As well as Sean Gabb on free will, see also Antony Flew's reply to this article, plus those of Kevin McFarlane, Ben Best, Danny Frederick, and Nicholas Dykes.

My purpose here is to take issue with the defences of freewill offered by Kevin McFarlane and Antony Flew (Free Life, No. 18, May 1993). I have set out my own views on this topic elsewhere,[1] and I will repeat as little of that as I can.

Kevin McFarlane says: "to say that we have freewill is not to say that our actions are uncaused. Freewill theory asserts that at least some of our actions are not necessitated by antecedent factors. In such cases the ultimate cause of our actions is the will".(p.7)

This may look self-contradictory: our free actions are not necessitated by antecedent factors, but they are caused. However, he may want to invoke a distinction between necessitating and non-necessitating causes to circumvent this (though I think this would be the wrong place at which to invoke it).

On the other hand, the quoted passage does appear to fall foul of logic on another count: the explanation of free actions seems to involve an infinite regress. For free actions, we are told, are those which are caused by the will. But the willing of an action (which makes it a free action) must, presumably, itself be free; it will therefore in turn have to be caused by the will; and so on ad infinitum.

The way out of this regress is as follows. Let us first distinguish a bodily motion from a bodily movement by saying that the former does not but the latter does imply agency. Note that bodily motions do not exclude agency: they leave that an open question. A motion of my finger may be the result of a nervous twitch, in which case there is no action. On the other hand, a motion of my finger may be the effect of a willing of mine, in which case I move my finger, there is a bodily movement, an action. However, it is not the case that my willing caused my action. My willing caused a bodily motion (a mere physical effect); therefore that willing was a bodily movement (a moving of my body). Willings are things that we do; but they are actions (bodily movements) only if they effect bodily motions. (Compare this different type of case. All mothers are women; but a woman is a mother only if she produces a child. The woman does not produce the mother, she produces the child; and in virtue of having produced the child, she is the mother.) To say that we have freewill is to say that our actions are uncaused. It is to say that our actions are identical to uncaused (ie. free) willings which cause bodily motions.

Antony Flew offers a demonstration of the existence of freewill and a challenge to anyone who doubts it.(p.11) I will reject the demonstration and accept the challenge. The demonstration is literally that. He says that we can identify ostensively instances of freewill, ie. cases of being able to do other than we do. He also says that we can identify ostensively instances of causal necessity, in cases of things happening to us independently of our will. The challenge is to provide some other account of how we come to have the concepts of freewill and causal necessity.

I agree that we have direct experience of willings (roughly, things that we do), on the one hand, and things that just happen to us, on the other. What I deny is that we have direct experience of our willings being not-causally-necessitated. It seems to me to involve no self-contradiction or logical impossibility to say that our willings (ie. those willings with which we are all acquainted in our direct experience) are causally necessitated by preceding events. Whether or not they are in fact so caused is therefore an empirical matter to be discovered, if at all, by the empirical sciences.

I therefore reject Professor Flew's ostensive definition of freewill. However, I can account for our having the concept of freewill quite easily, since it can be explained in terms of the ostensively definable concept of a willing (or, more colloquially, a trying or doing) and the concept of causality. For free willings are just uncaused willings.

At this point, Professor Flew would insist that his challenge has not been met. For he maintains that freewill and causal necessity are ostensively definable together, in the contrast between things we do and things that happen to us willy-nilly. In rejecting his ostensive definition of freewill, I am denying that this contrast is the contrast between freedom and causality. I am therefore also rejecting his ostensive definition of causality. I must consequently give an alternative explanation of how we arrive at this concept.

To do this I must exhume Hume and borrow Kant's cant. For it was Hume who demonstrated that we are not presented with instances of causal necessity in our experience. To put it crudely: we often observe one thing following another, but we cannot observe one thing necessitating another. However, because Hume thought that all non-compound concepts are derived from empirical instances, he repudiated the concept of causal necessity. Kant, on the other hand, could not reject the concept of causal necessity, but he was convinced by Hume's demonstration that we are not presented with instances of necessitation in our experience. Consequently, he rejected the principle that all non-compound concepts are derived from empirical instances. Some concepts, including causality but also a whole range of others, are a priori: they are part of the intellectual equipment that we bring with us to the world and which we use to organise our experience.[2]

I admit that I have here given only an indication of the way in which I think Professor Flew's challenge should be met. A lot more needs to be said about a priori concepts and our justification for applying them to the world. However, an examination of this abstruse issue would take us far away from the problem of freewill.

NOTES

1. Freewill: A Leibnitzian-Libertarian Solution, Philosophical Notes No. 26, Libertarian Alliance, London, 1992.

2. For Hume see sections II and VII of the first Enquiry in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning The Principles of Morals, ed. L A Selby-Bigge, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. For Kant see the Preface to Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself As A Science, tr. P G Lucas, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1971.