Topics Freedom

Question My question is about the free will problem. I hope it is not too stupid or anything. Many philosophers seem to argue against free will like this: "Either everything has a cause or not. If everything does have a cause, then it looks like you have no free will, because the chain of causes leading to your actions began before you were born. And if not everything has a cause, if in particular some of your actions are uncaused, then that doesn't seem like free will either. It seems just like a random event." This is from what Peter Lipton wrote in another question. I don't understand why if it is true that not everything has a cause, it must also be true that an uncaused event must be a "random" event. Suppose that a Cartesian "soul" caused an event, but there was no prior cause for the soul's causation of the event. That doesn't seem like a random event, it seems like an event which was caused by the soul, but which was not caused by anything else. To me it looks like this would be compatible with free will, because the soul is choosing something. I know that there are other objections which might be made against this sort of picture, but doesn't it at least avoid the argument that an uncaused event is random and so incompatible with free will?

Accepted:
September 17, 2006

Comments

In your scenario, the soul caused an event, but nothing caused the soul. But presumably the cause of the event is some configuration of the soul, perhaps a decision it made. Well was this decision caused or not? If it was caused, then there still doesn't seem to be any free will in the frame; and if that configuration of the soul was uncaused -- just came out of the blue -- then that seems random and again not compatible with free will.

When you say that a 'soul' caused the event, I guess you are referring to (i) something distinctively mental (like a decision, a belief, a judgement), rather than something physical; (ii) something that belongs to or is inside that soul, rather than something extrinsic to it.The first of these takes the decision out of the realm of physical causation. It happens to be the case that when we think of causation, we usually think of physical causation. But, of course, there can be causation between mental events too: if I say ‘Mary had a little’, you think ‘lamb’. (Let’s not worry about HOW mental causation happens.) So, the soul makes a decision, but what caused the decision are the set of beliefs and moral convictions the soul has about its world, and what caused those beliefs or convictions is … and so on. If this chain of causes leads back to evidence or principle, and if relations between the beliefs/ convictions and my decision is rational however, then we are saying something interesting. Namely, that my decision was based upon well-formed beliefs, and follows rationally from those beliefs. When this notion is combined with the idea of something that belongs to or is inside the soul, we arrive at a description of a ‘unfree’ action which is also precisely what many mean by ‘free will’, when that concept is analysed.