarian analysis of freedom. However, it is not clear that one can consistently endorse both of these positions and still subscribe to the orthodox conception of God as a free creator. For one might charge that an essentially good God would be determined by his very nature to make the best world he could, whereas a God whose creative action was thus determined would not be free in the libertarian sense. (shrink)