Abstract
In this chapter, I examine how free will can be incorporated—and indeed vindicated—within a scientifically disenchanted world. The key moves here are (a) to avoid conflating between compulsion and causal determination as well as between the ability to will otherwise and the ability to will rationally and (b) to understand the latter distinction as thoroughly normative in nature.
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Notes
- 1.
This distinction essentially amounts to that between Kant’s conception of freedom as Wille (freedom as autonomy based on reason) and as Willkür (freedom to choose between alternatives) (Kant, 1788 [1997]). A related distinction is made by Stovall (2022) who distinguishes between ‘choice from preference’ and ‘choice from a recognition of duty’ on the grounds that the latter case—but not the former—involves an attitude of rejection toward all actions incompatible with what one chooses, which is robust under changes in one’s desires (Stovall, 2022, pp. 153, 284).
- 2.
Of course, this whole process of socially instituting normative attitudes of commitment and entitlement in practical life as well as in the theoretical domain does come with certain costs. Nietzsche famously argues that a consequence of this process is the development and internalization of attitudes such as ‘resentment’ and ‘bad conscience’ (Nietzsche, 1984). Moreover, the novel possibilities that emerge from turning human beings into responsible thinkers and agents also include novel ways of alienating us from ourselves and others. But, as the point of this section is just to show that a community of beings capable of skilfully navigating the space of reasons would have significant evolutionary advantages over communities that did not engage in the game of giving and asking for reasons, I will not examine this line of thought further (but see Chap. 12).
- 3.
Compare here Frege who, commenting on this sign-making function (representing perceptual occurrences as signs), connects this ability with freedom of the will. As he puts it: “We create in this way a firm, new focus about which ideas gather. We then select another idea from these in order to elicit its symbol. Thus, we penetrate step by step into the inner world of our ideas and move about there at will, using the realm of sensibles itself to free ourselves from its constraint. Symbols have the same importance for thought that discovering how to use the wind to sail against the wind had for navigation” (Frege, 1964, p. 156).
- 4.
By this I do not mean that there are no emergent causal powers involved in this self-relating sign-making process, but that there are not located at the level of general structures such as ‘types’ of things. Types of things do not exert a direct causal influence on the ‘really real’ world, but influence it only indirectly, via the ‘productive-through-subtraction’ manner mentioned above, which is an emergent process located at the nominalistic level of concrete individuals.
References
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Christias, D. (2023). Free Will in a Scientifically Disenchanted World. In: Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_10
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