Hi dmb, Matt, Arlo (at the end) dmb: Does anyone know what the hell he's talking about with this notion of free will behind free will? He says stuff like, "Sure we make choices but we're not free to choose our choices". Does anyone think that makes any sense at all? If so, maybe you can explain it to me.
Steve: You've referred to the Stanford article several times, but much of what you say makes me wonder if you've read it. It says much of what I have been trying to get across to you. You have been equating the ability to will with free will and choice with freely willed choice, but according to the author of the article... "I have implied that free willings are but a subset of willings, at least as a conceptual matter. But not every philosopher accepts this. René Descartes, for example, identifies the faculty of will with freedom of choice, “the ability to do or not do something” (Meditation IV), and even goes so far as to declare that “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained” (Passions of the Soul, I, art. 41). In taking this strong polar position on the nature of will, Descartes is reflecting a tradition running through certain late Scholastics (most prominently, Suarez) back to John Duns Scotus. The majority view, however, is that we can readily conceive willings that are not free. Indeed, much of the debate about free will centers around whether we human beings have it, yet virtually no one doubts that we will to do this and that." Steve: Your equation of the capacity to choose with free will is only what the author calls a minimalist account of free will... "On a minimalist account, free will is the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. David Hume, for example, defines liberty as “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will.” (1748, sect.viii, part 1). And we find in Jonathan Edwards (1754) a similar account of free willings as those which proceed from one's own desires. One reason to deem this insufficient is that it is consistent with the goal-directed behavior of some animals whom we do not suppose to be morally responsible agents. Such animals lack not only an awareness of the moral implications of their actions but also any capacity to reflect on their alternatives and their long-term consequences. Indeed, it is plausible that they have little by way of a self-conception as an agent with a past and with projects and purposes for the future. (See Baker 2000 on the ‘first-person perspective.’) 1.2 Free Will as deliberative choosing on the basis of desires and values A natural suggestion, then, is to modify the minimalist thesis by taking account of (what may be) distinctively human capacities and self-conception. And indeed, philosophers since Plato have commonly distinguished the ‘animal’ and ‘rational’ parts of our nature, with the latter implying a great deal more psychological complexity. Our rational nature includes our ability to judge some ends as ‘good’ or worth pursuing and value them even though satisfying them may result in considerable unpleasantness for ourselves. (Note that such judgments need not be based in moral value.) We might say that we act with free will when we act upon our considered judgments/valuings about what is good for us, whether or not our doing so conflicts with an ‘animal’ desire. (See Watson 2003a for a subtle development of this sort of view.) But this would seem unduly restrictive, since we clearly hold many people responsible for actions proceeding from ‘animal’ desires that conflict with their own assessment of what would be best in the circumstances. More plausible is the suggestion that one acts with free will when one's deliberation is sensitive to one's own judgments concerning what is best in the circumstances, whether or not one acts upon such a judgment." dmb: Maybe you can explain how there can be moral responsibility without human agency. That's Steve's claim, even though he's never once said how that could work. Steve: I have never denied human agency. What I have said is that you are taking agency and free will to be the same thing. But agency just means that we make choices, we do one thing and not another. It doesn't need to imply _free_ agency as something extra on top of the ability to do one thing and not another. I am not promoting determinism, but note that agency is not opposed to determinism. An agent can make choices even if we believe that choices are determined based entirely on facts about the state of the world. dmb: And the linkage between the two shows up in every dictionary and encyclopedia, but he denies it anyway. Steve: I have said that this linkage is obviously usually made. The point of contention is whether or not this link is a simple logical necessity. Stanford article again: "Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one's action." The article does not support your claim that the link is a logical necessity. It says that it is often used as a metaphysical requirement for moral responsibility, but as pragmatists we don't conceive of the existence fo free will in any metaphysical form. I have asserted that we don't need to answer the free will debate before talking about moral responsibility or have a metaphysical basis it. All we need to do is ask whether someone else in a similar situation would have behaved differently. On a related note, Arlo's comments about agency rather than free will being relevant to human freedom is apparently a common notion today... "A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture, as well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom 2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom, ‘compatibilist’ and ‘ultimate’. On the ultimate level of evaluation, free will is indeed incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide concise defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)" Note well here, dmb, that it is not just me but all the philosophers listed above who are then "wildly incoherent" in not equating agency with free will and free will with moral responsibility. Regards, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
