Whizz Through PowerPoint: Free Will And Determinism
Transcript of Whizz Through PowerPoint: Free Will And Determinism
Free Will and Determinism Revision Powerpoint
Key Words to be happy withFree will – autonomy, freedom to choose on the basis
of reasonScientific worldview - every event has a cause eg
cognitive science (the mind is like a computer)Determinism or necessity – everything is subject to
the laws of cause and effectHard determinism – free will is an illusion because
the will is causally predeterminedCompatibilism – free will is real even though the will
is causally determined: freedom requires determinism.
Libertarianism – free will is a metaphysical idea so freedom and determinism are incompatible.
Key assumptionsHard determinists assume free will means a causally
determined act over which I have no control.Compatibilists assume freedom means “absence of
constraint”.Libertarians assume freedom means “subject to
reason alone”, outside of the scientific realm of cause and effect.
Honderich’s viewpoint
Honderich is a hard determinist.Our wills are causally determined.Freedom means “without strict causal antecedents”.Free will is incompatible with determinism.Therefore we have no free will.
Hume’s viewpointNote: Bowie* incorrectly labels Hume a libertarian.
Hume is a compatibilist or soft determinist.Free will means “absence of constraint”.Constraints could be psychological (eg mental
illness), physical (eg lack of strength) or logical (eg I can’t be in two places at once).
Free will requires necessity (Hume’s word for determinism) for without a cause, our wills would be random.
AJ Ayer is a modern compatibilist (see Freedom and Reason)
*Ethical Studies 2nd edition page 93
Kant’s viewpointKant is a libertarian, and his key assumption is
autonomy (self-rule or freedom with reason).Free will belongs to the realm of ideas (the noumenal
world or world of things in themselves where concepts like space, time and causation exist).
Moral acts can only be moral if they are free, coming from reason alone (a priori reason, meaning before experience).
CA Campbell (1976) is a modern libertarian. He sees freedom at points of struggle with decisions, ie “it could have been otherwise”.
Problems with different viewpoints
Honderich’s view seems to abandon hope for controlling our futures.
Hume’s view seems to take a rather minimal view of freedom (isn’t freedom a power, as Hume himself suggests?). Key question: could I have done otherwise? Honderich says “no”.
Kant’s view seems to divide human experience between the realm of reason, of pure ideas (called the noumenal world), and the realm of cause and effect (which he calls the phenomenal world).
AJ Ayer’s viewAyer (1910-1989) argues that determinism is
misleading idea suggesting “one event is in the power of another” rather than just factually correlated. Caused does not mean forced.
Laws of nature aren’t prescriptive in the way laws of the country are prescriptive....they don’t place eg the human will under obligations. They simply lay down established patterns in the nature of things.
“The laws of mechanics do not compel the planets to move in their orbits; they simply describe planetary motion.” DJ O’Connor , Free Will (1971:73)
Behaviourism and psychologyFreud and Laplace were hard determinists (will and
conscience come from our upbringing)Skinner argues we are conditioned to behave by
experiences (Pavlov’s dog). So we can condition new types of behaviour (eg advertising…where Skinner made a fortune in the USA).
JB Watson argues that if we change people’s environment we can change their behaviour (genes and environment are important).
Some films you could mentionA Clockwork Orange takes a hard determinist view:
we are compelled by both internal and external constraints.
Truman Show starts with Truman inhabiting a hard determinist world where everything is programmed. But Truman uses reason to work this out and break out of John Locke’s locked room (see textbook for Locke’s analogy). So in the end this is a Kantian, libertarian view.