How Free is Free Will?
11:53:00 AMUnknown
One of the hallmarks of a personalist view of man is the characterization of him as “radically free”. Flowing forth from man’s inner centre of subjectivity is the capacity to choose in an autonomous manner - that is, undetermined by external force or internal compulsion. He is one of the few beings - and the only embodied being - that can claim such a capacity.
Perhaps before delving into the preceding question, it would be good to contrast libertarian free will with determinism and compatibilism. For determinism, man is determined, and, as a result of such, is not free. For compatibilism, man is determined, but, despite such, is free. For libertarian free will, man in ultimately undetermined, and, as a result of such, is free. This final view is what is meant by the “radical freedom” spoken of by personalists, existentialists, and Kantians alike. To continue this present investigation, the qualities of a libertarian free will be analyzed. Kant speaks of freedom as “ ... that property [the will] by which it can be effective independent of foreign causes determining it …” (1) Freedom is autonomy, the “being effective independent of foreign causes”. In other words, to be free is to be ultimately responsible for whatever actions are carried out, and so to be the ultimate agent that carries out those actions.
Campbell would agree that freedom entails ultimate agency. Furthermore, he adds that freedom regards contingent things - it cannot be necessary. As he argues in his well-known essay, “ … our praise and blame … are really retrospective, being directed not to the agent qua performing this act, but to the agent qua performing those past acts which have built up his present character, and in respect to which we presume that he could have acted otherwise, that there really were open possibilities before him.” (2) Following the recognizing of these qualities, a first “limit” upon free will becomes obvious. Namely, a free being must be the sole author of his actions, actions that could have been done otherwise. However, this analytic concept is far from revelatory. To conclude that a free being acting freely must do so in a manner that makes the actions free is not remarkable; it is, in fact, tautological.
There are many other possible limits to freedom; the scope of this particular examination of such is limited. This being said, a basic pattern might be observed from the few so-called “limits” already proposed: they are either analytic (known through an understanding of what freedom is, and so already included in the concept of freedom) or not related to freedom per se. From this, it might be concluded (very tentatively, considering the above-mentioned scope), that freedom is self-limited. This is to say that the only limits to freedom in a libertarian sense are the limits of definition.
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- Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 63.
- C.A. Campbell, “Has the Self ‘Free Will”, 3.
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