Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.
C O N A T U S
16. Free Will
The problem with determinism is that the bad person has an excuse for being bad whilst the good person cannot take credit for being good!
Not attributed.
At the start of this section on Goodness, the intention is to get from our understanding of quality, value, meaning and purpose to an ‘ethic’ or a set of ethics by which we might live. However, there is one further issue along the way that needs to be dealt with and that’s the matter of free will.
Given our subjective point of view, we usually feel completely free to choose what we do and how we live — in fact, it could be said that our choice defines us! We give value to ourselves and to others by assuming that we act freely. We take responsibility for our actions, both good and bad. Likewise, we hold others accountable and seek to change their ways if that seems necessary. From the previous section, we saw quality and value as fundamental to our being and possibly innate to the universe. This would seem not to make any sense unless we have the freedom to act on the qualities we sense and the values that we intuit from our being in the world. So there is a problem. And hence there is a need to dig into the meaning of free will
159