Free Will & Determinism

Question 1

P. F. Strawson on moral responsibility and determinism and its objection

Answer 1

holding someone morally responsible is to have a morally reactive attitude towards their actions - these attitudes are the basis for our practices of moral responsibility
but, this does not show that we have moral responsibility, but rather the illusion of it

Question 2

what is the idea about values from Nietzsche as revived by strawson?

Answer 2

you do not choose the values with which you make your choice

Question 3

Locke on free will quote

Answer 3

Liberty is defined as “the power to act or not act according as the mind desires”

Question 4

what is the consequence argument

Answer 4

1. no one has power over the facts of the past and laws of nature
2. no one can change causal necessity between facts of the past, laws of nature, and facts of the future
3. therefore no one has power over the facts of the future

Question 5

Principle of alternate possibilities

Answer 5

an action is free only if the agent could have done otherwise

Question 6

Eddie Nahmias

Answer 6

Consciousness means that we do have free will

Question 7

Reductionism

Answer 7

The view that all parts of the world, and all our experience, can be traced back or reduced down, to one singular thing.

Question 8

what are the 3 main criticisms to home’s compatibilism?

Answer 8

1. Moritz Schlick - credits hum with being clear that morality is interested in freedom of conduct, not freedom of will
2. Is constant conjuncture of motive and action justifiable?
   a. what if undetected difference in causes is hormonal, not psychological?
   b. our will is determined by causes prior to us, why not attribute responsibility to them?
   use strawson here
3. Compulsive behaviour - stems from our will
4. Nietzche and strawson on values

Question 9

summarise Charles Taylor’s position on moral responsibility

Answer 9

argues that a person can raise the question, ‘do I really want to be the person I am now?’ and hence the fact that we, no matter our predetermined reasons, still resolve to be a certain way - this is where we are responsible for ourselves

Question 10

Soft determinism

Answer 10

Freedom means absence of constraints

Question 11

Greg Caruso

Answer 11

Punishment can still be justified in spite of determinism: public health quarantine model

Question 13

Kane’s definition of free will

Answer 13

‘The power to be the ultimate creator and sustainer of one’s own ends or purposes’

Question 14

Summarise ted honderich’s position

Answer 14

Who we are as agents is entirely caused by the causal pathways in our brains; there cannot be something above the brain

Question 15

Chriticisms of Calvinism

Answer 15

Why would Christ suffer punishment for the sins of those god chose not to save?

If god predestined everything, the he actively chose to eternally condemn some

Question 16

Criticisms of Kane

Answer 16

Clarke - Kane’s depiction is actually a form of compatibilism

Strawson- free will is impossible because no one is ever ultimately responsible; we cannot be causa Sui

Dennet- Kane believes freedom is based on rare exceptional events, but there is no guarantee that such an event will occur

Smilansky- whether this effort to change character will bear fruit or not is arbitrary and not under the agent’s control

Question 16

Frankfurt’s compatibilism

Answer 16

Rejects “could have done otherwise” being a condition for free will

Question 17

Al Mele

Answer 17

Whether determinism or randomness, either way we are not free

Question 18

TULIP

Answer 18

Total depravity
Unconditional election 
Limited atonement
Irresistable grace
Perseverance of the saints

Question 18

Baron D’holbach On Determinism

Answer 18

‘Everything, is the inevitable result of what came before. Including everything that we do’

Question 20

Significance of Oedipus

Answer 20

There is no escaping fate: our fates are determined so we aren’t free.

Question 21

Leibniz’ compatibilism

Answer 21

Incline without necessitating - prior causes to not determine action or choice, they merely incline without necessitating

Question 21

Define determinism

Answer 21

The view that given the state of the universe and the laws of nature, only one unique state of the universe can occur next

Assumed: 1. Universal causation 2. Causal necessity

Question 22

Ted Honderich On Hard Determinism

Answer 22

‘All our choices, decisions… and our actions are no more than effects of other equally necessitated events’

Question 23

Define Hard Determinism

Answer 23

The belief that all events are caused by past events such that nothing other than what does occur could occur. Freedom is an illusion.

Question 25

Define libertarianism

Answer 25

The belief that some actions are freely chosen

Question 25

Agent causation

Answer 25

An agent can start a whole chain of causality that wasn’t caused by anything else

Question 27

bruce waller on chance and morality

Answer 27

two people have the exact same past, one lies and the other tells the truth, what are our grounds for distinguishing between them and praising one whilst blaming the other?

Question 28

Schrodinger’s equation

Answer 28

Shows the sub atomic states change in a perfectly regular manner

Question 29

Summarise Harris’ position

Answer 29

We don’t have conscious authorship over our thoughts.

There is no way of combining chance and determinism to make sense of free will

Question 30

case study for Determinism

Answer 30

In 2000 a 40 year old man was arrested for molesting his 8 year old step daughter.

Brain scan revealed a tumour in his orbital cortex known to control sexual impulse. When tumour was removed, so was his sexual impulses.

Was paedophilia inducing brain tumour determined by a medical condition? Or did he freely act?

Question 31

Frankfurt cases

Answer 31

Harry frankfurt argues that an agent could be morally responsible for what he does even when he couldn’t have done otherwise. Can you be responsible without being able to do otherwise?

Question 32

Patricia churchland

Answer 32

Contemporary Canadian-American philosopher argues that as social animals we can’t help but hold people morally responsible and assigning blame or praise to their actions. We should ask how much control we have in order to understand how much responsibility we have.

Question 33

Buridan’s Ass?

Answer 33

A starving donkey between 2 equally big and equally delicious bales of hay starves to death

Question 34

Leibniz’s law?

Answer 34

Nihil Sine Ratione (nothing is without reason)

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit (nothing comes out of nothing)

Question 35

Schopenhauer Soft Determinism quote

Answer 35

‘You can do what you will but you cannot will what you will’

Question 36

What do libertarians respond to theological determinism?

Answer 36

God’s foreknowledge is acausal

Question 37

Where is Kane’s emphasis on?

Answer 37

Works on non-deterministic quantum processes

Question 38

The Copenhagen Interpretation

Answer 38

Refers to quantum mechanical Indeterminism as the basis for free will.

The existence of an observer is required to collapse the wave-function of quantum mechanical probabilities into ‘hard’ reality’.

The CI is denied by other interpretations like the deterministic ‘Many Worlds view’

Question 38

Hawking on Free Will

Answer 38

He says that chaos theory (the fact that Deterministic events can be entirely unpredictable) gives us free will

Question 39

The ‘locus classicus’ position of libertarianism

Answer 39

Mind / brain dualism: a Non- material mind exists alongside the physical brain and acts as the causal agent for thought & decision making in a way that overrides the physical causality entailed by the laws of physics

Question 40

Hume’s quote on soft Determinism

Answer 40

‘By liberty… we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may’

Question 41

Ted Honderich quote on hard Determinism (subject to fallacy of composition)

Answer 41

‘It would be a strange machine whose elements were all causal but whose large substructures were not’

• Honderich rejects the idea that indeterminism at a quantum level can travel up the causal chain, but if he’s using this argument surely Indeterminism can be attributed to the whole too?

Question 42

Laplace’s demon

Answer 42

The first published articulation of causal determinism by Laplace, 1814.

If the demon knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed and can be calculated using the laws of classical mechanics.