A THIRD CONCEPT OF FREEDOM OF THE WILL by Ulrich
Steinvorth -- The
determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website -- It is
useful for philosophers within one language to make their way
occasionally into the contemporary philosophy of another language. They
may find that their own thinking is congealed. They may find that what
is alive and what is dead in
Oxford, London, Boston and New York is not exactly what is alive and
dead in, say, Hamburg. Nor is it possible to sustain the illusion
that there is more philosophical intellect in Oxford than in
Hamburg. The nature and in particular the inevitability of philosophy
is against such nonsense. Prof. Dr. Ulrich Steinvorth of the
philosophy department of the University of Hamburg is in the high
tradition of German philosophical argument. He is also aware of and not
content with the English-language thinking that there are two ideas of
free action -- roughly speaking, action fully in accord with the
agent's desires, and action in accord with free will in a traditional
and obscure sense. There is, he believes, another good idea. It should
not have disappeared in the time when Kant was confuting Hume. ------------------------------------------ Abstract: Contemporary neuroscience has stimulated interest in the idea of free will, since a wider a wider public had the impression that neuroscience might prove that there is no free will. In the discussions between neuroscientists and philosophers there is a tendency to oppose two conceptions of free will, a Kantian or libertarian one, which is considered incompatible with science, and a compatibilist one which is presented as being in accord with science and determinism and defending a weak notion of free will and responsibility. Such an opposition does not take account of a third conception of free will that up to Kant’s time was generally accepted both by the adherents and the critics of free will. I present this conception (which I call scholastic), distinguish it from the Kantian conception which still underlies most contemporary thinking about free will, and point out its virtues. Here are some of the definitions and descriptions of free will taken from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “a special kind of causality in virtue of which events in the world happen”,[1] “a causality of starting a series of events completely by itself”, [2] “a faculty of really and truly starting a state, hence a series of consequences of it”,[3] “a spontaneity which by itself can start acting and excludes the presupposition of another cause that would determine its action according to the law of causal connection”.[4] There are two elements in Kant’s conception: causality and spontaneity. Free will is a faculty of causing events, yet its agency is spontaneous. What does that mean? First, that it is not caused by other causes. Second, that it works “completely by itself”. You’ll see shortly that we must distinguish these two points, though Kant probably did not. I’ll call a spontaneity that is not caused conditioned spontaneity, and a spontaneity that works completely by itself, absolute spontaneity. Both the idea that free will is a causality and that it is a spontaneity are not new in the history of philosophy. What is new is the way Kant combined them. Hume taught modern philosophers that to understand free will we must understand it as a causality. If we ascribe free will to men without admitting that men cause their actions, actions would just happen to them and they could not be their authors nor be made responsible for them. But if they cause their actions, they are, as Hume presupposes in agreement with Newtonian physics, elements in the chain of causes and effects that binds nature together. Hence what is called free will is in fact being caused, determined by causal laws and not free. Hence, it is one of those “confus’d ideas and undefin’d terms, which we so commonly make use of in our reasonings”.[5] Kant
hoped to escape this consequence by arguing that there is a kind of
causality beside the natural one, a causality by freedom, which is spontaneity. The idea of an uncaused causality is already
used by Aristotle. Aristotle explains motion by the
agency of movers that are themselves unmoved.[6] Yet
Aristotle’s unmoved movers act in space and time. In Newtonian physics,
uncaused movements in space and time are impossible. Hence Kant, to
save the idea of unmoved motion, must declare that the causality of
free will is of a completely different kind than the causality of the
objects in space and time. It is no causality that we can use to
describe and explain observable events, but “a pure transcendental
idea” never to meet in experience.[7]
We must postulate it as a condition of the
possibility of a faculty in virtue of which we are capable of
absolutely spontaneous actions. Many
contemporaries agree with Kant that free will in a strong sense must be
an absolute spontaneity, something that produces an action out of
nothing, since if there is something from which it will produce an
action, it is caused or determined by it. Yet for good reasons most
contemporaries think as well that an absolute spontaneity is
impossible. From nothing arises nothing, not even an absolute
spontaneity nor its acts. This is
a first defect in Kant’s conception of free will. There is another
defect. By his opposing causality by freedom and natural causality, Kant commits himself to rejecting any
empirical criterion for distinguishing actions of responsible persons
and actions of lunatics. If free will is a transcendental idea, it is a
necessary condition of all action. If we can never
meet the properties of a free action in experience, we can no longer
say of a certain action that it lacks or shows such properties.
Ascribing someone free will and, hence, responsibility, becomes a
matter of belief or arbitrary conventions. I
conclude that if free will is conceived as an absolute spontaneity the
conception is incoherent indeed and we must reject it, as most
contemporary neuroscientists do. I presuppose that this conception is
not only followed by Kant but also by libertarians. Nevertheless, it
does not follow that we must prefer a compatibilist conception, as is
implied by the popular opposition of libertarian and compatibilist
ideas of free will. For there is a third conception that up to the time
of Kant has even prevailed in philosophy. I call it the scholastic
conception. It does not conceive of free will as an absolute
spontaneity and is yet incompatible with the understanding of
determination of events that prevails up to our days. The
scholastic conception has been formulated by several authors. I follow
the definition given by the late Spanish scholastic Luis de Molina
which seems to have been the best known in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Molina defines freedom of the will as “that
which, if the conditions of doing so are met, is capable of acting and
not acting, or of doing something in such a way that it might as well
do its contrary”.[8] This
definition presupposes that that which is capable of acting and not
acting thinks of, or deliberates about,
that which it might do or not do. The object of deliberation was called
proposition. Propositions are thoughts, but
thoughts that incline us in a specific direction. They are conscious or
reflected impulses. That is why the capacity of acting
and not acting is a capacity of saying both yes and no to the proposition or the thought of an action we
incline to. Let us
formulate the scholastic conception of free will this way: x has
free will as regards action a iff x is capable of
saying both yes and no to the
proposition that proposes to do a. The condition that is used in this definition to define free
will is today often called the principle of alternative
possibilities. Let us note the most important differences to the Kantian
conception. First, free will in
the scholastic conception is no faculty of an absolute spontaneity.
It does not produce an action out of nothing. Rather, it responds to a thought that can be caused by natural causes or may
happen by chance to a person. Therefore, it is a power of responding to
thoughts. It is not a creative power but a power of
intellectual criticism. Second, in spite of
being a responding faculty, its responses are not
determined since they can be both affirmative and negative. Its liberty
consists in its capacity of both following an impulse and blocking it.
It is a power of denying any impulse we can make the
object of deliberation, hence of opting between at
least two possibilities. That is why the scholastics called it a power
of indifference, i.e. a power of
making oneself indifferent to the attraction of an impulse. What is most intriguing in the scholastic conception is its
idea of a conditioned spontaneity. Free will
presupposes stimuli to act on, yet it responds to them by choosing
among alternative possibilities. Though its choice is unpredictable, it
does not render the agent a lunatic. Rather, authorship and autonomy
spring from free choice among possibilities. Before considering this
point, let us test the claims of the scholastic conception and ask,
first, does it, unlike the Kantian conception, define free will by an empirical criterion? Second, does it, like the Kantian
conception, define free will? Third, is it,
like the Kantian conception, incompatible with determinism?
2. Does the scholastic
conception use an empirical criterion? I objected to the Kantian conception that it excludes using
an empirical criterion to distinguish actions that spring from free
will and actions that do not. Doesn’t the scholastic conception fall
victim to the same objection? If we want to find out whether someone is
able to say both yes and no to the
execution of a proposition, what we observe is that
he either says yes or says no. But we
never directly observe his capability of saying both
yes and no. So there seem to be no empirical criteria for deciding
whether he can do the one as well as the other. This, however, would be
a wrong conclusion. Take the case of solubility of a solid in water. What you
(“directly”) observe is that the solid either dissolves or does not,
never its solubility. Yet this does not imply that there are no
empirical criteria to decide whether the solid is soluble. If it
dissolves when placed in water it is soluble. We use the fact of its
dissolving as an empirical criterion for its solubility. In the same
way, capacities, although unobservable, have empirical criteria for
their identification. A man can swim if when placed
in water he is not drowned. In the same way, a man can say
both yes and no to a proposition if
when exposed to certain observable stimuli he responds in a certain
observable way. The way he responds to them is the criterion we use to
decide whether he has free will. There is an objection against this
argument. The logical
relation of the capacity of swimming to its empirical criterion is
different from the relation of the capacity of saying both yes
and no to its empirical criterion. Even before looking
at what this criterion is, we can see the difference. We may formalise
the definition of the capacity of swimming by reducing the modal
operator can to a when-sentence: x
can swim =df x is not drowned when thrown in deep water Yet we cannot define the capacity of saying both yes
and no to a proposition by reducing can to when. For
we obviously cannot define it this way: x can
say both yes and no to p =df x says yes to
p when in s1 and
says no to p when in s2 What the scholastic definition claims is that if or when x has free will, he can, in the same situation
s, say both yes and no
to p. Thus, the can implied
by the capacity of free will as conceived by the scholastics cannot be
reduced or dissolved. This difference distinguishes the capacity of free will from
the capacity of swimming and other capacities. Yet does it show that
there are no empirical criteria for the use of the term free
will? Certainly not. This becomes evident when we remember how we
decide whether someone is either capable or incapable of saying both yes and no to the same proposition.
There are cases when such a decision is difficult, but there are
paradigm cases when it is not difficult. A neurotic who does not leave
his home without checking several times that he did lock the door is a
paradigm case of the lack of the capacity of saying both yes
and no to a proposition. For he cannot say no to the proposition that he check the locking of the
door. By contrast, the cured neurotic is a paradigm case of this
capacity. He can say no to the proposition that he
check his locking the door. It would be silly to argue that he is not
also able to say yes to the same proposition. If
someone doubted this ability of his, the former neurotic could prove
his ability by checking his locking. If he proved unable to do so, we
would attribute him another neurosis or a new form of the old one. So there are empirical criteria for the application of the
scholastic conception of free will. The fact that this capacity’s can cannot be reduced to a when-sentence
whereas the capacity of swimming can does not show that the scholastic
conception is not empirical. Rather, it shows that even capacity terms
whose can is irreducible may be
applied in accordance with empirical criteria. 3. Does the conception
define free
will? In a way, this question is curious. If someone is able to say
no to a proposition although he might as well say
yes to it, his option is open and hence, it
seems, his will is free. But let us be cautious since we want to know
what has been understood by free will in the history of philosophy.
Perhaps only the scholastics have understood by free will the capacity
of denying. In fact, Ernst Tugendhat and Jürgen Habermas have
explicitly rejected the identitification of free will with the capacity
of denying. According to Tugendhat, this capacity is not freedom of the
will but freedom of action;[9] according to Habermas, the idea of free
will belongs to the “pre-Kantian philosophy of consciousness” and
cannot be defined as the capacity of denying.[10] So let us ask what the freedom of action is
under which Tugendhat wants to subsume the capacity of denying. The
common definition is that it is the capacity to act according to one’s
nature or will. It has never been controversial that men have this
capacity nor that animals have it. Hobbes ascribes it even to water
that acts freely if its flow is unimpeded.[11] Nor was there controversy that this
freedom looks different in men than in animals and children. The
controversy was over whether, to take account of men’s responsibility, we must, in addition to freedom of action, ascribe to
them freedom of the will. The determinists argued we need not. Hobbes
argued against Bishop Bramhall that men are justly punished because
their actions are noxious, not because they do not happen necessarily.[12] The
advocates of free will argued that determinists can understand both
punishment and reward only as a means to form men’s will the way
society or its ruling class wants it formed, and that this
understanding is insufficient. When we look at the history of philosophy for the origins of
the distinction between freedom of action and of the will we detect
that the distinction depends on harder facts than on how to understand
responsibility. It is to the third book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics that the definition of freedom of action is usually traced
back. Yet we can detect there even the origin of the scholastic
definition of free will. Aristotle distinguishes voluntary actions
and actions that are chosen after deliberation.
He distinguishes them because, as he says, we call voluntary not only
the actions of people who can be virtuous and vicious but also the
actions of animals and little children who cannot be virtuous or
vicious. [13]
As the essential property of a voluntary action he
points out that it must have its origin “in the agent”;[14] as
the essential property of the deliberately chosen action,
that it is done when we deliberate “about things that are in our
control and are attainable by action”, not about things that we cannot
change or do not want to change.[15]
This distinction appears quite convincing, since we may well
say that children and animals can act voluntarily and involuntarily yet
cannot choose after deliberation nor say both yes and
no to the execution of the thought of an action.
Therefore, Aristotle provides us with a solid argument first that we
should distinguish between freedom of action and freedom of the will,
second that philosophers after Aristotle have understood freedom of
action as the faculty of acting voluntarily and freedom of the will as
the faculty of choice after deliberation about things that we might as
well do as not do. Aristotle provided even the scholastics with the principle of
alternative possibilities. For to describe a specific property of
deliberately chosen actions he uses the description “when the origin of
an action is in oneself, it is in one’s own power to do it and not do
it”.[16]
Moreover, he defines the voluntary not only by the concept of an
action’s having its origin in the agent, but also negatively by
defining the involuntary. An action is involuntary, he
says, “when done (a) under compulsion or (b)
through ignorance”,[17] an
example of the latter being Oedipus’ killing his father. Hence we can
define, with Aristotle, voluntary actions as actions that are done
neither under compulsion nor through ignorance, and such actions do not
presuppose choice after deliberation and can be attributed to children
and animals. Therefore, the Aristotelian distinction between freedom of
action and freedom of the will would be this: freedom of action =df the faculty of acting without compulsion and
ignorance; freedom of the will
=df the faculty of choice
after deliberation whether to do or not do an action. We may conclude that Tugendhat’s and Habermas’s theses on the
meaning of the terms capacity of denying, free will
and freedom of action do not stand the test of
investigating its historical use. For in the Aristotelian tradition,
which dominated the ideas of free will and free action, freedom of the
will, in contradiction to Tugendhat’s claim, is identical with the
faculty of denying a proposition or suspending an impulse and, in
contradiction to Habermas’s claim, does not presuppose any philosophy
of consciousness. But we must also conclude that belief in free will is not
that exciting. For it may seem pretty clear that we better distinguish
between acting without compulsion and acting after deliberation than
reduce the latter to the former. Why then did so many philosophers want
to reduce freedom of the will to freedom of action? The answer is that
they rejected the idea that choosing after deliberation is a choice
that might have been otherwise. Locke is a classical representative of
this rejection. He agreed with the scholastics that free will can only
be a power of denying or blocking an impulse by
reflecting and deliberating about it: “… we have a power to suspend the
prosecution of this or that desire, as every one daily may Experiment
in himself. This seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems
to consist that, which is (I think improperly) call’d Free
will.”[18] Nevertheless, he refused to call the power of negation or
suspension free will because he rejected the principle of alternative
possibilities. If freedom consists “in a power of acting, or not
acting”, then a man who exerts such a power “cannot be free.
The reason whereof is very manifest: … he cannot avoid willing the
existence, or not existence, of that Action; it is absolutely necessary
that he will the one, or the other, i.e.
prefer the one or the other: since one of them
must necessarily follow; and that which does follow, follows by the
choice and determination of his Mind, that is, by his willing
it: for if he did not will it, it would not be.”[19] Locke is attacking the very essence of the Aristotelian
distinction between the voluntary and the deliberately chosen and their
corresponding definitions of freedom of action and freedom of the will.
He rejects the idea that deliberation gives actions a quality of
freedom that voluntary actions lack. His reason is the idea that
whether we choose to say yes or no to
the proposition, we are necessitated by causes to do
whatever we do. This idea is taken from the principles of contemporary
non-Aristotelian physics which postulate that whatever happens, happens
in accordance with physical laws that necessitate whatever happens.
Curiously enough, this idea did not prevent Locke from sticking to the
idea that men have a power of suspension, which is a consequence of the
Aristotelian distinction of choosing after deliberation and voluntary
action and incompatible with modern physic’s idea of laws that
necessitate whatever happens. 4. Is the
conception incompatible with
determinism? Like
Locke, Leibniz recognised that philosophy has to take account of
Aristotle’s distinction between voluntary action and action chosen
after deliberation, but unlike Locke was well aware that conceding a
power of suspension to the Aristotelian tradition is incompatible with
determinism. So he admitted that after deliberation we are not
determined by causes. But
he added that we are determined by reasons. Reasons,
he said, do not “necessitate” the way causes and motives necessitate.
Nevertheless, they “incline” us to choose what we choose, and they do
so deterministically. Hence, freedom of the will is either compatible
with determinism or an illusion. Leibniz allows us to distinguish
consistently between the voluntary and the deliberately chosen but
forestalls hopes of finding in the deliberately chosen the place of
free will. [20] Yet
even this criticism has found an answer in the history of philosophy.
The answer was given already by Descartes. In fact, in his defence of
determinism Leibniz argues against Descartes’ defence of free will.
When asked to explain his wavering remarks on free will in his Fourth
Meditation, Descartes explicitly defended the conception of free will
as a faculty of indifference, that is as a “positive faculty to
determine oneself to either of two opposites, that is to the following
or avoiding, asserting or denying”. What is more, Descartes makes
explicit what is implied by the use of such a faculty. He says that
“morally speaking (moraliter loquendo) we are nearly
incapable of moving ourselves to the opposite, but absolutely (absolute) we are. For it is always possible for us to
renounce following a clearly recognised good or affirming an
unmistakable truth, in case we think it good that thereby the freedom
of our choice (arbitrium) is demonstrated.”[21] What is
implied by deliberation, according to Descartes, is this. First, it
turns causes and motives into reasons. Second, reasons are reasons only
if they leave us the liberty to reject them. Only because we can choose after deliberation do we act on reasons. What we
then act on are reasons only if we have deliberated about what the
reasons are reasons for and are capable of both following
and rejecting it. So, although we normally follow the reasons that
convince us and are determined by them in a way similar to the way
causes determine us, considering things “absolutely” we must recognise
that we may reject even the most convincing reasons. As a proof of
this, Descartes refers to our capacity of acting on reasons that make
our actions unpredictable, in particular to the reason of proving one’s
freedom. Before
commenting on Descartes’ argument, let us consider Leibniz’s counter
argument: “… they
say you still have, even after having recognised and considered
everything, the power not only to will what pleases you most but also
to will the contrary, just in order to demonstrate your liberty. But
mind that also this whim or spite or at least this reason that hinders
you from following the other reasons enters the deliberation and makes
you be pleased what otherwise would not have pleased you.”[22] Here I
think it is evident that Leibniz is right. Descartes did not (nor
wanted to) show that we are not determined in our actions. Yet Leibniz
is wrong in what he inferred from that fact. What he inferred was that
„A mind that would have the property of willing, and being able, to do
and will the opposite of what can be predicted of him by whomsoever,
belongs to the set of entities that are incompatible with the existence
of the omniscient being, i.e. with the harmony of the things, and hence
to the set of entities that have not been nor are nor will be.”[23] Leibniz
is wrong because we know by experience that it is possible for men to
do the opposite of what is predicted of them, if only they know what is
predicted of them and want to prove their liberty. Children in their
many spite phases of development demonstrate this capacity much to the
trouble of their stressed parents. Because of this capacity, our
actions are unpredictable if only we know the prediction. This is an
unpredictability that results not from an overcomplexity of causes but
from the fact that our deliberation about the prediction enters the
causes. Though in normal circumstances we can rely that people do what
they promise and what suits their characters, they become unpredictable
if they are challenged by a prediction or the claim that they cannot
but act the way they are supposed to. According
to traditional determinism, earlier world states determine later ones
with necessity and without exception. It implies predictability of
later states by a Laplacean demon or an omniscient being and desists
from factual predictability or predictability by man only in (the
probably factual) case of an overcomplexity of causes of earlier world
states which precludes finite human intelligence from predictions of
later world states. Yet the unpredictability of human action does not
result from any overcomplexity. The same property that renders human
actions predictable under normal circumstances, their controllability
by promises, education, reason and reasons, makes them unpredictable
when actors feel they are supposed to be necessitated to act as they
are expected to. In that case, they can, but need not, use the
expectation as a cause or reason to do the opposite. They can act on
the reason not to be determined by pretended unchangeable causes. How are
we to describe this curious situation? Deliberation, it seems, brings
in a reflexivity of action causes that decouples our actions from
potential past causes. Acting after deliberation would be determined
by the reasons we follow, yet would not be predetermined.
Free will would include determinism but exclude predeterminism.
Yet can there be a determinism that is not predeterministic? What is
sure is that since the time of Lucretius, determinism has been
understood as predeterminism, as a theory that
whatever happens is not only somehow determined but is determined by
the very first state of nature or the will of its creator.[24] Let
us have another look at Descartes’s argument to learn the conditions of
a non-predetermined determination of an action. The
first condition is that the action result from a deliberation in which
the agent gets conscious of impulses and motives for actions he
inclines to. The second and critical condition is that in deliberation
the agent suspends his inclinations. As we have seen, Locke admits that
we have a power of suspension and yet sticks to the idea of actions
being predetermined. Up to this day, many thinkers follow him. Their
argument is that in the end, necessarily, we stop suspending action and
decide either for the strongest motive or the most convincing reason or
argument. In either case, they conclude, we are predetermined. What is
most important in Descartes’s rejection of this approach is that he
analyses what it means to be determined by a reason. Once we suspend an impulse, Descartes argues, we cannot but
decide for a reason that we must always be capable of replacing by
another one. Once we enact the power of suspension, we can
no longer follow an unreflected cause or a motive. We turn the
predetermining power of unreflected causes and motives into the
determining power of a subset of causes, namely, reasons. But it would
not be reasons we then must follow, if their power were necessitating
or determining our action in an inescapable way. Rather, it is their
essence always to be replaceable by other reasons. This essence gives
actions that result from deliberation the peculiarity of being
determined without being predetermined. Descartes
is well known as the author who gives much prominence to the
inescapability of the argument that because I doubt the existence of
anything I therefore must exist myself. Therefore, it may seem paradox
that the same author nonetheless maintains the escapability
of any argument. Yet Descartes relied on sound empirical
evidence that men can act against the reasons they judge the best.[25] We
know from ourselves and other people that we may reject the most
convincing reasons without ceasing to follow reasons. The reason we
follow when we reject the most convincing one may be the reason just to
try an unconvincing reason or to prove our negligence or coolness or
capability of acting against reason or our independence of reasonable
reasons or our power to prefer sentiments or passions to reason or to
replace reason by pure arbitrary will. But rejecting reason
does not mean escape from acting on reasons or
a reason. What it implies, though, is that
acting on reasons is inseparable from a decision for a reason which yet
always might be a decision for another reason. If it
is true that we cannot act on reasons without being able to replace a
reason by another one, then actions that result from deliberation
cannot be predetermined. But then, aren’t they undetermined? No, they are determined by the agent’s
choice among the reasons he can produce to himself. An action that
results from a deliberation is never something that happens
to the agent. Hence, Hume’s argument that unless actions are
determined, they are at best actions of lunatics, proves ambiguous. If
we understand him as he wanted to be understood, namely, that actions
must be predetermined, he is wrong. If we understand him as we better
understand him, he is right: unless actions are determined, they are
not actions at all, but events that happen to the agent. But such
actions need not be predetermined if they result from deliberation.
Determination of actions by the agent is of a different kind from
determination of billiard balls by causes. This
result exposes the scholastic conception to another objection. Isn’t it
an obscure idea of agent causation and perhaps even
of a timeless self that it depends on? What or whom are we to
understand as the agent that decides for or against a reason? To
neuroscientists this question does not pose a serious problem. They
will find out an excitatory brain pattern that represents what folk
psychology calls self or agent. The pattern will be excited when a
subject deliberates; it will be connected to loops and inhibitions in
neuronal processes and be determined by the subject’s history and
endowment. Yet if it is given, it will in principle exclude the
scientist from predicting which of alternative possibilities a subject
will choose. Its determination of efferent neurons may be called agent
causation. But this term can be explained by a description of the kind
neuroscientists have recourse to when they describe excitatory
patterns, loops and inhibitions. The
notion of agent causation is problematical only if we presuppose that
the agent has an absolute spontaneity. By contrast, starting from a
conditioned spontaneity we need not be puzzled how there can be a self
or responsible agent. Rather, we can think of chains of causes that end
up in a peculiar effect. The effect is a gap in the
chain that otherwise would predetermine the future.[26] The gap is performed by a particular
animal’s faculty of suspension, of imagining alternatives to the
original determination, and of choosing among them by reasons, i.e. in
the end arbitrarily and autonomously. If we must take account of such a
faculty, we imply that there is non-predetermined determination and a
self or agent with a conditioned spontaneity. Hence, if we think there
is conditioned spontaneity, we must think that there is
non-predetermined determinism, and vice versa. So the
answer to our third question must be this. The scholastic conception of
free will, unlike the Kantian one, is compatible with determinism but,
like the Kantian, is incompatible with predeterminism. Therefore, it is
compatible with science. But it does not presuppose that science is the
only nor even the best way to describe or understand the world. It can
be accepted by both dualists and monists. This independence of an
influential metaphysical watershed is another point in the list of its
virtues. Let me
condense the lessons of history of philosophy on free will to four
theses: 1. Free will is the capacity not of initiating something
absolutely new but of acting after deliberation. 2. Acting after deliberation is acting on
reasons. 3. When acting on reasons, we are determined by causes that
we can replace by other ones, even by causes that did not belong to the
original potential causes deliberated about, e.g. by the wish to prove
our freedom. 4. When acting on reasons, we are determined by reasons
without being predetermined by them. [1] Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 445, B 473: „eine besondere Art von Kausalität, nach welcher die Begebenheiten der Welt erfolgen“. [2] ibid. A 534, B 562: „eine Kausalität, ... eine Reihe von Begebenheiten ganz von selbst anzufangen“. [3] ibid. A 445, B 473: „ein Vermögen, einen Zustand, mithin auch eine Reihe von Folgen desselben, schlechthin anzufangen“. [4] ibid. A 533, B 561: „eine Spontaneität, die von selbst anheben (kann) zu handeln, ohne daß eine andere Ursache vorangeschickt werden (darf), sie wiederum nach dem Gesetze der Kausalverknüpfung zur Handlung zu bestimmen“ [5] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature bk 2, pt 3, sec 1,
ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford (Clarendon) 1978, 404 [6] Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ 1071b 3 – 75a 10 [7] Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 536, B 564: “Wirkung in der Welt … aus Freiheit“, and ibid. A 533, B 561. [8] Luis de Molina, Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae
Donis ... Concordia,
Antwerpen 1695 (Lisbon 1588), quaestio 14, art. 13, disput. 2, S. 8 (my translation). For the scholastic
conception of proposition and will, cp. Anthony Kenny, Will, Freedom
and Power, Oxford 1975. [9] E. Tugendhat, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie, Frankfurt (Suhrkamp) 1976, 110. [10] J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt (Suhrkamp) 1981, I 370, vgl. II 113f. [11] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ch.21, ed. Macpherson (Pelican)
1968, 262f [12] Th. Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity. English Works ed.
Molesworth vol. 4, London 1840, 253 [13] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics III 1111a 26, transl. H.
Rackham, London 1962 (Loeb Library). [14] ibid. 1110a 17 [15] ibid. 1112a 33 [16] ibid. 1110a 17. Rackham translates incorrectly “power to do
it or not”. Aristotle curiously gives the description
when he discusses not the deliberately chosen, but the voluntary. But
if Aristotle was consistent, he cannot have wanted to say that all
voluntary actions spring from the “power to do it and not to do it”. He
wanted to say that only deliberately chosen actions spring from it. [17] ibid. 1109b 35 [18] John Locke, An Essay concerning the principles of human
understanding bk 2 ch 21, § 47; ed. Nidditch, Oxford (Clarendon)
1979, 263 [19] ibid. bk 2 ch 21 §23; p. 245. [20] G.W. Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, on Locke, Essay bk 2, ch 21, § 49; ed. C.J. Gerhardt, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, Berlin 1982, 184. [21] René Descartes to Father Mesland, February 9, 1645;
Œuvres de Descartes ed. Adam et Tannery vol. IV,
173 [22] G.W. Leibniz, loc.cit. on Locke, Essay bk 2, ch 21, §
25, p. 168; this and the next translation of Leibniz are mine. [23] Leibniz ibid. p. 84f: „A mind that would have the property
of willing, and being able, to do and will the opposite of what can be
predicted of him by whomsoever, belongs into the set of entities that
are incompatible with the existence of the omniscient being, i.e. with
the harmony of the things, and hence have not been nor are nor will
be.” [24] Lucretius, De rerum natura, bk 2, ll 251-7: „Again, if
movements always is connected, New Motions coming in from old in order
fixed, If atoms never swerve and make beginning Of motions that can
break the bonds of fate And foil the infinite chain of causes and
effect What is the origin of this free will Possessed by living
creatures throughout the earth?” (transl. R. Melville, Oxford UP 1997) [25] Cp. Descartes’s allusion to Medea in Œuvres ed. Adam et Tannery vol. IV, 174, and Ulrich Steinvorth, Freiheitstheorien in der Philosophie der Neuzeit, Darmstadt (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft) 1994, 48 [26] The notion of a
gap has been used by John Searle in his Rationality in Action,
Cambridge/Mass., 2001. Although I share his criticism of deterministic
models of action, I do not share his conception of free will. ------------------------------------------- |