Hume on Free Will
Abstract
In this essay, I discuss David Hume’s reasoning on free will as he presents it in A
Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. I proceed
by showing how Hume’s compatibilist solution acquires meaning in the light of his
sentimentally based science of human nature, which conceives human beings as
reasonable, social, and active creatures. Within Hume’s empiricist, naturalistic, and
sceptical approach, we deal only with perceptions and never with things themselves,
and human experience is structured in a causal order which allows us to organise
both the way we experience the world and our existence in relation to that of others.
In such a scenario, the question of free will depends on human practices, such as the
attribution of responsibility, which follow a causal order and are not affected by
metaphysical doubts about the loss of responsibility if determinism were true. I argue
that Hume traces responsibility back to the expression of feelings for or against
particular characters; people become the object of judgements of responsibility in so
far as, through their actions, they show that they possess characters of a certain kind
which reflect a whole series of dispositions and traits, empirically verifiable and
causally explainable, acquired over time. I conclude by highlighting how free will
may represent a problem on a practical level once moral or religious issues come into
play and why this is not so for Hume.