Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The topic of free will brings together a number of independently important metaphysical notions: necessity and contingency, CAUSATION and chance, action and event, mind and MECHANISM. These make the topic an especially complex and challenging one. What gives the problem of free will its poignancy, however, is its connection with several central human values. In this way, morality has often been the mother of metaphysics.In western philosophy, two related values have been prominent in discussions of free will. One is a concern with moral responsibility - the conditions of justified praise, blame, punishment, and similar aspects of moral practice. A second value concerns what might be called autonomy or self-determination: one's sense that one is not merely a passive by standard but indeed shapes one's own life from the world as one finds it and to that extent is the author of one's biography. The value of autonomy goes beyond an interpersonal concern for accountability. Threats to our autonomy are threats to our personal dignity; they demean our lives. Both of these values presuppose or involve a kind of freedom that turns out to be philosophically obscure.These two concerns animated the discussion of free will from the start. They were clearly at stake in the debate provoked by Hobbes three centuries ago. Hobbes's revolutionary project was to extend the new natural scientific theories ... log in or subscribe to read full text