contested - the weight sits with the supporting side
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
2 sources for · 0 against
Philosophical literature suggests that accounts of free will face significant difficulties, but the provided sources do not establish that libertarian free will is definitively logically incoherent.
Abstract Abstract The argument of Part II so far has been that no account of free will can succeed, not even the compatibilist account of Part I. But there are, no doubt, readers who believe that libertarianism, or maybe libertarianism supplemented with some rationality constraints, can vindicate the notion of free will. So, it is to libertarianism that I turn directly. In this chapter, I argue that a libertarian conception of free will must satisfy the three conditions of the ability-to-choose-otherwise, control, and rationality, interpreted as dual abilities. I then look at two broad classes of libertarian theories, Nonvalerian theories that satisfy the first condition at the expense of the other two, and Valerian theories, none of which does better than compatibilist theories at satisfying the dual abilities. My conclusion is that the deep reason why no libertarian view can satisfy all three conditions is that the conditions are logically incompatible. Hence, libertarianism, despite its intuitive appeal, turns out to be incoherent, although it captures enough of the way we feel about freedom to rule out compatibilism. I conclude by suggesting that libertarianism has no resources of its own for dealing with rationality objections and must help itself to something like the compatibilist’s account from Part I, which we have already seen reason to reject.
Abstract The ‘Smart’ of my title is J. J.C. Smart. He has proposed an austere version of compatibilism.1 The generic doctrine of compatibilism holds that the claim—that all human choices are events in the physical world that are caused either deterministically or indeterministically—is compatible with moral responsibility and desert.2 According to Smart’s version, one is morally responsible for a choice one makes just in case praising or blaming, rewarding or punishing one for making the choice would produce good consequences by altering the future behavior of oneself or others. Compatibilism of this ilk does not include the assertion that free will and the causation of choices are compatible, and indeed Smart repudiates the libertarian idea of free will on the ground that it is logically incoherent and does not consider whether some watered-down notion of free will might make sense. If compatibilism plus determinism equals soft determinism, Smart’s doctrine merits the label ‘hard soft determinism’.
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