Free Will in Antiquity

Back in June, Kevin Timpe asked Gardeners for ancient references to Free Will Skepticism. 

I have just completed a study of Free Will in Antiquity as an expansion of my History of the Free Will Problem.

It tries to answer questions like who was the first determinist?, the first libertarian?, the first compatibilist?, and the first agent-causalist? And who first discovered the traditional "free will problem?" 

Candidates for the first thinkers to form these views include Democritus (460-370), Aristotle (384-322), Epicurus (341-270), the Stoic Chrysippus (280-207), and the skeptic Carneades (214-129).

Besides an overview of the development of the free will problem, I have surveyed and commented on the work of more than a dozen classicists and historians of philosophy, including  Carlo Giussani, Cyril Bailey, David Furley, Pamela Huby, Richard Sorabji, R. W. Sharples, A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, Don Fowler, Julia Annas, Jeffrey S. Purinton, Susanne Bobzien, Tim O'Keefe, and Ricardo Salles.

I hope these resources will prove useful to Gardeners in your own teaching and research on free will..

Can We Separate Free Will and Moral Responsibility?

In recent years, "free will" has become what John Fischer calls an "umbrella-term" for a large range of phenomena. He says (in his recent 4-volume Routledge anthology "Free Will," vol.I, p.xxiii)

The term is used differently by different philosophers, and I think that it is most helpful to think of it as an "umbrella-term" used to describe some sort of freedom that connects in important ways with moral responsibility, and, ultimately, person-hood. More specifically, the domain of free will includes various sorts of freedom (freedom of choice, of action, choosing and acting freely, and so forth), and the practices constitutive of moral responsibility (moral praise and blame, punishment and moral reward, and a set of distinctively moral attitudes, such as indignation, resentment, gratitude, respect, and so forth).

Some philosophers do not distinguish between freedom and moral responsibility. Put a bit more carefully, they tend to begin with the notion of moral responsibility, and "work back" to a notion of freedom; this notion of freedom is not given independent content (separate from the analysis of moral responsibility). For such philosophers, "freedom" refers to whatever conditions are involved in choosing or acting in such a way as to be morally responsible.

In the spirit of a careful conceptual (and linguistic) analysis, I think there are benefits to separating free will from moral responsibility and wonder what other gardeners think.

Moreover, I think our discussions (the dialectic) could benefit from three additional separations:

1) The separation of "free" from "will."
2) The separation of "moral" from "responsibility"
3) The separation of "moral responsibility" from "retributive punishment" (revenge).

A Flaw in the Standard Argument Against Free Will?

The simple and logical argument against free will is that either determinism or indeterminism is true.

If determinism is true, we are not free.

If indeterminism is true, our actions are random, so we did not will them.

We are not responsible either way. Ergo, no free will. Q.E.D.

The flaw in the argument concerns indeterminacy. Because logic is time and space independent, many philosophers assume that if indeterminism if true, randomness is significant and relevant at all times and all places, independent of scale or size.

But indeterminacy is normally important only for microscopic structures. Macroscopic structures, including our brains and bodies, are adequately determined - except when some useful indeterminacy helps us to generate alternative possibilities, or (and this is very important) allows us to be creative and bring genuinely new information into the universe.

So could you accept some chance in your own causal chain that would not make your decisions random?

An Exchange with Galen Strawson on Free Will

In the comments to Randy Clarke's Libertarianism and the Laws post, Eddy Nahmias asked if standard arguments could be reformulated with my "adequate determinism."

I recently exchanged emails with Galen Strawson asking him whether quantum indeterminism could be limited to the generation of alternative possibilities (and not affect the decision and action directly) without making the ultimate choice random.

Here is that exchange.

Martin Heisenberg on Free Will

This  week’s Nature magazine (14 May 2009) has an essay on free will by Martin Heisenberg (son of Werner), chair of the University of Wurzburg’s genetics and neurobiology section of their BioCenter.

Since the indeterminacy principle was his father’s work, the comment that the physical universe is no longer determined and that nature is inherently unpredictable comes as no surprise.

What is unusual is that Heisenberg finds evidence of free behavior in animals, including some very simple ones such as Drosophila, on which he is a world expert.

He says:

A Glossary of Terms in the Free Will Debates

Hi Gardeners,

Happy New Year.

I am hoping some of you might help me correct my definitions for a few dozen critical terms in the recent debates on free will and moral responsibility.

A draft glossary is on the web at www.informationphilosopher.com/afterwords/glossary/.

Philosophy undergrad students and graduates working on dissertations are accessing the site and I hope to provide them with important resources on freedom, values, and epistemology.

I have written web pages on nearly 100 philosophers and a few dozen scientists with strong opinions on these problems. My goal is to describe their work briefly and include short excerpts of their work to demonstrate their philosophizing, hopefully encouraging visitors to read more.

That includes a number of you gardeners. Some of you have suggested concepts and philosophers that I should include. Several pages are in draft form awaiting approval by individual philosophers.

Over forty "core concepts" on freedom have their own web pages linked to from here:
www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/.

The home page has links to the philosophers.
www.informationphilosopher.com/

If you can refer me to other glossaries or references that I can use to strengthen my own understanding and definitions that would be most valuable.

The glossary takes advantage of the web to include recursive links to other terms in the glossary, to I-Phi web pages on specific concepts, and external links to Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy where available.

I do the same for philosopher pages, with an automatic search link for Noesis on each one.

Thanks in advance for criticisms and suggestions for additional concepts and philosophers.

Bob (bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com)

Anti-Frankfurt Demons and Creative Possibilities

Peter van Inwagen's Consequence Argument is an attack on one horn of the two-part standard argument against free will.

informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html

This horn is the Determinism Objection. If all our actions are determined by a causal chain of prior events which goes back to long before our birth, we cannot be responsible for our actions.

The other horn of the two-part argument is the Randomness Objection. If our actions are caused by random events, or if some events in the causal chain were uncaused, we also cannot be responsible for our actions.

In either case, and many philosophers have claimed that these two horns of the dilemma exhaust the possible cases, there is no responsibility.

For many incompatibilist libertarians, van Inwagen's Consequence Argument was a success, with the result that many more thinkers today call themselves incompatibilist or at least agnostic on determinism.

I propose an attack on the other horn of the dilemma - the Randomness Objection.

Information Philosophy (I-Phi) and Free Will

Hello Gardeners,

I would like to introduce you to Information Philosophy (another way of philosophizing beyond logic and language) and especially tell you about the strong implications that I-Phi has for the problems of free will and moral responsibility. (www.informationphilosopher.com)

    What is information that merits its use as the foundation of a new philosophical method of inquiry?