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Is Free Will Incompatible with Something or Other?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
Professor Vesey poses the following question:
…philosophers talk of ‘free will’ with a view to justifying our engaging in the practice of treating people as responsible for what they do. But why do we feel the need for a justification? It is because they want, also, to engage in the practice of looking for (motor) causes of everything that happens, and feel that the two practices are somehow incompatible? If so, then it is very paradoxical that they should turn to Descartes, and his theory of willing. Descartes' answer to the question ‘What does a person do immediately?’, namely ‘He performs an act of will’, has what I call ‘the incompatibility feature’, whereas Aristotle's answer has not. Why are they not content to say, with Aristotle, that the two practices are compatible, and hence there is no need for a justification?
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1988
References
Notes
1 P. 82.
2 P. 86.
3 See Descartes' Philosophical Writings, tr. Kemp-Smith, N. (London: Macmillan, 1952)Google Scholar, Meditation IV, 232ff Google Scholar. Thus, for Descartes, Reason is perfect, and cannot mislead us; but the will, being perfect, can will anything, including the acceptance of beliefs against all reason, or beyond what reason allows. It is because of this that while the faculties of reason and will are both perfect, we can have erroneous beliefs. This particular doctrine of Descartes' is not one which appeals to many, including many of the most inveterate Cartesian mind-body dualists. I would not reject it entirely; I think a distinction can be made between believing and freely believing which is parallel to that between willing and freely willing. But it is only the latter distinction with which I can be concerned here.
4 P. 85.
5 Ryle, G., The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), Ch. III.Google Scholar
6 Hume, D., An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, Selby-Bigge, L. A. (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), App. 1, 293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Kant, I., Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Paton, H. J. as The Moral Law (London: Hutchinson, 1948).Google Scholar
8 This does not mean I cannot give any explanations of our actions. Biographical narrative is no more devoid of explanation than is history. Neither constitutes theory.
9 Descartes Selections, Eaton, M. (ed.) (New York: Scribners, 1927)Google Scholar; Automatism of Brutes: Letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, 335ff.Google Scholar
10 Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Kemp-Smith, N. (London: Macmillan, 1929), 449ff.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., 218–233.
12 Ibid., 212–217.
13 Ibid., 227.
14 Ibid., 221.
15 Hume, D., op. cit., Sect. VII, Part II, 73.Google Scholar
16 Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigg, L. A. (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 4–5.Google Scholar
17 Ibid., xvi.