Free Will: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Pink

Author:Thomas Pink
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
Published: 2004-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

Hobbes and common sense

Many philosophers have been convinced by Hobbes. These philosophers agree that Hobbesian freedom, an unobstructed capacity for voluntariness, a capacity to act as we happen to want, is the only freedom there could ever be. Ideas of freedom as anything more are purely inventions. That freedom might depend on a special capacity for reason, or that it might depend on our actions not being determined in advance – all this is a fantasy.

And Hobbes’s picture of what freedom might come to looks plausible enough once you accept his theory of action. Hobbes identifies action with voluntariness, with doing what we want because we want to do it. That essentially is all that Hobbes believes to go on when we act: our being driven into motion by our own desires. So what more could freedom, the self-determination that we exercise in our action, be but voluntariness?

According to Hobbes, to act is simply to do something on the basis of wanting to do it, and that is how we experience our own agency. The child wants to pick up that ball lying on the floor, and finds itself managing to pick the ball up just as it wanted to do. In managing to do what it wants, the child has had, if you like, its first experience of successful self-determination. And it is only from later reflecting on this experience of being able to act as we want that we ever gain any real understanding and knowledge of what selfdetermination is. Or so the Hobbesian would maintain. And this has an obvious consequence. If Hobbes is right about action, the only self-determination that we ever experience in our actions is a kind of voluntariness – doing what we want because we want to do it. And this means that ideas of freedom as anything more are quite unsupported by what we actually experience.

But ordinary opinion, let us be clear, is very obviously on the side of the supposed fantasy, and firmly opposed to Hobbes. As ordinarily understood, freedom certainly does involve more than a capacity to act as we want.

Hobbesian freedom, remember, is no more than unobstructed desire. The only thing, according to Hobbes, that can remove our freedom, is some obstacle to satisfying our desires. Our freedom can never be taken away by our desires themselves. But common sense thinks of freedom quite differently. It sees freedom as something that can perfectly well be taken away from us, not merely by obstacles to our desires, but by our desires themselves. Consider drug addicts, for example. A drug addict is a person imprisoned, not by obstacles to desire satisfaction such as locked cell doors or chains, but by his own desires. A drug addict lacks the freedom not to take the drug to which he is addicted. And he lacks this freedom not to take the drug because his own desire to take it, and not any external constraint, is forcing him to act. The addict is acting exactly as he desires to act.

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