Freedom within ReasonPhilosophers typically see the issue of free will and determinism in terms of a debate between two standard positions. Incompatibilism holds that freedom and responsibility require causal and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature. According to compatibilism, people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. In Freedom Within Reason, Susan Wolf charts a path between these traditional positions: We are not free and responsible, she argues, for actions that are governed by desires that we cannot help having. But the wish to form our own desires from nothing is both futile and arbitrary. Some of the forces beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it: they endow us with faculties of reason, perception, and imagination, and provide us with the data by which we come to see and appreciate the world for what it is. The independence we want, Wolf argues, is not independence from the world, but independence from forces that prevent or preclude us from choosing how to live in light of a sufficient appreciation of the world. The freedom we want is a freedom within reason and the world. |
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Contents
| 3 | |
2 The Real Self View In Which a Nonautonomous Conception of Free Will and Responsibility is Examined and Criticized | 23 |
3 The Autonomy View In Which an Autonomous Conception of Free Will and Responsibility Is Examined and Criticized | 46 |
4 The Reason View In Which a Nonautonomous Conception of Free Will and Responsibility Is Proposed | 67 |
5 Ability and Possibility In Which the Implications of Determinism for Responsibility Are Discussed | 94 |
6 The True and the Good In Which the Metaethical Assumptions of the Reason View Are Examined | 117 |
Notes | 149 |
Selected Readings | 155 |
Index | 159 |
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Common terms and phrases
ability to act ability to choose able accordance with Reason act in accordance agent's real alternative answer appreciate auton autonomous agent Autonomy View basis believe bility Carson City Chapter choice claim compatibilists compatible concept of responsibility condition of autonomy condition of responsibility constrained context deserve praise desires example exercise fact faculties free and responsible freedom and responsibility govern grade papers hypnosis imply incompatibilism insofar intuitions J. L. Austin justified kind kleptomaniac level of explanation metaethical metaphysical moral Moral Responsibility necessary for responsibility nihilist nonautonomous agent Nonetheless Normative Pluralism objectivity of values ourselves person philosophical plausible position praise and blame problem of responsibility proponents question rational Real Self View Reason View recognize relevant requires responsibility and free responsible agent right reasons right thing Rose's seems sense sort status status of responsibility subjectivism subjectivist suggestion Thomas Nagel thought tion True understand valuational system value judgments
Popular passages
Page 73 - View, . . . responsibility depends on the ability to act in accordance with the True and the Good. If one is psychologically determined to do the right thing for the right reasons, this is compatible with having the requisite ability. . . . But if one is psychologically determined to do the wrong thing, for whatever reason, this seems to constitute a denial of that ability.
Page 65 - What if I want to be dishonest?" I'll answer, "There's no reason for you not to be, but I'm saying that that's what you are, and that the strictly coherent attitude is that of honesty." Besides, I can bring moral judgment to bear. When I declare that freedom in every concrete circumstance can have no other aim than to want itself, if man has once become aware that...
Page 55 - Wolf: 81 not only to want the ability to make choices even when there is no basis for choice, but to want the ability to make choices on no basis even when there is a basis. But the latter ability would seem to be an ability no one could ever have reason to want to...
Page 39 - A man is to be blamed only for what he does himself, for that alone tells what he is. He did not make his character; no, but he made his acts. Nobody blames him for making such a character, but only for making such acts. And to blame him for that is simply to say that he is a bad act-maker.
Page 81 - Whatever the explanation that prevents the agent from being able to do the right thing for the right reasons, our intuitions seem to support the claim that the agent does not deserve blame. If an agent is incapable of doing the right thing for the right reasons, then it is not her fault that she stumbles into doing something wrong.
Page 67 - ... more relevant to our status as responsible agents than the former. For within the class of agents who share the ability to act in accordance with Reason, the difference between autonomous and nonautonomous agents consists in the former's having the ability to act in discordance with Reason, an ability that at best seems irrelevant to our status as responsible agents and at worst bespeaks a position directly incompatible with that status.1 If one has the ability to act in accordance with Reason,...