Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

question to ask of free will is whether our actions in the world must always obey natural laws, or whether we can break them. (The latter case would be libertarianism.)

There’s a big difference between a natural cause bringing about an effect (for instance, a drop in temperature causing ice to form) and an effect that is brought about by an agent acting. And as we’ve seen above, there are events which seem to have no immediate cause. We do not consider effects brought about by natural causes — such as water freezing to form ice — to be acts of free will. Likewise, we do not consider random acts and accidents to count as free will. Whilst cause and effect seem to need to follow through with determinism, strict determinism does not recognise any difference between random or purely physical causes and causation by agents.

To summarise — there can be necessary causes as a result of natural laws, there can be contingent causes as a result of random events and there can be contingent causes as a result of agency. A contingent cause as a result of agency is just another way of saying free will. So the big question concerning free will really comes down to whether an action initiated by an agent is in some way different from an action that is just a result of natural causes or random events in the universe.

Previous chapters have shown that we can come to grips with many of the unusual qualities of the world by looking at emergence and at essence in a non-mysterian manner. Below I want to examine this option for free will.

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