This paper explores the theory of freedom that Emilie du Châtelet advances in her essay “On Freedom.” Using contemporary terminology, we can characterize this theory as a version of agent-causal compatibilism. More specifically, the theory has the following elements: (a) freedom consists in the power to act in accordance with one’s choices, (b) freedom requires the ability to suspend desires and master passions, (c) freedom requires a power of self-motion in the agent, and (d) freedom is compatible with moral necessity (...) but not with physical necessity. While these elements may at first appear disparate, the paper shows that they fit together quite well. The resulting theory is a surprising combination of doctrines that appear to be based on Samuel Clarke’s libertarian account of free will and doctrines that are reminiscent of the compatibilist accounts of John Locke, Anthony Collins, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)

En sus últimos años, Leibniz emplea el concepto de necesidad moral para cualificar la elección divina de lo óptimo. Sin embargo, Leibniz no explica este concepto con precisión. El presente trabajo intenta mostrar que la necesidad moral leibniziana no puede entenderse como una modalidad puramente deóntica, porque ello contraría los fundamentos metafísicos que hacen al carácter teleológico de su ética. El artículo propone también una interpretación del contenido alético de tal noción, basada en la conexión necesaria que Leibniz parece atribuir (...) a la relación entre la voluntad y la tendencia al bien. Dicha necesidad afirmaría que, aun cuando toda elección es contingente, en tanto entraña una infinidad de consideraciones, el Dios leibniziano está metafísicamente necesitado a seguir el criterio de lo mejor. In his last years, Leibniz employs the concept of moral necessity to qualify God's choice of the best. However, he doesn't explain this concept accurately. This paper intends to show that leibnizian moral necessity cannot be conceived as a purely deontic modality, because it would be contrary to the metaphysical grounds which make Leibniz's ethics strictly teleological. This paper also proposes an interpretation of the alethic content of this concept, based on the necessary connection that Leibniz seems to assign to the relationship between free will and the tendency towards good. What this necessity entails is that, for Leibniz, even though the infinity of reasons involved makes every choice contingent, God is metaphysically necessitated to follow the rule of the best. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Leibniz’s form/matter defense of omnipotence is paradoxical, but not irretrievably so. Leibniz maintains that God necessarily must concur only in the possibility for evil’s existence in the world (the form of evil), but there are individual instances of moral evil that are not necessary (the matter of evil) with which God need not concur. For Leibniz, that there is moral evil in the world is contingent on God’s will (a dimension of (...) divine omnipotence), with the result that even though it is necessary that God exerts his will, there are particular products of his will that are contingent and unnecessary—including human moral evil. If there are instances of evil which are contingent on God’s will and yet unnecessary, then the problematic conclusion for Leibniz’s view must be that human evil depends upon divine concurrence, not just for its possibility in the world (which is necessary) but for its instance (which is contingent). If the form/matter defense of omnipotence contains a true paradox, then God concurs in the form as well as the matter of evil. To assuage this difficulty for Leibniz, I will argue that he could either give up an Augustinian notion of evil, or rely upon a distinction between *potenta absoluta* and *potenta ordinate*, which was popular among important thinkers in the medieval period. (shrink)

This paper deals with the issue of self-determination and agency in moral action. On the one hand, it seems that where possible, the moral agent should use their practical reason to identify what it is right for them to do, and act accordingly; on the other hand, this seems to leave little room for the agent to decide for themselves how to act, where this is often said to be a marker of freedom and how the will is exercised. In (...) response to this difficulty, Ruth Chang has argued recently that at least some reasons themselves need to be seen as being created through an act of will. Looking at the work of Iris Murdoch, it is argued that this response is problematic. At the same time, it is also argued that Murdoch can provide a fruitful way of dealing with this problem through her account of the imagination. This gives a role to the will of the agent, not in creating reasons, but in attuning us to those reasons, thereby locating the will within practical reasoning itself and showing how the authority of the good can be made compatible with human freedom. (shrink)

En este artículo, presentamos primero un análisis de la proposición “Dios elige siempre lo mejor”, con el fin de indagar qué tipo de necesidad cabe atribuírsele. Puesto que Leibniz rechaza la necesidad geométrica en el ámbito de la libre elección divina, examinamos luego qué clase de relación hay entre el entendimiento y el bien, es decir, si corresponde prioritariamente a la razón juzgar sobre el bien o lo mejor. Del mismo modo, analizamos a continuación el vínculo que liga a la (...) voluntad con el bien, por cuanto este último parece ser, al mismo tiempo, el objeto natural de la voluntad. En ambos casos, el análisis se aplica tanto a Dios como a las criaturas racionales. Una aparente inconsistencia parece suscitarse entre un entendimiento y una voluntad que “se disputan” el mismo objeto. Nuestro objetivo es mostrar que, aunque la prioridad de examinar sobre el bien pueda recaer en una u otra facultad, según el contexto escritural, la cuestión carece de sentido al aplicársela a Dios. En suma, la ambivalencia se diluye cuando advertimos que ello resulta de una ficción humana, a saber que hay un hiato entre deber y querer. (shrink)

Si Dios es la razón suficiente del mundo, entonces parece seguirse que todos los eventos son consecuencia necesaria de un ser necesario. Para evadir esta conclusión, Leibniz formula en la década de 1670 una concepción modal que funda la contingencia en un rasgo lógico e intrínseco de las ideas de las cosas: la posibilidad de concebir la idea contraria sin contradicción. Hacia 1686, Leibniz complementa esta primera concepción con lo que considera su solución definitiva al problema de la contingencia: la (...) teoría del análisis infinito. Sin embargo, en otros escritos de ese año, propone dos vías alternativas de fundamentación de la contingencia. Este trabajo sugiere que esa pluralidad de modelos explicativos converge en una concepción integral de las modalidades que subyace como trasfondo de la reflexión modal leibniziana. If God is the sufficient reason for this world, then it seems to follow that every event is a necessary consequence of a necessary being. in order to avoid this conclusion, Leibniz states, during the 1670's, a modal conception that grounds contingency on a logical feature which is intrinsic to the ideas of things: the possibility of conceiving the opposite idea without contradiction. Towards 1686, Leibniz complements this first conception with what he considered to be his definitive solution to the problem of contingency: the theory of infinite analysis. However, in other writings from the same year, he proposes two different ways to explain contingency. This paper suggests that this plurality of models converges in a global conception of modalities, which lies at the background of Leibniz's modal thought. (shrink)