One common notion of free will is the idea of choice: you have a number of options in front of you, and you pick one. Or, perhaps a better way to talk about this is like so: you have free will if you could have done otherwise than you did. A provisional definition could be this:
(T1) For any person x who performs an action A,
x performs A freely = iff
x could have done other than A.
But that's not really good enough, because a determinist who believes that our actions are causally determined by our prior histories could agree with it. Such a determinist might say: 'of course you could have done otherwise, if you had a different history.'
Well, sure, I could have done otherwise if I had a different history. But that's still deterministic: one history determines me to do certain things, and another history determines me to do other things. And that's not really what I mean when I say that I could have done otherwise. What I really mean is that I could have done otherwise, even with the same history. So we could revise T1 something like this:
(T1*) For any person x who performs an action A,
x performs A freely = iff
x could have done other than A,
given the same history.
That seems a little better.
Dignity, ecosystems and artifacts
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1.
If a part of *x* has dignity, *x* has dignity.
2.
Only persons have dignity.
3.
So, a person cannot be a proper part...
2 days ago
1 comment:
I'm with you on this, JT. And ISTM this is *another* reason for being a dualist (alongside haecceity). It is hard to see how materiality can ever do any better than (euphemistically labelled) compatibilism.
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