Restorative Free Will by Waller Bruce N

Restorative Free Will by Waller Bruce N

Author:Waller, Bruce N.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.


Chapter 7

Psychological Free Will

Richard Double (1991, 9) argues that the whole notion of free will is incoherent, and must be abandoned: Too many elements are regarded as essential properties of free will, and there is no way those supposedly essential elements can be integrated into a workable unity. Even a brief perusal of the startling variety of views that claim to be true accounts of free will (Zimmerman 2011, 100; Wright 2014, 227–8) offers powerful evidence that Double is correct. For Pico della Mirandola, the essence of free will is a special power of first-cause choice which offers open opportunities that range from the lowest beastliness all the way to immortal deity. While William James does not insist on quite such a panoply of open choices, he does insist that genuine free will can operate only in an open, rather than a closed (determined) universe: free will must afford choices among new and radically open paths and possibilities. C. A. Campbell concurs and postulates the remarkable power of contra-causal free will to guarantee such open choices. Robert Kane agrees that free will must involve open choices among alternative paths, but insists that such choices are possible within a scientifically naturalistic nonmiraculous world view. In contrast, Frankfurt argues that free will does not require open alternatives; and Susan Wolf goes even further, insisting that an agent who has the possibility of taking a different path has less than perfect freedom. For Wolf, genuine free will requires following the single narrow path that tracks the True and Good, and that basic model of single path free will has a long history: one strong Christian tradition insists that the only perfect freedom consists in complete and willing enslavement to God, and that in the eternal bliss of Heaven when we are directly in the presence of God there will be no inclination whatsoever to deviate from the path of righteousness and single-minded worship, and that is the highest degree of perfect freedom. Dostoyevsky begs to differ: unswerving adherence even to the true rational path would destroy freedom, and humankind would go mad rather than be deprived of open alternatives:

So one’s own free, unrestrained choice, one’s own whim, be it the wildest, one’s own fancy, sometimes worked up to a frenzy—that is the most advantageous advantage that cannot be fitted into any table or scale and that causes every system and every theory to crumble into dust on contact. . . .

Now, you may say that this too can be calculated in advance and entered on the timetable—chaos, swearing, and all—and that the very possibility of such a calculation would prevent it, so that sanity would prevail. Oh no! In that case man would go insane on purpose, just to be immune from reason. (1864/1961, 110, 115)

According to the free will account offered by one neuropsychologist, Michael Gazzaniga, the more genuinely open possibilities one can consider the greater the freedom: “Our freedom is to be found in developing more options for our computing brains to choose among” (2014, 73).



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