www hoddereducation co ukrsreview Free will and determinism

www. hoddereducation. co. uk/rsreview Free will and determinism Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

John Locke (1632– 1704) • John Locke took a ‘hard determinist’ position. This is the belief that moral agents have only preprogrammed choices, over which they have no control. • A moral agent is not free to act — free will is no more than an illusion. Therefore, there is no need to praise good deeds because the moral agent who did them had no choice to do differently. • Equally, a moral agent cannot be blamed for a bad deed. • Locke developed his philosophical determinism theory based on universal causation. Universal causation is the belief that all human actions and choices have a past cause, leading to the conclusion that all events that happen are determined by an unbreakable chain of past causes. Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

A fixed future? • Locke postulates that, if the above view is correct, the future must logically be as fixed and unchangeable as the past. We can retrospectively look back and see the chain of causes that made us do certain actions — and this must be happening now and will continue to happen in the future. It is only retrospectively that moral agents can look back and consider the truth of Locke’s assertion. • From this theory Locke coined the phrase ‘free will is just an illusion’. This is because moral agents, who believe they have free will, think they do so only because they can reflect before making a moral choice. • However, Locke believed that all such thoughts are just the moral agent’s ignorance of universal causation. In fact, in a stinging attack on those who rejected his theory, Locke argued that the only people who do not accept hard determinism are those who do not have the intelligence to see that there are no choices to be made. Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

William James (1842– 1910) • James supported Locke’s theory and summed it up as ‘the iron block universe’. • What James meant by this is that moral agents are trapped/determined by an unbreakable (like an iron block) set of past causes that logically can be traced back to the beginning of the universe. Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

Locke’s analogy • Locke further developed his idea of universal causation by creating an analogy to illustrate his theory. • His analogy starts with a man who wakes up in a room that, unknown to him, is locked from the outside. He chooses to stay in the room, believing he has chosen freely to stay there. In reality, he has no option but to stay in the room — it is only his ignorance of the fact that the door is locked which gives him an illusion of freedom. • Locke believed this analogy clearly illustrates that free will is only an illusion; just as the man in his ignorance of the door being locked has no choice but to stay in the room, so all moral agents have no choices to make because it is just their ignorance of universal causation that gives them the false belief in free will. Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 1980) (1) • Sartre takes a ‘libertarian’ stance. • Libertarianism is the belief that moral agents are completely free to act. In terms of making moral decisions, the moral agent’s will to do a certain action is 100% their own (or at least within the constraints of physical natural laws). • Sartre’s libertarian beliefs were explicitly stated when he argued, ‘There is no determinism — man is free, man is freedom. ’ Therefore, agents are morally responsible for their own actions — moral actions are not caused by ‘the iron block universe’. • Sartre starts his libertarian theory by stating, ‘There is no God, so man must rely upon his own fallible will and moral insight. He cannot escape choosing. ’ • What Sartre meant by this is that, because there is no God, there is no higher power controlling moral agents. He believed, therefore, that humankind is condemned to freedom — in other words, moral agents have no choice but to embrace freedom. • The irony of this was not lost on Sartre when he argued that humankind is totally free to make decisions with one exception: ‘Man is not free not to be free. ’ Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 1980) (2) • Sartre believed moral agents can grasp their free-will nature because humanity possesses a consciousness of their own existence. • Sartre believed that the very nature of this consciousness is what enables moral agents to have free will. He believed that this self-consciousness enables moral agents to think about and consider the different possible futures that might come about from different actions. Therefore, moral agents can stand back from their own lives and consider them in different ways. • This, according to Sartre, opens up a distance between a moral agent’s consciousness and the physical world, with its potentially determining influences, such as universal causation. Sartre calls this distance between a moral agent’s consciousness and the physical world ‘the gap’. The gap is what allows moral agents to have free will. Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

Reverse psychology (1) • Sartre uses reverse psychology to prove that moral agents have free will to make moral decisions. • According to Sartre, humankind’s freedom is obvious because of the way moral agents go about trying to deny their own freedom. He believed freedom can bring pain, and therefore moral agents try to avoid the reality of their own freedom. • According to Sartre, moral agents create a self-deception, which he called ‘bad faith’. • Bad faith is the attempt, by moral agents, to escape pain by pretending to themselves that they are not free. • Moral agents convince themselves that their actions are determined by causes, their character, their role in life and so on. Hodder & Stoughton © 2018

Reverse psychology (2) • Therefore, Sartre’s theory supports the libertarian argument that moral agents are essentially free. • However, in Sartre’s view this is both a gift and a curse for humanity. • The gift is that a moral agent always has the freedom of making something out of their circumstances. • The curse is that this comes with the responsibility that a moral agent must shape their own lives. • With total freedom comes total responsibility. Hodder & Stoughton © 2018