Faversham Stoa -- Free-will & Determinism

Free-will & Determinism

Determinism is the idea that all our mental states and acts, including choices and decisions, and all our actions are effects necessitated by preceding causes. Thus our futures are in fact fixed and unalterable in much the same way that the past is.

In everyday life, we suppose that free actions are the only ones for which we can hold persons morally responsible, or for which we can appropriately feel gratitude or resentment. Ordinary morality says that we are excused for doing something that would otherwise be blameworthy if we can establish that in some sense or other we had no choice in the matter, that in some sense or other we could not have done otherwise.

Some philosophers, incompatibilists, believe that determinism if true destroys moral responsibility, undermines interpersonal relations, and destroys our life-hopes by making all actions unfree. Freedom and determinism are incompatible.

Incompatibilists who believe that determinism is false, and hence that some actions are morally responsible, are often called libertarians.

Incompatibilists who believe that determinism is true, and moral responsibility is therefore an illusion, are sometimes called hard determinists.

Compatibilist philosophers deny that determinism has any such effect on freedom and moral responsibility. Freedom and determinism are compatible. They are sometimes called soft determinists.

Another possible position is that determinism is false but moral responsibility still fails to exist has no advocates and no name. Perhaps we should call it ‘libertinism’.

Compatibilists say that we only need to be free in the sense in which 'free' is opposed to 'compelled' or 'coerced'. Our actions only need to be voluntary in this sense. All we need is voluntariness.

In G E Moore‘s famous analysis, I am free in performing an action if I could have done otherwise, but this latter proposition is to be understood as I would have done otherwise if I had chosen. So I could have done otherwise even if determinism is true.

Moore's analysis seems to capture much of the pre-theoretical or everyday-life distinction between excused and unexcused infractions of the moral law. Its essential notion is that some actions result from effective choices by the actor, and hence are free, and some do not result from such choices, and are not free. Moore's analysis, nevertheless, seems beside the point to libertarians, because, as they say, if determinism is true, I could not have chosen otherwise in the right sense, and therefore could not have done otherwise. I could not have originated anything. Thus, they say, moral responsibility collapses.

The philosopher Ted Honderich has argued persuasively that the long running compatibilism-incompatibilism controversy springs from what it overlooks, the systematic ambiguity of talk of freedom. We each have two conceptions of freedom, not one. One involves both origination and voluntariness, while the other involves voluntariness alone.

If this is so, compatibilism and incompatibilism are both false – both claim that we have just one conception of freedom or that there is one correct conception of it.

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Free-will & Determinism