The logic of freedom.

Abstract

I take it for granted that free will is a central philosophical notion. Still, throughout Western history certain philosophers have put forth arguments which claim that no person has, or could have, free will. These arguments may be grouped into three different types. First, there are metalogical arguments which argue that since all propositions are either true or false, and since propositions do not change their truth-values, no person ever has free will. Second, there are divination arguments which claim that there exists some divine being, perhaps God, with complete knowledge of all future events. Thus, no person ever has free will. Third, there are determinism arguments which suggest the truth of a general causal determinism which governs each object and event in the entire universe. Given this, it is supposed, no person ever has free will. I call these the inevitability arguments. In this dissertation I show that all of these arguments are unsound. I do this by showing, first, that each argument type is of the same general form which I call the basic structure. So, the arguments stand or fall together. The basic structure includes, beyond the information given above, another premise which claims that the past, or the set of God's beliefs, or the conjunction of the laws of nature is fixed and, in some sense, beyond our control. It is this premise, necessary to the validity of any inevitability argument, which I claim to be false. I show that there is some sense in which, say, the past is fixed but that this sense is unimportant to attributions of free will. Moreover, the sense of fixedness which is important to freedom is not undermined by the inevitability arguments.