Free will: An impossible reality or an incoherent concept?
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Stephen Leach
Abstract
The problem that Tallis attempts to address in Freedom: An Impossible Reality (2021) is that science appears to describe the entire world deterministically and that this seems to leave no room for free will. In the face of this threat, Tallis defends the existence of free will by arguing that science does not explain our intentional awareness of the world; and it is our intentional awareness that makes both science and free will possible.
Against Tallis, it is here argued that his argument is vulnerable to two criticisms. Firstly, his characterisation of science as apparently deterministic is inaccurate. Secondly, he has not solved the problem he has set himself but rather recast it, so that his conclusion leaves us having to account for free will, not in a deterministic universe, but either as a product of chance or as a miracle.
It is here suggested that when we set aside the illusory threat of scientific determinism, we also set aside the temptation of free will (as its spurious answer). That done, we may better focus upon agent’s freedom of action – as discussed by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume – the rational capability of an agent to act upon their wishes, given the constraints under which they find themselves.
References
Bramhall, J. & Hobbes, T. (1656/1999) Questions concerning liberty, necessity and chance clearly stated and debated between Dr Bramhall, Bishop of Derry and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Republished as Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, V. Chappell (Ed.). Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
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© 2022 Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction a book symposium on Raymond Tallis’s Freedom: An impossible reality
- Disarming causation in the service of agency: Tallis on Hume
- Causation without the causal theory of action
- Free will: Dr Johnson was right
- Jail break: Tallis and the prison of nature
- Free will: An impossible reality or an incoherent concept?
- Libertarianism in disguise
- Freedom: An enactive possibility
- On the importance of a human-scale breadth of view: Reading Tallis’ freedom
- The seemingly ordinary complexity of daily life
- The ontology of freedom
- Freedom. An impossible reality
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction a book symposium on Raymond Tallis’s Freedom: An impossible reality
- Disarming causation in the service of agency: Tallis on Hume
- Causation without the causal theory of action
- Free will: Dr Johnson was right
- Jail break: Tallis and the prison of nature
- Free will: An impossible reality or an incoherent concept?
- Libertarianism in disguise
- Freedom: An enactive possibility
- On the importance of a human-scale breadth of view: Reading Tallis’ freedom
- The seemingly ordinary complexity of daily life
- The ontology of freedom
- Freedom. An impossible reality
