TITLE:
Free Will and Determinism: Resolving the Tension
AUTHORS:
Richard Startup
KEYWORDS:
Free Will, Determinism, Randomness, Reasons and Causes, Praise and Blame
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.11 No.4,
November
11,
2021
ABSTRACT: Progress may be made in resolving the tension between free will and
determinism by analysis of the necessary conditions of freedom. It is of the
essence that these conditions include causal and deterministic regularities.
Furthermore, the human expression of free will is informed by understanding
some of those regularities, and increments in that understanding have served to
enhance freedom. When the possible character
of a deterministic system based on physical theory is considered, it is judged
that, far from implying the elimination of human freedom, such a theory might
simply set parameters for it; indeed knowledge of that system could again prove to
be in some respects liberating. On the other hand, it is of the essence that the
overarching biological framework is not a deterministic system and it
foregrounds the behavioural flexibility of humans in being able to choose
within a range of options and react to chance occurrences. Furthermore, an
issue for determinism flows from the way in which randomness (e.g. using a true
random number generator) and chance events could and do enter human life. Once
the implications of that issue are fully understood, other elements fit
comfortably together in our understanding of freely undertaken action: the
contribution of reasons and causes; the fact that reasons are never sufficient
to account for outcomes; the rationale for the attribution of praise and blame.