i don't see it that way. you can say if we are ever going to stop the punishment stuff, it is already determined. however, discussions like this could be what actually led to things changing. say someone beats their dog. you could say they have no free will. they were determined to be someone who beats their dog UP TO THAT TIME. now say that person is exposed to someone who teaches why punishment is incorrect. they may not be so punishing now towards their dog.
FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM The idea of human freedom antedates philosophical speculation on this idea. When philosophers began to inquire into the nature and existence of freedom, they did not initially think of freedom as an attribute of a man's will. For example, no theoretical discussion of the concept of will appears in the works of Plato, and therefore, no talk about the freedom of the will. Nonetheless, Plato had definite ideas regarding the conditions under which a man is free. A man is free when the rational part of his soul governs the other parts, viz., the feelings and passions. A man may thus be enslaved by his feelings or passions if they dominate his being. Governance by reason produces harmony and justice; in the individual, justice is conceived as the state of the soul in which each part performs only its proper function in harmony with all other functions. A man is liable to sin if his soul is unjust; but the sin is involuntary for no man would knowingly choose to be in this state. Nor does a just man choose evil volun- tarily for the explanation of this choice is always ig- norance. Hence, according to Plato, a person in whom reason reigns, and who possesses knowledge, can do no evil. Since a man incurs responsibility only for his volun- tary actions, Aristotle undertakes an ethical and psy- chological inquiry into the voluntary. An act is un- willed if its moving principle is outside the person, i.e., the person is acting under compulsion, or if the act can be explained by reference to the person's igno- rance. Aristotle makes two qualifications regarding the second way in which an act can be unwilled: (1) if a man does not regret having performed the act once his ignorance is removed, the act may be said to have been involuntary rather than unwilled; (2) the igno- rance must be about circumstances and consequences, not moral principles. A man who acts contrary to a moral principle whose truth he refuses to acknowledge is acting willingly (assuming he is not acting under compulsion or through ignorance of circumstances and consequences) and wickedly (Wheelright, p. 203). If a man chooses to do something out of some desire or even a strong or sudden impulse, the moving princi- ple is in the man and he is, therefore, acting willingly. Aristotle does not require for voluntariness, therefore, what libertarians will later require for freedom; to wit, that the act be caused by the actor or agent rather than some state of the agent, e.g., a desire. Choice is not identical with desire (choice has to do with matters in our power whereas desire is not so restricted) or with any cognitive state like belief or opinion (choices are good or bad whereas beliefs are true or false). It is a voluntary act preceded by deliberation in which a desire for some end is trans- formed into a desire for the means deemed appropriate to that end. Assuming that the chosen act is done willingly, it may be a virtuous or a vicious act. Virtue and vice, therefore, are voluntary. Moreover, a man may be responsible for the ignorance that makes his act unwilled and for the original choices that deter- mined his present character, even if it is not now within his power to act contrary to his character. Neither Plato nor Aristotle philosophized about man's freedom or responsibility in the light of problems that are raised by a conception of the world as a mechanism governed entirely by inviolable laws. The Stoic philosophers confronted this issue, but failed to provide a satisfactory account. They accepted a thoroughgoing materialistic determinismâeverything necessarily obeys the order of nature, which was also conceived as Providence and thought of as a material entity. But this determinism turns out not to be really thoroughgoing, for, although man's actions are deter- mined, his attitudes and impressions, particularly his judgments about good and evil, are not. Since a man's attitude or intention is the sole determinant of moral good or evil, what happens to a man or what a man does is morally neutral. Hence, Providence, who de- termines what happens in the world rather than man's reaction to it, is absolved from the responsibility for moral evil.
Since a man's attitude or intention determines moral good or evil, i.e., virtue or vice, the only vice is the wrong attitude, i.e., judging that things really are evil. Hence, resignation or subordination to nature is the correct attitude. It is the attitude demanded by man's reason, which is an emanation of Providence. But, of course, man has it within his power to accept or reject the dictates of his own reason. (This conception of freedom is similar to a conception that appears in determinists at several points in the history of philoso- phy, viz., the idea that freedom is the recognition of necessity, i.e., the acceptance of the world as it has to be. See the discussion below of Spinoza.) This atti- tude of acceptance requires the suppression of passion and emotion, for these involve mistaken judgments about things, e.g., that some object is intrinsically desirable. This consequence of Stoic doctrine seems to imply a contradiction, however, for a part of nature, man's passionate nature, is being morally condemned. Some Stoics, grappling with the inconsistencies and other problems of their doctrine, attempted solutions. In the third century B.C. Cleanthes, for example, argued that foreordination by Providence does not imply that an action not performed is not possible. Epicurus had previously believed, however, that the validation of man's sense of freedom requires an in- deterministic world. He introduced into the doctrine of atomism, which he accepted, the idea that atoms spontaneously swerve and saw this spontaneity as the basis of a genuine control and direction by a person over his own actions and destiny. As the Epicurean Lucretius (first century B.C.) expressed it, we can act freely because the atoms of which the mind is com- posed can swerve minutely, transmitting their motion to the body. The first great Christian philosopher to grapple with the problem of human freedom in the light of Christian theology was Saint Augustine. Since Christianity im- posed certain moral obligations on man, it appeared to follow that man's will must be free. For if man's will is under constraint, God cannot legitimately make demands upon him and then punish him if the demands are not satisfied. The fundamental obligation man is under, according to Augustine, is the obligation to turn to and love God. Hence, man's will is free to turn to or turn away from God. The freedom of the will is evident from the fact that man chooses one or the other. A will that freely turns from God lacks a certain right order. The man himself, not God, is responsible for this absence and God cannot, therefore, be blamed for moral evil, i.e., for the lack in the man's will. But Augustine also maintained that a will cannot have right order without God's grace. A will is motivated by love; hence a good will must be motivated by the love of God. But it is God, through grace, that implants in man the seeds of man's love of God. A creature without grace will delight in the wrong objects. How free is man's will, then, if man depends so completely on God's grace? Although it is not entirely clear how Augustine dealt with this apparent conflict, he seems to have resolved it in the following way. Since free will is the ability to choose and since men do choose throughout their lives, all men have free will regardless of their state of grace. It is absurd to suggest that an act of will may not be free if freedom is the ability to will. But free will is not useful without grace. Once man is given grace, he has the ability to use his free will to attain union with God. Moreover, the fact that God knows beforehand how man will choose does not negate the freedom of will. To know what a man will do is not to constrain him to do it. God knows how man will freely choose.
Saint Thomas Aquinas also accepted the reality of free will. He believed, as did Augustine, that man's ultimate happiness or fulfillment is found only in God. If all men fully recognized this fact, they would choose God because man's will necessarily chooses what it conceives to be good or desirable. The will's being under this necessity does not preclude its being free for two reasons: (1) the necessity is not coercion since no external agent imposes itself upon the will inde- pendent of the will's inclinations. This distinction is similar to a distinction that will become central to the âreconciliationistâ approach to free will (the view that there is no incompatibility between determinism and free will) as presented in Hume. As we shall see, Hume distinguishes coercion or compulsion from ordinary causation which, he maintains, involves no objective necessity. (2) Although a man must choose what he deems to be good, his judgment that something is good or bad is not necessitated. Hence the freedom of choice is the freedom of judgment that guides the will. A choice is free, therefore, if it is the product of deliberation involving free judgments. An animal's judgment is not free because it flows from a natural instinct rather than rational deliberation. The factor in rational deliberation that confers freedom upon the resultant judgment is the lack of a necessary connection between deliberation and judgment. Each potential act may be viewed by the person under its good aspects or under its bad aspects. Although the person must choose the act he believes to be good, he is free to confer this goodness on virtually any object because he is free to view the object in different ways. In the seventeenth century, the views of Benedict Spinoza on freedom are strikingly similar, in tone and content, to the ideas of the Stoics. Both accepted determinism; but Spinoza, unlike the Stoics, was unwavering in his application of determinism to the psychological domain. The behavior and mental life of human beings are completely determined and can- not, therefore, be different from what they are. We often think we are free or choose freely in a sense implying the absence of causal determination; but this belief is a consequence of our ignorance of the causes that determined our action or choice. Because the term âfree willâ was often used to explain behavior that was believed to be immune to explanation by underlying causes, Spinoza rejected this view of the concept. Moreover, it is absurd to praise and blame people since they are and do what they must be and do. We should rather seek to understand the causes of their actions and states of mind. Like the Stoics, Spinoza felt that the wise man would react to universal determinism in two ways: (1) he would, of course, acquiesce; and (2) he would seek knowledge of the causes of his own behavior in order to understand his position in nature. The latter takes on added significance in the light of Spinoza's meta- physical system. He believed that âmindâ and âbodyâ are not the names of distinct substances that jointly comprise man, but are rather the names of two differ- ent ways of conceiving the unitary man. Hence, every bodily state can be conceived as a mental one, and conversely. The ideas of an ignorant man will not be connected logically because ignorance is the lack of knowledge of causes, and causal knowledge, according to Spinoza, is expressed in a deductive system where ideas depend on one another logically. The bodily aspect of ignorance is the predominance of passive emotions, emotions like love and hate that reflect the passive reaction to things that conduce to or detract from pleasure or vitality. As a man's intelligence in- creases and his ideas begin to succeed one another logically, his emotions will become active, i.e., they will be generated by mental activity itself. He will pursue his own interests and seek the friendship of others, guided by reason alone. He will be objective, resolute, happy, and free of pettiness. This develop- ment also represents an increase in perfection and freedom. Spinoza speaks of freedom because, under man's mental and physical aspects, man will be (rela- tively) free of external influence, his states and activi- ties resulting rather from his own causal activity. His ideas will be the results of other ideas, and his emotions
and actions will be determined by his own mental activity. In general terms, therefore, Spinoza conceived of freedom as self-determinism, not indeterminism. The views of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on freedom are also intimately bound up with his metaphysical outlook. Like Spinoza, he rejected any conception of freedom based on the assumption that a choice is undetermined (philosophers often call this conception of freedom the âliberty of indifferenceâ). Any choice is determined by a combination of nonrational factors, i.e., feelings, together with a rational appraisal whose purpose is the selection of the act that appears to be for the best. An act is free if the predominant compo- nent in its determination is the man's reason or intelli- gence. But, according to Leibniz' metaphysical system, each individual person's life is the necessary unravel- ling of his given nature. Thus, all acts are necessary, including, therefore, free acts. Leibniz may be classified as a âreconciliationistâ because he tried to reconcile this metaphysical theory of necessity with his belief in freedom. His task was more difficult than the analo- gous task for reconciliationists like David Hume and Moritz Schlick because the latter two denied the exist- ence of objective necessity. In this regard, Leibniz distinguished necessity from compulsion, the latter, of course, being incompatible with freedom, and made distinctions among different types of necessity (meta- physical, moral, and physical). John Locke defined freedom as the power a person has to act in accordance with his will. Sense experience does not provide man with a clear idea of any power. So reflection, or the mind's experience of its own activities, is the source of all knowledge of power, including, of course, the knowledge of freedom. Free- dom is the opposite of necessity; but Locke defines a voluntary act as one that is preferred by the agent even if the act is not free, i.e., even if the act is performed necessarily. Will, like freedom, is defined as a power of a person, to wit, the power to will or to perform that act of preference or thought that sometimes gives rise to the preferred act. Since freedom and will are powers of persons, freedom cannot meaningfully be predicated of the will; hence, there is no genuine concept of free will. Locke is forced to concede, however, that the con- cern about free will is genuine because it is the concern about the freedom to will rather than the freedom of will. Locke initially denies this freedom on the ground that a man must choose some alternative in a decision- making situation. Realizing that the question does not concern the freedom to make some choice, but rather the freedom to make a specific choice, Locke examines the status of the question, âIs he free to will A?â He concludes that the question is absurd because the an- swer is a tautology. A man cannot but have it in his power to will what he in fact wills. Locke fails to see that the concern here is not with whether or not a man can will what he does will (since he does will A, he can will A), but whether or not he can will what he does not will. For if willing A is the only act of will in his power, it looks as if the act is not free in some important sense of âfree.â Locke added a section on the determination of the will to the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). His psychology is hedonisticâman's will is always determined by a state of uneasiness and, given that he believes this state can be removed, he will act accordingly, priorities being determined by the relative urgencies of the uneasy states. Into this mechanistic picture, Locke introduced âfree-willâ as the power to prevent desire or uneasiness from determining the will. But this turns out not to be a concession to indeterminism, but rather to those who identify freedom with rational action, e.g., Leibniz. For the interruption of the mechanical work- ings of the will is due to a judgment formed as the result of deliberation and consideration of alternative courses of action. Thus, a man may foresee that an act he would perform has an undesirable consequence and this judgment, rather than the uneasiness that would lead to the act, determines the will to refrain from that act. In reply to the charge that a âfree-willâ is incompatible with a determined will, even if reason determines the will, Locke presents his case against the advocates of the liberty of indifference, arguing that freedom cannot be conceived as the irrelevance of our judgments to our will. A conception of freedom similar to Locke's âfree-willâ was also advanced by René Descartes. Although the view that determinism is true and compatible with the existence of free will has been held by a number of philosophers, contemporary thinkers associate Hume's name, more than any other, with this doctrine. The belief that all physical events have causes such that a given physical event must occur if the event that always caused it in the past recurs is a belief that has equal validity in the psychological sphere. We can predict how any human being will behave if we have a complete knowledge of his motives, circumstances, background, etc. Since determinism is true even in psychology, there is no liberty of indifference. But Hume agreed with Locke that the existence of such liberty would not be worthwhile anyway. A man who had this sort of liberty would not be a genuinely re- sponsible agent. It would be pointless, for example, to