I was teaching philosophical ethics yesterday and came across these quotations I’d saved up about the possibility of human freedom.
Isaiah Berlin
The first, from Thomas Nagel, simply describes what a hard-core version of determinism looks like:
Some people have thought that it is never possible for us to do anything different from what we actually do, in the absolute sense. They acknowledge that what we do depends on our choices, decisions, and wants, and that we make different choices in different circumstances: we’re not like the earth rotating on its axis with monotonous regularity. But the claim is that, in each case, the circumstances that exist before we act determine our actions and make them inevitable. The sum total of a person’s experiences, desires and knowledge, his or her hereditary constitution, the social circumstances and the nature of the choice facing them, together with other factors that we may not know about, all combine to make a particular acting in the circumstances inevitable. This view is called determinism… [quoted in Alban McCoy, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Christian Ethics, 34-35]
The second quotation, from Isaiah Berlin, is about how freedom is in fact a presupposition of ordinary personal and social life, whether we like to admit it philosophically or not:
The whole of our common morality, in which we speak of obligation and duty, right and wrong, moral praise and blame – the way in which people are praised or condemned, rewarded or punished, for behaving in a way in which they were not forced to behave, when they could have behaved otherwise – this network of beliefs and practices, on which all current morality seems to me to depend, presupposes the notion of responsibility, and responsibility entails the ability to choose between black and white, right and wrong, pleasure and duty; as well as, in a wider sense, between forms of life, forms of government, and the whole constellations of moral values in terms of which most people, however much they may or may not be aware of it, do in fact live. [Liberty, 324]
If you want to follow all this up, you can read Alban McCoy’s very helpful chapter about determinism here on Google Books.
One of my favouite treatments of freedom (which goes on to argue from freedom to the existence of God” is W.S. Anglin’s Free will and the Christian Faith
In it he argues that without “libertarian free will which extends to evil”
(1) Human beings are not truly rational;
(2) Human beings do not have any real artistic creativity;
(3) Human beings are not fully responsible for good and evil in a way which really makes a difference;
(4) Human beings cannot really chose their values;
(5) there is no genuine co-operation among human beings;
(6) There is no true love among human beings;
(7) Human beings cannot love unconditionally;
(8) Human beings cannot really make promises
I would add that in a deterministic world view truth is unknowable since our perceptions of truth would be caused by the events which preceded that perception and therefore would not necessarily be congruent with the object of the perception.
If we were to decide only to Love, would this not be the only freedom in the world. Because then we would have nothing other to choose between. and it is choice that takes away our freedom….our being free maybe. ?
I don’t like Nagel’s discourse on determinism. It seems very fatalistic, as though we are almost bound to respond in a given way to certain situations. Frre will surely has a place here? Moreover, though I understand where Fr Tony is coming from in quoting Anglin, even though human beings are very ‘small parts’ in the wider sceme of things, we can make a little bit of difference in the small corner of the world in which we live.
Whooah, brain not up to coping with this post right now. Will return when I’m feeling fresher to see if I can fathom it a little. Totally off-topic, but slightly related to a previous post concerning gossip and the Daily Mail… Confess to quite liking some of the info on there….particularly fond of the Beckam family….whether or not they will be blessed with a girl this time around….Victoria’s grit and determination, and now success, with fashion, hearing that David stopped to help a broken down motorist on a roundabout…..for me they, and so many others, are part of the fabric of life in this country. When returning from abroad I am always (pleasantly) struck by feeling plugged back in again to a culture whose nuances are so familiar. Anyway apropos DB, I find it fascinating that he has just sat through a painful 12 hour tattoo and now bears the figure of Christ and three angels on his chest. In his description of why he did it, he doesn’t say that he is passionate about Christ; or indeed link it with a fair few other religious themes now adorning him, (helpfully listed – my kind of list!). I find it fascinating. Seems to me that whether or not he articulates it, he is passionate about love and Christ. Apologies for being so off-topic.