Ideas about freedom and related concepts like autonomy and self-determination play a prominent role in the moral debate about human enhancement interventions. However, there is not a single understanding of freedom available, and arguments referring to freedom are simultaneously used to argue both for and against enhancement interventions. This gives rise to misunderstandings and polemical arguments. The paper attempts to disentangle the different distinguishable concepts, classifies them and shows how they relate to one another in order (...) to allow for a more structured and clearer debate. It concludes in identifying the individual underpinnings and the social conditions of choice and decision-making as particularly salient dimensions of freedom in the ethical debate about human enhancement. (shrink)

This paper considers Aquinas's accounts of the end of human action and the structure of human action, examines the debate between intellectualist and voluntarist interpretations of Aquinas, and corrects mistaken accounts of Aquinas's views on freedom, necessitation, and causation.

In the author’s opinion there are three primary conceptions of human freedom - non-coercion, autonomy and indeterminism. He presents his thoughts to define, compare, distinguish and correlate these, not merely with regard to the freedom of the human will, but also and more generally with regard to freedom in human life and thought. The discussion is psychological, ethical and theological. Originally published in 1947.

In this study, Worsley argues that it is rational to believe in a loving God in the face of evil. Beginning with a critique of Alvin Plantinga, he shows that human freedom is highly complex, and so depends upon complex structures in nature. These are both necessary for freedom but also sufficient for natural evil. He offers close analysis of the evolution of the human brain. The book develops a parallel argument that human evil stems (...) from the evolution of personality. (shrink)

This article is about how human freedom is understood in the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche. According to Malebranche, the most important proponent of occasionalism in the modern period, God is the sole and real cause of the universe and all its functioning. In addition, according to him, people are free and responsible for their own actions. In this case, what it means for man to be free in this vision where God is the only reason for everything needs (...) to be explained. While Malebranche's basic views on occasionalism and human freedom are included in many of his works, these views are especially found in his famous six-volume book titled The Search after Truth and in the book of explanations he wrote for this book, Elucidations of the Search after Truth. In the article, the subject is discussed through Malebranche's basic texts. Firstly, the relationship between the human soul and God has been tried to be explained in order to explain Malebranche's understanding of freedom. At this point Malebranche; unlike the Aristotelian thinkers of the Middle Ages, seems to follow an Augustinian line. In this line, the human soul is towards God and in need of His light. Secondly, what freedom means according to him is examined. In Malebranche, it is seen that freedom is the power of man, who is naturally inclined towards the general good, that is, God, to stop his tendency towards this general good in worldly special goods, or to not consent to this and to move towards the better with attention and research. This view emerges on the basis of Malebranche's view of vision in God and the distinction between soul and body. In other words, since human beings are incomplete and limited in their knowledge, they may sometimes not go towards what they really need to reach and may accept any worldly good as true good for themselves. Or since this good is not the general good and will never satisfy him, he may not consent to it and seek out the general good. Freedom is precisely the power either to stop at the particular good or to pay attention and search beyond it. Then, how this power was reconciled with Malebranche's occasionalism was discussed and three prominent issues were examined. Firstly, Malebranche claimed that man has no causal contribution to the tendency towards general or particular goods, and that this occurs only with the influence of God. Secondly, although it seems that a power is attributed to humans in freedom, it can be said that this power is not a positive action that brings about any change. Third, there is the claim that since God is the only true cause, attention and investigation are not a cause of human knowledge but only an occasional, intermediary cause. With these claims, it has been seen that Malebranche associates freedom with sin because he treats it as a stop, that man cannot make any changes, and therefore he evaluates freedom as only the power to want, not the power to act. As a result, it can be said that it is debatable whether a power that does not cause any action or change, but only the desire to consent or not, can be called freedom. In this regard, Malebranche has moved freedom to a negative or incomplete place. Although this study specifically discusses the nature of freedom and its relationship with God through Malebranche's philosophy, it is aimed to contribute to studies on the nature of freedom. It has been seen that further studies on freedom of action and desire can be carried out, especially in the fields of religion and moral philosophy. (shrink)

In _The Ethical Primate_, Mary Midgley, 'one of the sharpest critical pens in the West' according to the _Times Literary Supplement_, addresses the fundamental question of human freedom. Scientists and philosophers have found it difficult to understand how each human-being can be a living part of the natural world and still be free. Midgley explores their responses to this seeming paradox and argues that our evolutionary origin explains both why and how human freedom and morality (...) have come about. (shrink)

For both Spinoza and Zhuang-zi, the goal of life is attaining freedom, namely, human freedom. What do they mean by “human freedom”? What are the necessary conditions for humans to attain freedom? Seeking for answers to these questions, I’ve noted that Spinoza and Zhuang-zi suggest remarkably similar answers to these questions. First, both Spinoza and Zhuang-zi understand human freedom as a form of complete independence from externals: self-determination in Spinoza and union with (...) the Dao in Zhuang-zi. Second, both Spinoza and Zhuang-zi assert that human freedom is attainable when one sees things truly or adequately: in Spinoza, when one sees things from the viewpoint of eternity, and in Zhuang-zi, when one sees things from the viewpoint of the Dao. (shrink)

This book argues for two claims: firstly, determinism in science does not infringe upon human free will because it is descriptive, not prescriptive, and secondly, the very formulation, testing and justification of scientific theories presupposes human free will and thereby persons as ontologically primitive. The argument against predetermination is broadly Humean, or more precisely ‘Super-Humean’, whereas that against naturalist reduction is in large Kantian, drawing from Sellars on the scientific and the manifest image. Thus, whilst the book defends (...) scientific realism against the confusion between fact and fake, it also reveals why scientific theories, laws and explanations cannot succeed in imposing norms for our actions upon us, neither on the level of the individual nor on that of society. Esfeld makes a strong case for an ontology of science that is minimally sufficient to explain our scientific and common sense knowledge, not only removing the concern that the laws of nature are incompatible with human freedom, but furthermore showing how our freedom is in fact a very presupposition for science. (shrink)

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of human freedom in the philosophy of Pierre Gassendi, a 17th century natural scientist, Catholic priest, and one of the founders of Early Modern philosophy. The key postulate of this dissertation is that the epistemology of probabilism, which represents Gassendi's skeptical stance toward the possibility of certain knowledge, is also the foundation of human freedom: the uncertain and merely probable nature of all our knowledge serves as a guarantee of (...) the multiplicity of options open to us, and thereby ensures freedom. ;The first part of the dissertation investigates the sources on which Gassendi drew to elaborate his notion of freedom. The main sources are Aristotle's ethical theory and discussion of necessity, chance, and choice, as well as the Epicureans' theory of freedom. In conjunction with the latter, I consider the possibility that Gassendi conceives of the human mind---the seat of freedom---as corporeal, and thereby capable of generating autonomous developments on the basis of the natural motions of its atoms. ;The second part is devoted to studying Gassendi's epistemology of probabilism as the foundation of freedom. I look at the process of judgment that underlies choice, and consider the various manifestations of the freedom of indifference in the process of acquiring knowledge or preparing for a practical decision. I also look at the roles of the will and the intellect throughout these activities. ;The third part looks at theological issues in Gassendi's philosophy that relate to human freedom: divine concurrence with created beings, divine providence, and the limitations that faith imposes on the scope of our inquiry. ;The fourth and final part presents a study of Gassendi's ethics from the perspective of freedom. I investigate the role of temperament, passions, and opinions in human behaviour, and study the role of freedom in shaping these factors. I also consider the concept of pleasure as the central motive of human actions, and its various manifestations in Gassendi's ethics. (shrink)

This is a good time for determinists. One hundred and fifty years of Darwinian thought have undermined belief in the exceptional status of human beings. Biological reductionism is in the ascendant. One of its most recent manifestations—evolutionary psychology, which has been widely influential both within and beyond academe—argues that individual behaviour and even social institutions are expressions of genes, the vast majority of which are common to humans and the higher primates. The implicit, largely unconscious, principles that inform gene-determined (...) human behaviour are rooted in their survival value; and the entity whose survival is served is not the conscious organism but the genome itself. Since the actual reasons for our actions are beyond our ken, they are not truly voluntary. Yet more radical attacks on the notion of human freedom have come from neuroscience: ever more sophisticated and seemingly complete accounts of the human mind in terms of the functioning of our brains, appear to embed even higher level awareness in the material world. (shrink)

현대적 사유는 존재를 완전하고 불변적인 원인으로 놓지 않고, 그 자체 철저히 생성하는 것으로 이해한다. 따라서 인간을 절대적 자기원인성을 일부 나누어 갖는 특권적인 존재자로서 다른 존재자들과 달리 ‘자유롭다’고 이해하는 방식도 더 이상 유효하지 않다. 이런 맥락에서 오늘날 가장 영향력 있는 존재론인 신유물론이 인간의 자유를 물질 자체에 속하는 생성의 힘으로 환원시킬 뿐 별개의 물음으로는 취하지 않는 것도 자연스럽다. 하지만 신유물론의 함의와는 별개로, 인간 자유의 가능성은 여전히 중요한 문제로 남아 있다. 우리는 생성하는 존재 이해가 허용하는 한계 내에서, 인간 사유의 자유의 가능성을 확보해야 한다.BR/ (...) 본 논문은 생성하는 존재를 숙고하는 현대적 존재론 속에서도 여전히 ‘자유’를 논의할 수 있음을 논증하고, 자유를 불가결한 물음으로 되돌리고자 한다. 이를 위해 본 논문은 하이데거를 끌어들인다. 하이데거는 전통 형이상학에 맞서 존재의 생성을 숙고할 뿐만 아니라, 신유물론적 계열과는 달리 생성하는 존재와 공속하는 인간 ‘사유’의 역할을 진지하게 물음거리로 삼고, 이를 ‘자유’라는 이름 아래 이해한 사상가이기 때문이다.BR/ 본 논문은 먼저 하이데거가 형상화한 사유의 자유가 의미하는 바를 밝힌다. 사유는 그 자유에서 우선 실존적인 동시에 탈존적이어서, 제한되는 동시에 그 제한을 넘어서 가는 자기의 시간성을 의미한다. 그리고 이 시간성에서 현존재는 그때마다 자기가 이해하는 존재에다 다름 아닌 ‘무’를 도입한다. 그런데, 자유란 실은 사유가 존재와 공속하는 방식을 의미한다. 즉 사유는 자유를 통해 존재와 공속한다. 그래서 항상 사유와 공속하는 존재 역시 사유의 자유를 통해 무와 공속한다. 사유가 그때마다 수호하는 무를 통해 존재는 비로소 진리인 동시에 비-진리일 수 있으며 생성하기를 그치지 않는다.BR/ 이렇게 볼 때, 존재의 생성을 숙고하는 현대적 존재론은 반드시 자유 논의를 포기할 필요가 없다. 오히려 반대로 자유 물음이야말로 생성하는 존재와 공속하는 사유의 본질 현성으로서 가장 적극적으로 숙고되어야 할 물음으로 정당화될 수 있다. (shrink)

The Essence of Human Freedom is a fundamental text for understanding Heidegger's view of Greek philosophy and its relationship to modern philosophy.

This book consists of selections that cover almost thirty years of writing, from Nausea to the essay, Search for a Method which summarizes the Critique of Dialectical Reason The selections succeed in giving us a substantial account of Sartre’s explanation of the nature and conditions of human freedom, and in reflecting also his thinking on contemporary issues which affect human rights. They are arranged chronologically and suggest an actual development of thought. In Nausea Sartre uses Roquentin’s struggle (...) to dramatize his discovery of ‘the key to existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life’; through the void of his own conceptual existence he glimpses the fact and possibilities of his own freedom. In The Psychology of Imagination ’Sartre examines the function of consciousness in creating a world of unrealities, probes the nature of the psychic life and the mind’s complex ties with the outer world, defines the intentional structure of the image and the uniqueness of man’s freedom to create, and concludes that “the imagination is the necessary condition for the freedom of empirical man in the midst of the world”’. The full exposition of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom is given in Being and Nothingness. But for Sartre, a writer must use his own freedom to promote the freedom of all men. There are selections from his writings on freedom from persecution, freedom to write, freedom to do evil, freedom from exploitation. Finally, in Search for a Method there is an excerpt on his positive social theory and his hope that Marxism will take on ‘the human dimension’. (shrink)

Doppelt argues that the democratic socialist conception of human freedom expressed in some recent works of mine lacks philosophical justification and fails to get to the roots of the socialist ideals of dignity, human worth, and self-respect. Doppelt claims to provide a new approach to the grounding of human freedom which allows him to avoid what he regards as the narrowness of my own conception. Not only does Doppelt fail to show that my own conception (...) of freedom is confined to self-management and cannot embrace the dimensions of social life his own paradigm is claimed to take care of, his article fails to raise or resolve the question of the conflict between the democratic socialist and the Rawlsian components that make up his 'new' paradigm. In this reply I discuss the issues Doppelt himself raises in connection with my own work: (1) how to ground human freedom; (2) whether my conception of freedom in democratic socialism is rationally preferable to the conception embodied in contemporary capitalist society; and (3) whether my idea of freedom does indeed exclude those dimensions of life to which Doppelt refers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 136-137 [Access article in PDF] John Watkins. Human Freedom after Darwin: A Critical Rationalist View. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1999. Pp. xi + 348. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $24.95. John Watkins examines man's place in nature since Darwin. As a critical rationalist, using the methods of science, Watkins hopes to construct a world-view which challenges competing hypotheses and supports his (...) own. He recognizes that his view is, also, a candidate for critical rejection. All scientific views are, in principle, fallible. He divides his book into two parts: Naturalism and Freedom. [End Page 137]In evolutionary development, he accepts, as critically established, the sequence: matter before life, life before mind, and, no mind without a brain. Thus, naturalism is preferred beforesupernaturalism or divine intervention. These guides may support a continuous, steady evolutionaryprocess or discontinuity, mutations, and various stages of change. Darwin acceptedthe former and held physical changes were unaffected by consciousness. All change is, in principle,present from the beginning and unfolds over time. Darwin's view, then, is deterministic.Watkins challenges this position and argues for consciousness affecting physical change in new and unpredictable ways. It is herein that the possibility of animal and human freedom lies. Watkins gives examples of the actions of the hunter and hunted among animals, and of strategies developed by humans during crises, to support the view that there are novel and unpredictable actions by conscious beings. These actions can hardly be called predetermined in the nature of things. There is a huge difference between a general genetic structure for kinds of behavior and specific actions during crises (not that these are the only instances of freedom). At any rate, there is a reciprocal action between an individual and its environment and not merely a unilinear one.In Part II, Freedom, Watkins examines some classical, philosophical views of human freedom. He gives brief, but penetrating, analyses of Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. Either they account for human action in strictly physical terms that are causally deterministic or they turn to non-empirical sources that are not verifiable. Since the latter make no difference in our account of behavior, they are entities multiplied beyond necessity. Those who give a completely deterministic view—Hobbes, Hume, and Schopenhauer—offer no continuum between cause and chance. Chance turns out to depend upon our ignorance of causes; further examination would show it causally determined.Watkins seems most sympathetic to Spinoza's treatment. In his hard-headed naturalism, Spinoza rejects any non-natural or supernatural accounts of human behavior. He is a strict determinist where man's confrontation with nature is concerned. Human emotions are passive and react to our environment; they do not affect it. Human reason makes no difference, but in its capacity to contemplate eternal truths it offers a way out. Instead of reacting to nature, man may transcend it. This transcendence is the key to Spinoza's view of the intellectual love of God, and human freedom. Watkins criticizes this flight from man's place in nature and the limited use of reason. In this vein, Spinoza seems to abandon the confrontation of nature for a flight to eternal truths. For Watkins, however, reasons must be used in confronting nature. As we saw, he claims that reason may have an effect upon the environment that is novel and unpredictable. Human agency is a part of the evolutionary story. Human agency is not an either/or proposition. There are degrees of effectiveness in human response to nature.In his analysis of human freedom, Watkins turns to the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, and others. In studying the problems posed by the consideration of natural phenomena during their time, they showed intellectual perspicacity of the highest order. Faraday's unified field theory brought electrical and magnetic phenomena, previously thought to be disparate, together. Newton's laws of motion brought celestial and terrestrial mechanics under one theory. Einstein changed the way in which space, time, mass, energy, and light were conceived. In a real sense, they were... (shrink)

A growing body of evidence has linked consumption of trans fatty acids to cardiovascular disease. To promote public health, numerous state and local governments in the United States have banned the use of artificial trans fats in restaurant foods, and additional bans may follow. Although these policies may have a positive impact on human health, they open the door to excessive government control over food, which could restrict dietary choices, interfere with cultural, ethnic, and religious traditions, and exacerbate socioeconomic (...) inequalities. These slippery slope concerns cannot be dismissed as far-fetched, because the social and political pressures are place to induce additional food regulations. To protect human freedom and other values, policies that significantly restrict food choices, such as bans on types of food, should be adopted only when they are supported by substantial scientific evidence, and when policies that impose fewer restrictions on freedom, such as educational campaigns and product labeling, are likely to be ineffective. (shrink)

It is commonly asserted that Boethius defined free will as the judgment of the will or a rational choice. Accordingly, sin or evil is identified with ignorance or vice of the intellect, which prevents or distorts rational deliberation. However, Boethius adopted a more complex understanding of the self-motion of the soul and, consequently, articulated a more nuanced account of sin and the healing effects of Providence. Boethius treated human freedom as a complex including a natural motion, identified as (...) the desire for happiness, the determination of reason following the judgment of deliberation, and the sovereignty of the will over its own acts and, to some extent,over other acts of the soul. Sin, therefore, involves mistaken ideas about reality but also deformations in the affective orientation of the will to the world and in the exercise of the will’s control over the soul. (shrink)

During the 19th-century controversy over human freedom, a controversy involving such figures as Locke, Collins, Clarke, Leibniz, Price, and Reid, two different conceptions of freedom were at the center of the dispute. The first of these, of which John Locke is a major advocate, I will call Lockean freedom, the other conception, of which Thomas Reid is the leading advocate, I will call Reidian freedom. The history of this controversy is fundamentally a dispute over which (...) of these two concepts of freedom is more adequate to our common-sense beliefs about freedom and our general metaphysical and scientific principles. To evaluate the merits of each side in this dispute we must, as a start, have a clear understanding of these two conceptions of freedom. Lockean freedom is fairly well understood, Reidian freedom much less so, perhaps even misunderstood. My aim in this paper is to show that the standard account of Reidian freedom is incorrect, to provide a correct interpretation of Reid’s conception of freedom, and to show its importance to the question of the connection between moral responsibility and freedom. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the view, held by some Thomistic thinkers, that divine determinism is compatible with human freedom, even though natural determinism is not. After examining the purported differences between divine and natural determinism, I discuss the Consequence Argument, which has been put forward to establish the incompatibility of natural determinism and human freedom. The Consequence Argument, I note, hinges on the premise that an action ultimately determined by factors outside of the actor’s control (...) is not free. Since, I argue, divine determinism also entails that human actions are ultimately determined by factors outside of the actors’ control, I suggest that a parallel argument to the Consequence Argument can be constructed for the incompatibility of divine determinism and human freedom. I conclude that those who reject natural compatibilism on the basis of the Consequence Argument should also reject divine compatibilism. (shrink)

, LI, . D., F. B. A. Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen LONDON QEO IGE ALLEN AND IJNWIN LTD PREFACE JOHN LAIRD did not live to ...

Schelling’s philosophy has been construed either as endorsing a Christian view of revelation or as setting the stage for an existentialist account of human freedom. There has been a tendency to ignore the interface of Schelling’s task, namely, as exploring the presuppositions that govern an attempt to rethink the affinity between the Divine and the human will. This paper aims to rectify the above deficiency; it shows how Schelling offers a more radical account of human (...) class='Hi'>freedom than can be found in either a conventional Christian or in a secular account of the frailty of the human situation. The key to this interpretation lies in showing that Schelling developed a dialectic of human freedom which establishes how the self-devisiveness of evil can arise as a corollary to the harmony of love. Through his dialectic, Schelling cultivates the insights of German idealism in a manner which clarifies rather than undermines the basic motifs of Christianity. (shrink)

Schelling’s 1809 Freiheitsschrift, perhaps his most widely read work, presents considerable difficulties of understanding. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of the work in relation to Kant. My focus is on the relation in each case of their theory of human freedom to their general metaphysics, a relation which both regard as essential. The argument of the paper is in sum that Schelling may be viewed as addressing and resolving a problem which faces Kant’s theory of (...) class='Hi'>freedom and transcendental idealism, deriving from the challenge posed by Spinozism. One major innovation in Schelling’s theory of human freedom is his claim that it presupposes the reality of evil. I argue that Schelling’s thesis concerning evil also provides a key to the new and highly original metaphysics of the Freiheitsschrift. The relation of Schelling’s theory of freedom to his general metaphysics is therefore complex, for it goes in two directions: the metaphysics are not simply presupposed by the theory of freedom but are also in part derived from it. These new metaphysics also, I argue, allow Schelling to resolve a problem which his own earlier Spinozistic system had left unresolved. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1964, given by Roderick M. Chisholm (1916-1999), an American philosopher.

In recent work, Rawls, Nozick, and the ?democratic?socialist? theory of Markovi? and Gould, attempt to ground rival models of just economic relations on the basis of conflicting interpretations of human freedom. Beginning with a philosophical conception of humans as essentially free beings, each derives a different system of basic rights and freedoms: (1) the familiar democratic civil and political rights of citizenship in the West (Rawls); (2) the classical bourgeois market freedoms ? ?life, liberty, and property? (Nozick); and (...) (3) democratic socialist rights of self?management of the work?place (Gould and Markovi?). I argue that each of these theorists implicitly assumes a different but ungrounded ?social paradigm of human agency? concerning the particular forms of human choice which are singled out as most important for a free, human life. None of these theories contains the methodological resources for showing why the forms of human agency it ?emancipates? are more important than the forms it suppresses or ignores. In order to overcome this impasse and provide a way of evaluating such rival paradigms of free agency, I elaborate a methodology based on the idea that a free society must provide its members with ?equality in the social bases of self?respect?. I use this methodology to argue that all three of the above conceptions are blind to problems of human agency, freedom, and dignity posed by the modern phenomena of welfare dependency, unemployment, and a self?stultifying division of labor. (shrink)

The traditional philosophical questions around human freedom are to do with how to square freedom for human organisms with increasingly scientific understandings of the universe itself. At the beginning of Western philosophical consciousness, Plato, unlike later philosophers eligible of the label rationalist, maintained that there are obstacles to free and rational agency, owing in no small measure to pressures exerted by the human psyche from what later were referred to as biological drives and drives for (...) social status. In subsequent eras, these obstacles came under the heading of “weakness of will”—a conception shared widely in popular and traditional culture. Today the realities of addiction, social stresses, forces of habit, culture, social position, and group identity, together with psychological findings about cognitive biases, have come to dominate the landscape of empirically-based obstacles to agency. Can the image of the human being under the microscope of contemporary science, including cognitive and social science, be reconciled with the “manifest image” of human beings as sources of their individual behaviors (and held responsible accordingly), particularly if the scientific image is best construed in terms of governance by laws of nature? (The phrases manifest image and scientific image were coined by the twentieth-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, see Sellars 1962.) How is it possible to square the idea of laws of nature with the manifest image in which humans exercise free agency as they play their various parts in the drama that is life? Does the manifest image thus square better with a theistic image of the world, as both seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant seem to have thought, and by contrast the scientific image square better with atheism? A deterministic universe, such as was proposed during the Enlightenment, was early on thought to pose a threat to the idea of human freedom. (It does not pose the same threat to the idea of a sovereign creator, however, because the notion of a creator of the universe already puts the entity who qualifies for the office outside the regime of those laws, ahead of them both in time and in ontological status.) One traditional answer to the threat has been the notion of compatibilism— which simply asserts that freedom and determinism are not incompatible. The devil, of course, has been in the details of explaining how this can be so, and many schools of thought on the matter exist. It is worthwhile noting that there are enormously compelling reasons, from the quantum regime so well described by quantum theory, to reject determinism: the laws governing the universe are simply not fully deterministic. This, of course, vitiates the need to confront the threat as originally posed. However, the trouble, if one follows along this line of thought, is to make sense of the nature of freedom in a world governed partly by deterministic laws and partly by nondeterministic ones that admit of an element of chance. Is such a world itself any more compatible with the idea of human freedom? In this section we grapple with the question of human freedom, what it could mean, and whether it is best accepted in the context of a form of theism. We find that theism has no more resources for addressing these difficulties than atheism does. (shrink)

Advances in biology, genetic research and operant behavior modification have thrown into question the status of human freedom of self-determination, i.e., the ability to conceive and understand rules and the ability to act in accordance with or in opposition to them. An argument based on biological and psychological research is sometimes claimed to show that all human behavior is determined by genetic make-up and environment and that freedom of self-determination is an illusion. An analysis of (...) class='Hi'>human action and of the scientific enterprise, however, shows such determinism to be inconsistent and hence untenable. (shrink)

Mechanistic explanation is the dominant approach to explanation in the life sciences, but it has been challenged as incompatible with a conception of humans as agents whose capacity for self-direction endows them with freedom and dignity. We argue that the mechanical philosophy, properly construed, has sufficient resources to explain how such characteristics can arise in a material world. Biological mechanisms must be regarded as active, not only reactive, and as organized so as to maintain themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium. (...) Notions from systems biology make key contributions, particularly Gánti’s chemoton, Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno’s basic autonomy, and Barandiaran and Moreno’s adaptive autonomous agents. The reconstrual is then extended to mental life by conceiving of cognitive mechanisms as control components in inherently active systems, as illustrated in models offered by Randall Beer and Cees van Leeuwen. (shrink)

This book claims that artificial intelligence (AI) may affect our freedom at work, in our daily life, and in the political sphere. The author provides a philosophical framework to help make sense of and govern the ethical and political impact of AI in these domains. AI presents great opportunities and risks, raising the question of how to reap its potential benefits without endangering basic human and societal values. The author identifies three major risks for human freedom. (...) First, AI offers employers new forms of control of the workforce, opening the door to new forms of domination and exploitation. Second, it may reduce our capacity to remain in control of and responsible for our decisions and actions, thereby affecting our free will and moral responsibility. Third, it may increase the power of governments and tech companies to steer the political debate, thereby affecting the possibility of a free and inclusive political participation. The author claims that it is still possible to promote human freedom in our interactions with AI. This requires designing AI systems that help promote workers' freedom, strengthen human control and responsibility, and foster a free, active, and inclusive democratic participation. Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on the ethics of technology, philosophy of technology, political philosophy, design, and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In that it holds God to be the only true efficient cause, Malebranche’s occasionalism would seem to deny human freedom and to make God responsible for our sins. I argue that Malebranche’s occasionalism must be considered within its Cartesian framework; once one understands what it is to be an occasional cause in this context, Malebranche can be seen as saving a place for human freedom, and he can consistently hold that we are morally responsible for our (...) actions. (shrink)

The ancient problem of fatalism, more particularly theological fatalism, has resurfaced with surprising vigour in the second half of the twentieth century. Two questions predominate in the debate: (1) Is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom and (2) How can God foreknow future free acts? Having surveyed the historical background of this debate in "The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge" and "Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez" (Brill: 1988), William Lane Craig now attempts to address these issues critically. His (...) wide-ranging discussion brings together a thought- provoking array of related topics such as logical fatalism, multivalent logic, backward causation, precognition, time travel, counterfactual logic, temporal necessity, Newcomb's Problem, middle knowledge, and relativity theory. The present work serves both as a useful survey of the extensive literature on theological fatalism and related fields and as a stimulating assessment of the possibility of divine foreknowledge of future free acts. (shrink)

After centuries of reflection, the issue of human freedom remains vital largely because of its connection to moral responsibility. When I ask—What is human freedom?—I mean to be asking what kind of freedom is required for moral responsibility? Questions about moral responsibility are intimately connected to questions about social policy and justice; so, the issue of moral responsibility—of desert, of whether or not anyone is ever really praiseworthy or blameworthy—has practical as well as theoretical significance.

In God and Human Freedom: A Kierkegaardian Perspective Tony Kim discusses Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of historical unity between the divine and human without disparaging their absolute distinction. Kim’s central analysis between the relation of God and human freedom in Kierkegaard presents God’s absoluteness as superseding human freedom, intervening at every point of His relation with the world and informing humanity of their existentially passive being. Kim argues Kierkegaard is not a strict voluntarist but (...) deeply acknowledges God’s absoluteness and initiative over and against human life. Moreover, the author’s exploration of unity in Kierkegaard points to the very ethics of who God is, one who loves the world. Ultimately, God manifests that love in Jesus Christ, representing God’s ultimate reconciliation with the world in his humility. (shrink)