William King’s De Origine Mali has recently started to attract some attention in early modern scholarship. In a recent paper devoted to King’s theory of free will, Kenneth Pearce identifies a “lacuna” in his text, namely the fact that King “never explicitly describes the process whereby election leads to action” (Pearce, “William King on Free Will”, 4). In this paper, I analyse King’s theory of ‘election’ (roughly, free choice) and Pearce’s interpretation of it. I discuss his claim that there is (...) a lacuna in King’s account and argue that the text provides us with important suggestions on how election generates action. Therefore, no speculative proposal to fill the lacuna is needed. This, in turn, allows me to develop a reading of King’s text that avoids a textual puzzle unsolved in Pearce’s interpretation: while he maintained that every election is “with reason”, my account can take King’s text at face value and explain how some elections are reasonable while others are not. (shrink)

William King's De Origine Mali contains an interesting, sophisticated, and original account of free will. King finds 'necessitarian' theories of freedom, such as those advocated by Hobbes and Locke, inadequate, but argues that standard versions of libertarianism commit one to the claim that free will is a faculty for going wrong. On such views, free will is something we would be better off without. King argues that both problems can be avoided by holding that we confer value on objects by (...) valuing them. Such a view secures sourcehood and alternative possibilities while denying that free will is simply a capacity to choose contrary to our best judgment. This theory escapes all of the objections levelled against it by Leibniz and also has interesting consequences for ethics: although constructed within a eudaimonist framework, King's theory gives rise to a very strong moral requirement of respect for individual self-determination. (shrink)