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Core Concepts
Adequate Determinism Agent-Causality Alternative Possibilities Causa Sui Causality Certainty Chance Chance Not Direct Cause The Cogito Model Compatibilism Conceptual Analysis Control Could Do Otherwise Creativity De-liberation Determination Determination Fallacy Determinism Disambiguation Either Way Ethical Fallacy Extreme Libertarianism Event Has Many Causes "Free Will" Free Will in Antiquity Free Will Mechanisms Free Will Requirements Future Contingency Hard Incompatibilism Illusion of Determinism Illusionism Impossibilism Incompatibilism Indeterminacy Indeterminism Libertarianism Liberty of Indifference Luck Modest Libertarianism Moral Responsibility Moral Sentiments Naturalism Necessity Noise Non-Causality Pre-determinism Predictability Probability Pseudo-Problem Random When?/Where? Rational Fallacy Responsibility Same Circumstances Science Advance Fallacy Second Thoughts Semicompatibilism Soft Causality Standard Argument Temporal Sequence Tertium Quid Torn Decision Two-Stage Models Ultimate Responsibility Uncertainty Up To Us Philosophers Mortimer Adler Rogers Albritton Alexander of Aphrodisias G.E.M.Anscombe Thomas Aquinas Aristotle David Armstrong Augustine A.J.Ayer Mark Balaguer William Belsham Isaiah Berlin Bernard Berofsky Susanne Bobzien George Boole F.H.Bradley C.D.Broad C.A.Campbell Joseph Keim Campbell Carneades Ernst Cassirer Roderick Chisholm Chrysippus Cicero Randolph Clarke Donald Davidson Democritus Daniel Dennett René Descartes Richard Double Fred Dretske John Earman Laura Waddell Ekstrom Epictetus Epicurus John Martin Fischer Owen Flanagan Philippa Foot Alfred Fouilleé Harry Frankfurt Richard L. Franklin Carl Ginet Nicholas St. John Green Ian Hacking Ishtiyaque Haji Stuart Hampshire Georg W.F. Hegel Martin Heidegger R.E.Hobart Thomas Hobbes David Hodgson Shadsworth Hodgson Ted Honderich Pamela Huby David Hume William James Robert Kane Immanuel Kant Tomis Kapitan Christine Korsgaard Keith Lehrer Gottfried Leibniz Leucippus C.I.Lewis David Lewis John Locke John R. Lucas Lucretius Hugh McCann Colin McGinn Michael McKenna Alfred Mele John Stuart Mill Dickinson Miller G.E.Moore Thomas Nagel Friedrich Nietzsche P.H.Nowell-Smith Robert Nozick William of Ockham Timothy O'Connor Charles Sanders Peirce Derk Pereboom Steven Pinker Karl Popper H.A.Prichard Willard van Orman Quine Frank Ramsey Ayn Rand Thomas Reid Charles Renouvier Nicholas Rescher Josiah Royce Bertrand Russell Paul Russell Gilbert Ryle T.M.Scanlon Moritz Schlick Arthur Schopenhauer John Searle Henry Sidgwick Walter Sinnott-Armstrong J.J.C.Smart Saul Smilansky Michael Smith Galen Strawson Peter Strawson Eleonore Stump Richard Taylor Kevin Timpe Peter van Inwagen Manuel Vargas John Venn Kadri Vihvelin G.H. von Wright R. Jay Wallace Ted Warfield Roy Weatherford Alfred North Whitehead David Widerker David Wiggins Ludwig Wittgenstein Susan Wolf Scientists Margaret Boden Neils Bohr Ludwig Boltzmann Max Born Stephen Brush Arthur Holly Compton Abraham de Moivre John Eccles Arthur Stanley Eddington Albert Einstein Richard Feynman A.O.Gomes Joshua Greene Jacques Hadamard Martin Heisenberg Werner Heisenberg Pierre-Simon Laplace David Layzer Ernst Mach Henry Margenau James Clerk Maxwell Ernst Mayr Jacques Monod Steven Pinker Max Planck Henri Poincaré Erwin Schrödinger Herbert Simon B. F. Skinner William Thomson (Kelvin) John von Neumann Daniel Wegner Steven Weinberg |
Extreme Libertarianism
"Extreme" libertarians believe that one's actions are not determined by anything prior to a decision, including one's character and values, and one's feelings and desires, in short, one's motives and reasons. Their model of free will is not "reasons responsive."
This idea, that determination by reasons and motives implies or entails strict causal determinism or even pre-determinism, is the Determination Fallacy.
Extreme libertarians insist that pure chance, irreducible randomness, or quantum indeterminacy, must be involved directly in our decisions as causes of our thoughts and actions.
By contrast, "Modest" - or "Adequate" or "Conservative" - libertarians believe that humans are free from strict physical determinism - or pre-determinism, and all the other diverse forms of determinism. But they do not believe that chance is the direct cause of actions. That would preclude control of the agent's actions and deny moral responsibility.
Libertarians are incompatibilists who believe that determinism and free will can not both be "true." Freedom requires some form of indeterminism. This need only be the first stage in a mental deliberation process. This stage generates the alternative possibilities needed for deliberation and evaluation.
Two-stage models of free will also require determination of the action by the agent's motives and reasons, following deliberation and evaluation of the alternative possibilities for action provided by that indeterminism.
Critics of libertarianism (determinists and compatibilists) are really attacking the extreme libertarian view. If an agent's decisions are not connected in any way with character and other personal properties, they rightly claim that the agent can hardly be held responsible for them.
Many determinists and compatibilists now accept the idea that there is real indeterminism in the universe. Conservative libertarians agree with them that if indeterministic chance were the direct direct cause of our actions, that would not be freedom with responsibility.
Even determinists might also agree that if chance is not a direct cause of our actions, it would do no harm to responsibility. In which case, conservative libertarians should be able to convince determinists that if chance is limited to providing real alternative possibilities to be considered by the adequately determined will, it provides an intelligible freedom and can explains creativity.
Conservative libertarians can give the determinists, at least the compatibilists, the kind of freedom they say they want, one that provides an adequately determined will and actions for which we can take responsibility.
Even the current chief spokesman for libertarianism, Robert Kane admits that "extreme" libertarian accounts of free will are unintelligible. No coherent idea can be provided for the role of indeterminism and chance, he says.
But Kane insists that "something more" is needed beyond simple determination of our thoughts and actions by our desires and feelings, our character and values, and our motives and reasons.
Yet, as Dennett and Mele also admit, a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For Mike does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. Mike does have some control after the chance considerations have occurred.Two-stage models for free will, especially the latest I-Phi Cogito model that has located the contribution of randomness as noise in information processing, leads us to a new conservative libertarianism that is less "free" perhaps than radical libertarianism, but distinctly more "willful" and more responsible. For Teachers
References:
Dennett, D. C. (1978). Brainstorms : philosophical essays on mind and psychology. Montgomery, Vt., Bradford Books. (see "Giving the Libertarians What They Say They Want.")
Kane, R. (2001). The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press.
For Scholars
Notes:
1. Clarke, Randolph (2003), Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, p.xiii. Accounts of free will purport to tell us what is required if we are to be free agents, individuals who, at least sometimes when we act, act freely. Libertarian accounts, of course, include a requirement of indeterminism of one sort or another somewhere in the processes leading to free actions. But while proponents of such views take determinism to preclude free will, indeterminism is widely held to be no more hospitable. An undetermined action, it is said would be random or arbitrary. It could not be rational or rationally explicable. The agent would lack control over her behavior. At best, indeterminism in the processes leading to our actions would be superfluous, adding nothing of value even if it did not detract from what we want. 2. Honderich, Ted (2002), How Free Are You?, p.5. "Maybe it should have been called determinism-where-it-matters. It allows that there is or may be some indeterminism but only at what is called the micro-level of our existence, the level of the small particles of our bodies." 3. Searle, John (2004), Freedom and Neurobiology, p.74-75. "First we know that our experiences of free action contain both indeterminism and rationality...Second we know that quantum indeterminacy is the only form of indeterminism that is indisputably established as a fact of nature...it follows that quantum mechanics must enter into the explanation of consciousness."
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