[lit-ideas] Re: Do You Have Free Will?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2011 23:13:39 EDT
In a message dated 4/1/2011 12:51:17, Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx writes:
What will happen if people stop believing that they are choosing? Perhaps
the scientists should keep it to themselves.
Or perhaps they want to sell it for a charge!
-----
see Geary, "The price of free will".
Oddly, it was A. G. N. Flew, who using Urmson's expression (1951 --
"Notions concerning validity), "the argument of the paradigm case") applied it
to
'free will' in "Crime or disease" (1954, British Journal of Sociology). The
cases they discussed, along with, in later years, H. Frankfurt, include
drug-addicts.
Watson ("Free agency") criticised such Griceian analyses:
The drug addict may feel he is not acting freely. He may have a desire to
take drugs, and a higher desire not to have this ground or first-floor
desire. Is he acting 'akratically' when he takes drugs? Frankfurt argues that
in
a way, the drug-addict is acting _freely_ and Watson recognises that:
Watson goes on to claim that first-floor desires constitutes a person in ways
that higher-order desires don't. Bratman, a disciple of Grice, extended the
analysis to the draft and alcoholism. Bratman's example involves eating a
candy-bar. The desire is in the agent that perhaps he shouldn't eat the
candy bar. Or strictly, that he shouldn't DESIRE to eat the candy bar. As it
happens, Bratman does eat the candy bar, and says he has acted freely as long
as he recognised that while he did fulfil the desire to eat the candy bar
"he could have acted otherwise".
------- And so on.
Speranza
----- The Swimming-Pool Library
"Have Free Will. Will Travel"
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