Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

In summary then, we are either determined by the nature of God, the nature of the physical universe or by the nature of our genetic inheritance.

We need to take some wide detours in order to get to grips with this debate. First of all, 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 there are also events that seem to have no immediate cause, so this gives a third class of events in the world. 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. So the first key thing to note is that determinism does not recognise any difference between random causes, causes brought about by natural laws and causation by agents.

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.

The second point is to note that consciousness, as an emergent property of the universe, makes a difference to the types of event that can happen as a result of agency as compared with things that happen by accident or because of natural laws. What is it about a sentient being that makes it different from an object? What makes a ‘something’ into a ‘someone’? Anything that has sentience, volition and agency is

162