Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 What is free will?
- 3 Obscure and panicky metaphysics
- 4 A glaring absurdity
- 5 Weeds in the garden of forking paths
- 6 A wretched subterfuge
- 7 The quagmire of evasion
- 8 Of puppies and polyps
- 9 Two overridden and wearied nags
- 10 Whither free will?
- Further reading: a personal top ten
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Two overridden and wearied nags
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 What is free will?
- 3 Obscure and panicky metaphysics
- 4 A glaring absurdity
- 5 Weeds in the garden of forking paths
- 6 A wretched subterfuge
- 7 The quagmire of evasion
- 8 Of puppies and polyps
- 9 Two overridden and wearied nags
- 10 Whither free will?
- Further reading: a personal top ten
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This principle conclusion of the book may not be right, as I am confident it is, but very certainly it is not more of the same. It is not one more attempt to have one of those two so overridden and wearied nags, Incompatibilist or Compatibilist, plod at last into the winner's enclosure. They are both put out to pasture.
Ted HonderichUp until now we have looked at libertarianism and compatibilism – and considered a number of objections that can be raised against them – from the point of view that one or the other of them may be correct. That is, I have assumed that we do have free will in some sense. But what if we do not? According to an increasing number of commentators, while we may have a certain degree of autonomy, and the ability to act rationally, intentionally, voluntarily, morally and so on, what we do not have is free will, or moral responsibility, in either a libertarian or a compatibilist sense.
Traditionally, the “third position” in the free will debate has been taken by the hard determinist. This is one who agrees with the libertarian that determinism and free will are incompatible but who denies that we have free will because he believes that we live in a deterministic universe. A more modern variation of hard determinism is to agree with the compatibilist that the libertarian is unable to answer the randomness problem (discussed in Chapter 3), but also to agree with the libertarian that the compatibilist is unable to answer the consequence argument (discussed in Chapter 6).
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Problem of Free WillA Contemporary Introduction, pp. 127 - 146Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012