Free Will

As agreed last Friday, the topic for the next meeting will be free will. This is an important topic in several ways. Free will has an important role in many arguments for and against the existence of god(s) and what his/their nature may be. It is also crucial to public policy, as our view on free will shapes whether we believe people can be held morally responsible for their actions. If we believe they cannot, it may be argued that it is inappropriate for legal sentences to contain any retributive element.

Here is some interesting material on free will which you may like to dip into (although, as discussed, this is not essential). There are a combination of podcasts, web pages, pdfs and books (which may be available from a library, bookshop or, where I have provided a link, free in the web in pdf or ebook form). If you want to read the books on the bus then, in addition to the library and bookshop options, I have found ebook readers like the Kindle or Sony Reader to be very convenient and pleasant to use. iPads and laptops can do the same job but they run out of batteries much faster and are harder on the eyes, especially in sunlight.

BBC Radio 4 "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg. 45 minute discussion about free will from 10 March 2011, between Lord (!) Bragg and three philosophers with charming accents.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z

I found this fascinating. Unfortunately, the BBC has a policy of moving the podcasts after six months from downloadable form to one in which you can only listen live on the computer, so you can't put it on an mp3 player and listen while jogging or in bed. I do have the MP3 file though, which is 19.4MB, so if you would like that and you don't think your email service will block it as too big, email me and I'll send it to you.

That BBC web page also provides a list of background materials, most of which are books, hence very suitable for bus trips if you can get hold of one. One that is also available for free in pdf or ebook form is An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Section 8, entitled "Liberty and necessity", discusses free will. It's a bit hard to read because of the 18th century language, but worth the effort. The Schopenhauer book on free will should also be freely available on the web as an ebook or pdf.

ABC Radio National Philosopher's Zone 16 April 2011.

Free will and the courts

The ABC's Alan Saunders talks to two lawyers, one of whom is also a philosopher, about the extent to which we can hold people accountable for their actions. It's downloadable as an MP3. The web page also has a transcript available for those who prefer reading to listening. Note the reference to Compatibilism (misspelt as compatiblism, in case you're text-searching for it) near the end. Compatibilism is an important view of free-will that is quite widely held amongst philosophers today. There's a short wikipedia article that describes Compatibilism quite well.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a marvellous resource!) has a chapter on free will, which explains and discusses the main issues. It also has quite a long article on Compatibilism, if you want to get really into that.

The 17th century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza believed that free will is an illusion. This university assignment spec discusses Spinoza's views and links to some relevant short excerpts from Spinoza's writings. Here is a link to Spinoza's magnum opus, The Ethics if you want to see the context in which those excerpts appear.

The Catholic Church maintains the existence of free will as a core belief. The church's position is described in this article from the Catholic Encyclopaedia. The article asserts that both Martin Luther and John Calvin denied free will, which might imply that the Lutheran and Calvinist branches of Protestant Christianity do not believe in free will. This interpretation of Luther and Calvin is widely but not universally held. Luther and Calvin believed in 'predestination' - that it is determined in advance for each of us whether we will be saved by God's grace - but some Calvinists and Lutherans assert a subtle distinction (perhaps too subtle for me) between predestination and lack of free will.

My understanding is that Moslems mostly believe in predestination, although this is disputed.

This Wikipedia article discusses the views of various religions on free will.

The 'Problem of Evil' is the question of how an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God could allow suffering to exist in the world. Theodicy is the name for theological responses to this question. The most usual basis of a response relies on the existence of free will, an idea proposed by Saint Augustine around 400AD. Here is a short article by a Christian arguing that the world must contain both moral and natural evil because otherwise there could be no free will.

Alvin Plantinga is a well-known Christian philosopher who uses free will as a defence to the problem of evil in a slightly different way. This wikipedia article briefly explains Plantinga's argument and some criticisms of it.

Here is a page with a series of MP3 sermons by what sounds like a Southern US states preacher, all on different aspects of free will. I haven't listened to much of them, but they may be good material for mp3 players while driving, jogging or trying to get to sleep.

I find it a little hard to understand the Southern accent, so here's a softer Yankee one, giving a seminar on free will (1hr 45 mins MP3) to the Anglican Church League in Sydney. He seems to touch on a number of the different approaches people have to free will. He says at the beginning that he personally believes in free will, in some sense.

Bertrand Russell thought that free will was probably, but not certainly, an illusion, as the quote below shows. The quote is from Russell's 1913 essay entitled "On the Notion of Cause". I wouldn't recommend reading the whole essay for this meeting unless you're really keen, as it's dealing with causality, which is a mostly different and possibly even more difficult subject. Perhaps we'll have a meeting on causality some time in the future. If you want a hard copy, the essay is published in Russell's book "Essays on Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays", available in many libraries.

"Finally we considered the problem of free will: here we found that the reasons for supposing volitions to be determined are strong but not conclusive, and we decided that even if volitions are mechanically determined, that is no reason for denying freedom in the sense revealed by introspection, or for supposing that mechanical events

are not determined by volitions. The problem of free will versus determinism is therefore, if we were right, mainly illusory, but in part not yet capable of being decisively solved."

Here are the results of a large international survey of the beliefs of philosophers on various issues. Compatibilism is the most common view of free will, with Libertarianism (belief in free will ) at around 15%. Mind you, philosophers' views on many of the issues listed there are very different from population norms.

Here's a wikipedia article about the neuroscience of free will. Neuroscientists have conducted experiments - not without controversy - to attempt to understand the extent to which our decisions are already made subconsciously before we become aware of them.