An Introduction to Philosophy Lecture 05: Free Will James Mooney Open Studies The University of Edinburgh j.mooney@ed.ac.uk www.filmandphilosophy.com @film_philosophy

1. Free Will
An Introduction to Philosophy: 05
© James Mooney 2012

2. ThetheProblem
What is Problem of Free Will?
Socialisation,
Conditioning,
and Psychology
Firstly, there are a set of specific reasons for thinking that we are neither
so free in forming our desires, nor in acting on them, as we might think.
Consider the effectiveness of advertising: it is unlikely that powerful
corporations would expend millions of pounds in a failed attempt
to manipulate our desires and choices – and hence our actions.
More particularly, there is a wealth of psychological literature showing
that we are less free in our choices as we might think.
E.g. Phobias, addictions, neuroses, ‘brainwashing’, hypnosis
Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious

3. Determinism
Secondly, science operates on the assumptions that:
i. Every event is caused; and
ii. The cause of every event is an antecedent event.
– Thus the natural world is governed by deterministic
causal laws.
– The scientific world view (evident in, for example,
Darwinian theory) is that human beings are part of
nature.
– Therefore, everything we do, along with everything else,
is governed by deterministic causal laws. This is the
thesis of determinism.

4. The Determinist’s Argument
‘Given determinism, there will always be some much earlier set of conditions s
that is connected by laws of nature to any human action a that takes place. But
nothing can be done to alter, nothing can be done, about those laws; and neither, it
may be added, can anything be done about s at any time when the doing of a is
immediately in question. Since s is thus necessary (e.g. unalterable) at the time
when a is in question and since a law leading from s to a is similarly necessary
(unalterable) at that time, it would seem to follow that a itself is necessary
(unalterable, unavoidable) at that time – however ignorant of that fact the agent of
a may be. Presumably, then, the agent in question does not act freely in
performing a, and, since the argument has been entirely general in its
assumptions, one may conclude that no human being ever acts freely in a
deterministic universe.’
Michael Slote, The Journal of Philosophy, Volume 79 (1982)

5. Determinist’s Argument
P1
If determinism is true, then every human action is
causally necessitated
P2
If every human action is causally necessitated, no
one could have acted otherwise
P3
One only has free will if one could have acted
otherwise
P4
Determinism is true
C
No one has free will

6. Determinism
“Man’s life is a line that nature
commands him to describe on
the surface of the earth, without
his ever being able to swerve
from it, even for an instant.”
(Baron D’Holbach, 1723-89)
“Man’s craving for grandiosity is now
suffering the third and most bitter blow.”
(Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)

7. Why is it a problem?
• There are two considerations that make the
truth of the thesis of determinism seem so
alarming:
1. The phenomenology of freedom.
2. Moral responsibility.

8. The Various Positions
• Hard Determinism
– Hard Determinists accept the soundness of the above argument and so
embrace its conclusion.
• Libertarianism
– Libertarians deny the conclusion (and thus the soundness of the
argument), and do so by denying the truth of determinism (P4).
• Note that it is not enough just to deny determinism. Libertarians must say
what to put in its place, and it is quite unclear, as we shall see, what could
play that role.
• Thus, although differing greatly in their conclusions, both hard
determinists and libertarians agree that free will and
determinism are incompatible (they cannot both be true). Both
are, therefore, incompatibilists.
• Compatibilism
– Compatibilists deny the conclusion of the above argument and accept
P4 – they want to hold that free will and determinism are compatible –
and so standardly want to reject one of the other premises; typically P2
or P3 (or both).

9. Libertarianism
• Recall that the libertarian will attempt to escape the determinists’ argument
by denying the truth of determinism.
• It is not enough however, for libertarians to deny that human actions are
subject to deterministic causal laws, they must give an alternative
explanation of human action.
• However, they do not, they leave a blank where an explanation should be.
And it would take a very odd something to fill in that blank.
‘The desired entity (self, soul, agent, originator) must be sufficiently
connected to the past to constitute a continuing locus of personal
responsibility, but sufficiently disconnected so that its past does not
determine its present. It must be sufficiently connected to the causal chain
to be able to interrupt it, but sufficiently disconnected not to get trapped. It
must be susceptible to being shaped and maybe governed by motives,
threats, punishments, and desires, but not totally controlled by them. It
resembles very much the river god, who serves as an explanation for what
seems to be the free behaviour of the river until a better explanation comes
along through physical geography, meteorology, and physics.’
(Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy)

10. Classical Compatibilism
“By
liberty . . . we can only
mean a power of acting or not
acting, according to the
determinations of the will.”
David Hume,
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
1748
“A FREE-MAN, is he, that . . . is not
hindred to doe that he has a will to . . .
from this use of the word Free-will, no
Liberty can be inferred of the will,
desire or inclination, but the Liberty of
the man; which consisteth in this, that
he finds no stop in doing what he has
the will, desire or inclination to doe.”
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

11. Freedom of Action
• What this amounts to is freedom from constraint or coercion.
– If one is constrained then one is stopped from acting in accordance with
one’s will.
– If one is coerced then one is forced to act against one’s will.
• Classical compatibilism, then, understands the ‘ability to do
otherwise’ in a conditional sense:
– ‘if I had desired to do otherwise, I could have done otherwise.’ (GE Moore)
– As such, P3 in the determinists’ argument is understood as
P3* One only has free will if one could have acted otherwise (if one had
desired to act otherwise)
• But then P2 is straightforwardly false: our actions could be
causally necessitated whilst it is true that we could have done
otherwise (if we had desired to do otherwise).
• As such the argument is unsound and the conclusion (that no one
has free will) is not necessarily true.

12. Freedom of the Will
• One of the major problems with classical compatibilism is that it tends to
just push the problem back onto our desires.
• For what if my desires were not free? Suppose that they were implanted in
me by hypnosis or whatever. Then we wouldn’t think my act was free
even if it were true that had I desired otherwise I would have acted
otherwise.
– The case of the addict
• Therefore, although the ability to act on our desires granted us by Classical
Compatibilism is a necessary condition for what we take, intuitively, to be
a wholly free act, it is not sufficient.
• In addition a person requires freedom of will, or, in other words, the ability
to control those desires upon which we act.
• Such an account is offered by Harry Frankfurt in his ‘Freedom of the Will
and the Concept of a Person’. Frankfurt maintains that: when someone has
freedom of action and freedom of will
‘then he is not only free to do what he wants to do; he is also free to want
what he wants to want . . . he has, in that case, all the freedom it is
possible to desire or conceive.’

13. A further worry
“JoJo is the favourite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a
small, undeveloped country. Because of his father’s special feelings for
the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his
father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, it is not
surprising that little JoJo takes his father as a role model and develops
values very much like Dad’s. As an adult, he does many of the same sorts
of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to
torture chambers on the basis of whim. He is not coerced to do these
things, he acts according to his own desires. Moreover, these are desires he
wholly wants to have. When he steps back and asks, “Do I really want to
be this sort of person?” his answer is resoundingly “Yes.” for this way of
life expresses a crazy sort of power that forms part of his deepest ideal.”
Susan Wolf, ‘Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility’
• Does JoJo act freely?
• Is he responsible for his actions?
• What point is Wolf attempting to make here?

14. “We have to believe in free will.
We have no choice.”
(Isaac B. Singer)

15. Details
James Mooney
Open Studies
The University of Edinburgh
j.mooney@ed.ac.uk
www.filmandphilosophy.com
@film_philosophy