“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over two millenia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very (...) closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one's action. (Clearly, there will also be epistemic conditions on responsibility as well, such as being aware—or failing that, being culpably unaware—of relevant alternatives to one's action and of the alternatives' moral significance.) But the significance of free will is not exhausted by its connection to moral responsibility. Free will also appears to be a condition on desert for one's accomplishments (why sustained effort and creative work are praiseworthy); on the autonomy and dignity of persons; and on the value we accord to love and friendship. (See Kane 1996, 81ff. and Clarke 2003, Ch.1.). (shrink)

In recent years, a large amount of scholarship has been written about St Thomas Aquinas's views on free will and determinism. This paper is an attempt to bring some Thomist views of libertarian free will into dialogue with analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen and his ‘mysterianism’ about free will. The thesis of this paper is that Thomist libertarians about free will are committed to Peter van Inwagen's mysterianism about free will. The paper intends to accomplish this aim by showing how (...) recent accounts of Thomist libertarianism cannot defeat the intuitive strength of van Inwagen's ‘Replay argument’. The significance of this conclusion is that some Thomists are committed to mysterianism and that mysterianism is a legitimate position a Thomist can hold. This also provides evidence that the Thomist tradition can grow and be nourished by engagement with contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The Abrahamic traditions regard God as the world’s author. But what kind of author? A novelist? A playwright? Perhaps a composer of classical music? I will argue that it is best to regard God as like an improvisational play director or the leader of a jazz ensemble. Each determines the broad melodic contours or coarse-grained plot beforehand, while allowing their musicians or actors, and chance, to fill in the more fine-grained details. This analogy allows us to regard God as the (...) ultimate author of this world, while allowing us to be, while less than co-authors, more than mere enactors of a pre-written piece. These metaphors are particularly well-suited to illustrate and flesh out an Open Theistic view of things. (shrink)

Medieval authors generally agreed that we have the freedom to choose among alternative possibilities. But most medieval authors also thought that there are situations in which one cannot do otherwise, not even will otherwise. They also thought when willing necessarily, the will remains free. The questions, then, are what grounds the necessity or contingency of the will’s acts, and – since freedom is not defined by the ability to choose – what belongs to the essential character of freedom, the ratio (...) libertatis. This article studies medieval theories of freedom without choice from William of Auxerre to William of Ockham and their background in Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. (shrink)

I argue that by attending to a distinction among perspectives on the root causes of our reactive attitudes, we can better understand the bases and limitations of long-standing debates about free will and moral responsibility. I characterize this distinction as “objectivism vs. subjectivism.” I bring out this distinction by, first, scrutinizing an especially sharp divergence between Peter Strawson and Peter John Olivi: for Olivi, our ordinary human attitudes make it obvious that we have free will, and our attitudes would be (...) senseless if we did not firmly believe that we have free will; for Strawson, reactive attitudes would carry on despite a theoretical acceptance that we lack free will. I apply my distinction to more recent disagreements, such as between Peter van Inwagen and John Martin Fischer/Mark Ravizza. By getting clearer on why we disagree, we can move closer toward a resolution and we can avoid talking past each other. (shrink)

Later medieval theories of free choice differ fundamentally as to the importance they assign to deliberation. Some thinkers hold that the will's choices necessarily agree with the intellect's judgment, obtained by deliberation, of what is most worth choosing in a particular circumstance. They thus think that deliberation provides the object of choice. In addition, they take the control that is essential to free choice to be rooted in deliberation. Others object that deliberation cannot ground free choice since it is itself (...) not originally in our control. They think that one can choose differently from what appears most choiceworthy upon deliberation, and so they deny that the object of choice is exclusively given by deliberation. This paper considers theories of the role of deliberation in free choice held by prominent thirteenth and early fourteenth-century thinkers. It will be shown that there are significant theoretical difficulties on both sides. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to suggest that in early modern discussions of agency and causal efficacy it is possible to detect an attempt at pushing to its extreme consequences a specific account of agency and causality that was developed in late scholastic thought. More specifically, the article examines Francisco Suárez's (1548–1617) account of freedom and how this relates to his views on efficient causality. Despite Suárez's careful way of differentiating between natural (necessary) and human (free) agents, his view (...) can be exploited to drive home occasionalist positions that deny causal efficacy for natural agents lacking reason. The family resemblance that might be noted between early modern positions could be traced back to the reception of a common late scholastic background and to the tensions and potential nestled there. (shrink)

According to Aquinas, the souls in heaven (hereafter, the blessed) are both necessitated (i.e., determined) and free in their choice to love God. But if Aquinas is right, it may seem that we cannot give an incompatibilist account of the freedom of the blessed to love God. Roughly put, incompatibilism is the thesis that free will is incompatible with determinism. In this paper, I take inspiration from Kevin Timpe and Timothy Pawl’s account of the impeccability of the blessed to argue (...) for a more refined view of incompatibilism, consistent with some of the literature, according to which free will is compatible with a certain kind of determinism. I then modify Timpe and Pawl’s account along Thomistic lines, removing a problematic character-based contingency, to argue that anyone, regardless of character, is necessitated to love God in the beatific vision – necessitated in a sense consistent with incompatibilism. (shrink)

An increasing number of studies indicate that virtues affect brain structure. These studies might shed new light on some neuroethical perspectives suggesting that our brain network activity determines the acquisition and permanence of virtues. According to these perspectives, virtuous behavior could be interpreted as the product of a brain mechanism supervised by genes and environment and not as the result of free choice. In this respect, the neural correlates of virtues would confirm the deterministic theory. In contrast, I maintain that (...) these findings do not undermine the role of willpower and freedom while reinforcing an interactionist view of free will. If virtues affect our neural system, then the predictability of the virtuous behavior follows. The likelihood of our future (moral) actions is primarily virtue-dependent; therefore, the acquired naturality of virtuous behavior is a source of predictable behavioral patterns outlining expected actions, which I propose to call Hypotheses of Action (HAs). However, the predictability of an action indicates its likeliness and not its certainty or necessity. The neural traces of virtues can be interpreted as major indicators of HAs. It is always possible for the agents to depart from their more likely, virtue-induced actions, but their deviations from the virtuous behavioral pattern are rare, as it is rare for the vicious/non-virtuous person to behave well systematically. This implies a reaffirmation of the notions of veto and consent as they provide a universal practical power affecting the subject’s use of moral virtues. (shrink)

Given certain anti-Pelagian assumptions he endorses, Aquinas faces an “arbitrariness problem” explaining why God predestines and reprobates the particular individuals he does. One response to the problem that Aquinas offers—biting the bullet and conceding God’s arbitrariness—has a high theoretical cost. Eleonore Stump proposes a less costly alternative solution on Thomas’s behalf, drawing on his notion that our wills may rest in a state of “quiescence.” Her proposal additionally purports to answer the general question why God reprobates anyone at all. I (...) argue that Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between divine causation and human freedom prevents him from accepting Stump’s proposal as she herself puts it forward; he couldn’t accept it as an answer to the general question. Nevertheless, I claim, granted one controversial but widely accepted assumption—that he isn’t a divine determinist—Aquinas could accept a slightly modified version of her quiescence solution to the arbitrariness problem. Indeed, there is evidence that he did accept some of its key components. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of the two-level nature of acts of the will, i.e. its ability to voluntarily refer to its own acts. First, we will examine the ancient sources of the concept of the two-level will (Plato and Augustine). Then, we will focus on the views of John Duns Scotus on the types of acts of will, with particular emphasis on the concept of non velle and its application in philosophical and theological issues. Against the backdrop of Scotus’s (...) concept, we will examine the ways in which 14th-century thinkers engaged with his position and developed his account of the two-level acts of will and types of acts of will. Finally, the article discusses a significant change in the function of non velle and the use of this type of volitional act in 14th-century ethics by exploring the views of Buridan and Kilvington. -------------------------- Received: 29/01/2023. Reviewed: 30/03/2023. Accepted: 18/04/2023. (shrink)

Little attention has recently been paid to Aquinas's analyses of mixed actions, which constitute a significant sort of border line cases between the voluntary and the involuntary. A textual inconsi...

El pensamiento cristiano, para el cual la gracia perfecciona la naturaleza y no la destruye, no impide la fundamentación laica-racional, es decir, sin presupuestos teológicos de la libertad. En este sentido, queremos retomar la lección de Tomás de Aquino sobre el acto libre que puede constituir un aporte para este propósito. En el presente trabajo se expondrán las inferencias laicas que se pueden extraer de la génesis y desarrollo de la naturaleza jurídica y económica del acto libre, así como las (...) presenta Tomás. El desarrollo del estudio no repite, sino que prolonga la filosofía de Tomás y, aunque no usa el lenguaje habitual de los estudios tomistas, se mantiene fiel a su lógica y pensamiento. (shrink)

In this essay, we will try to provide a formal analysis of practical inference, attentive to the various phases in which it is articulated, and being so capable of explaining both the logical conclusiveness of the inference and the probabilistic nature of its conclusion. An innovative purpose of this article is to show how the final deliberation leading to action—the ultimate practical judgment—takes place according to a logic consistent with the use of Bayes’ theorem. This is why we refer to (...) Bayesian practical inference in the title of this essay. (shrink)