OCR students please note – free will has dropped off the new OCR spec but remains on some of the other specs (so I am leaving this section on the website). PB

The debate over free will versus (hard or soft) determinism has important implications for our ideas of moral responsibility, our power to transcend our circumstances, and make life choices that transform weaknesses into strengths, as suggested, for example, by virtue ethics. Go to the roadmap for the structure of ideas in this section.

It rests on the meaning of three ideas (key terms): freedom, the will and causation. Once you realise that different philosophers define these terms differently, the spaghetti begins to unravel.

Hard determinists such as Ted Honderich (Extract 9) argue that causation is mechanistic idea – we cannot escape our pre-causes that underlie the illusion of freedom. So freedom is an illusion. This view of causation fits neatly within our scientific worldview (see Sam Harris for a more recent hard determinist treatment) but it seems to make moral education, moral conversion and personal transformation impossible. Hard determinists are incompatibilists, as are libertarians.

Soft determinists (such as David Hume) are compatibilists because they argue that free will must be compatible with determinism (some idea of causation) otherwise moral responsibility is impossible, and more significantly, choice appears to be random. Choice must be caused by something – but the debate seems to be whether the cause is something internal to our minds, or a process if you like, or whether it is simply some hidden mechanism to do with brain-waves (the materialistic view). Be aware that different compatibilists have different arguments: Locke’s argument (Extract 2) is different from Kant’s is different from Hume’s. But we need to clarify and develop at least one of these – Kant himself calls Hume’s argument a ‘dangerous subterfuge’. Hume’s view of freedom is a weak one – ‘absence of constraint’. For Kant, freedom (autonomy) is a postulate – something we have to assume. But Kant’s view of freedom is a stronger one than Hume’s and metaphysical. Locke’s too is stronger – Locke sees freedom as an ‘active power’ to think and judge for yourself.

Libertarians such as Van Inwagen (Extract 4) argue that freedom is incompatible with causation because it is a strong idea of a power to define an open-ended future. Van Inwagen doesn’t claim to solve the paradox of determinism – that if every event including the mental event of choice has a cause, then mental events cannot be free – but he does argue that it makes our ideas of the will and our own experience nonsensical. We have all experienced times of struggle when wee see an open future and ‘two paths diverge in the yellow wood’ – our choice ‘makes all the difference” (the poem by Robert Frost). So Van Inwagen takes a strong view of freedom but causation becomes something metaphysical – beyond the reach of scientific ideas of causal chains. Here’s an interesting article discussing three views of determinism.

All this can appear quite complex: but the way to disentangle the spaghetti is to understand that philosophers mean different things by these three key ideas: freedom, the will and determinism. Read my book here if you want a fuller discussion – with many more authors included. Also notice I have posted some articles on theological determinism (which is on the syllabus, but no questions have yet been asked with this phrase in it!). This dimension isn’t included in the roadmap.

Further Reading

1. Peter Vallentyne, Libertarianism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/libertarianism/>.

[2] C.A. Campbell’s excellent essay In Defence of Free Will is available here: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/campbell/defence.html . A more recent form of libertarianism was articulated and defended by Robert Kane. Kane defends his position in The Significance of Free Will (1996) and in a follow-up article, Responsibility, Luck and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminism, Journal of Philosophy (1999).

[4] For more information on Hume’s view of free will, see Paul Russell, Hume on Free Will, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/hume-freewill/>.

[5] Kleptomania is an example of a compulsion (hence unfree act) defined by the following diagnostic criteria: 1) recurrent failure to resist impulses to steal objects that are not needed for personal use or for their monetary value; 2) increasing sense of tension immediately before committing the theft; 3) pleasure, gratification, or relief at the time of committing the theft; 4) the stealing is not committed to express anger or vengeance and is not in response to a delusion or a hallucination; and 5) the stealing is not better accounted for by conduct disorder, a manic episode, or antisocial personality disorder. Jon E. Grant, Understanding and Treating Kleptomania: New Models and New Treatments, Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 43 (2006) 81,87; URL = < http://www.psychiatry.org.il/upload/infocenter/info_images/16112006173113@Pages%20from%20IJP-43-2-3.pdf>.

[6] For more on Locke, see William Uzgalis, John Locke, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/locke/>.

[7] For a discussion of naturalism and free will, James Lenman, “Moral Naturalism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2006/entries/naturalism-moral/ >.