Peter van Inwagen- Esej o wolnej woli (1986).pdf

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van Inwagen, Peter
An Essay on Free Will
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983
Preface
v-vi
I The Problems and How We Shall Approach Them 1
II Fatalism
23
III Three Arguments for Incompatibilism
55
IV Three Arguments for Compatibilism
106
V What Our Not Having Free Will Would Mean 153
VI The Traditional Problem
190
225
Notes
Index
246-8
van Inwagen, Peter
An Essay on Free Will
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983
Preface
v-vi
I The Problems and How We Shall Approach Them 1
II Fatalism
23
III Three Arguments for Incompatibilism
55
IV Three Arguments for Compatibilism
106
V What Our Not Having Free Will Would Mean 153
VI The Traditional Problem
190
225
Notes
Index
246-8
Vi
PREFACE
Preface
This book considers several questions about free will, but the
bulk of it is addressed to the question whether free will and
determinism are compatible. Its answer is that, contrary to
received opinion, they are not.
There have appeared, in the last twenty years or so, a fair
number of books wholly or mainly about the problem of
free will and determinism. One should certainly mention
M. R. Ayers's
The
Refutation
of Determinism,
Austin Farrer's
The Freedom of
the
Will,
R. L. Franklin's
Freewill and
Determinism,
Anthony Kenny's
Will, Freedom and Power,
J. R. Lucas's
The Freedom of the Will,
A. I. Melden's
Free
Action,
and D. J. O'Connor's
Free Will.
I have made no men-
tion of these books in the body of the present work. This does
not reflect my judgement of the quality of these books, but
rather the fact that the concerns of their authors are largely
irrelevant to the topics I propose to discuss. I shall treat the
problem of the compatibility of free will and determinism
seriously and at length. The books I have listed either do not
treat this problem at all, or, at best, pass very quickly over
certain arguments the correct evaluation of which is essential to
its solution. In particular, none of these books contains any-
thing like an adequate discussion of the following argument:
If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences
of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But
it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and
neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. There-
fore, the consequences of these things (including our
present acts) are not up to us.
The present book is essentially a defence of this argument
and an exploration of the consequences of supposing it to
be right, and, therefore, it owes little to any of the hooks I
have mentioned.
There are, I think, only five twentieth-century works that
have had any very extensive influence on the present book:
C. D. Broad's "Determinism, Indeterminism and Libertarian-
ism",
1
R. E. Hobart's "Free Will as Involving Determination
and Inconceivable Without It",
2
R. M. Chisholm's "Responsi-
bility and Avoidability",
3
Carl Ginet's "Might We Have No
Choice?' and Richard Taylor's
Action
ozdPurpose
s
.
I discuss
Hobart's article in Chapter IV. I do not discuss the other
works, but their influence is pervasive. From the articles I have
learned what arguments about free will are worth serious and
extended consideration. Taylor's book has deeply influenced
me; it is, I think, the source of a "picture" of human beings
that is partly responsible for my most basic convictions about
free will.
Two works that have influenced me as regards special but
important points are Harry Frankfurt's "The Principle of
Alternate Possibilities"
6
and G. E. M. Ansccanbe's inaugural
lecture,
Causality and Determination.'
W. P. Alston read the book in manuscript. His comments
have resulted in the rewriting of many confused and unclear
passages.
I have benefited from discussing the problem of free will
and determinism with Keith Lehrer, Richard Taylor, Alvin
Plantinga, and Carl Ginet. I have benefited from discussing
the problem of future contingencies with Margery Naylor.
Parts of this book have appeared elsewhere. I wish to thank
the editor of
Noils
for permission to reprint a few paragraphs
of "Laws and Counterfactuals" (1979), the editors of
The
Philosophical Review
for permission to reprint parts of
"Ability and Responsibility" (1978), D. Reidel Company
for permission to reprint parts of "The Incompatibility of
Free Will and Determinism"
(Philosophical
Studies,
vol. 27,
no. 3, 185-9, copyright @ 1975 by D. Reidel Publishing
Company, Dordrecht, Holland), the editor of
Theoria
for
permission to reprint parts of "A Formal Approach to the
Problem of Free Will and Determinism" (1974), and the
Philosophy Documentation Center for permission to reprint
parts of "The Incompatibility of Responsibility and Deter-
minism", which appeared in M. Brand and M. Bradie, eds.,
Action and Responsibility
(Bowling Green: 1980).
Chapter I
The Problems and How We Shall Approach Them
1.1 There is no single philosophical problem that is "the problem of free
will". There are rather a great many philosophical problems
about
free
will.
1
In this book I shall solve one of these problems and worry another at
great length.
The problem I solve is the problem of "fatalism" or "future
contingencies". This problem will be dealt with in Chapter II, which is a
more or less self-contained essay. That chapter might have been left out of
the book with almost no impairment of the argument of the remainder. It
is included because it does, after all, bear on the question whether we have
free will. And perhaps the fact that what it says is right will go some way
toward making up for its irrelevance to the other parts of the book.
The problem of future contingencies is an old and honourable
philosophical problem, but it is hot one of the great central problems of
philosophy. The main topic of this book is one of the great central
problems: the problem of free will and determinism.
1.2 It is difficult to formulate "the problem of free will and determinism"
in a way that will satisfy everyone. Once one might have said that the
problem of free will and determinism — in those days one would have
said 'liberty and necessity' — was the problem of discovering whether the
human will is free or whether its productions are governed by strict causal
necessity. But no one today would be allowed to formulate "the problem
of free will and determinism" like that, for this formulation presupposes
the truth of a certain thesis about the conceptual relation of free will to
determinism that many, perhaps most, present-day philosophers would
reject: that free will and determinism are incompatible. Indeed many
philosophers hold not only that free will is compatible with
end of p. 1
determinism but that free will
entails
determinism. I think it would be fair
to say that almost all the philosophical writing on the problem of free will
and determinism since the time of Hobbes that is any good, that is of any
enduring philosophical interest, has been about this presupposition of the
earlier debates about liberty and necessity. It is for this reason that
nowadays one must accept as a
fait accompli
that the problem of finding
out whether free will and determinism are compatible is a large part,
perhaps the major part, of "the problem of free will and determinism".
I shall attempt to formulate the problem in a way that takes account
of this
fait accompli
by dividing the problem into two problems, which I
will call the Compatibility Problem and the Traditional Problem. The
Traditional Problem is, of course, the problem of finding out whether we
have free will or whether determinism is true. But the very existence of
the Traditional Problem depends upon the correct solution to the
Compatibility Problem: if free will and determinism are compatible, and,
a fortiori,
if free will
entails
determinism, then there is no Traditional
Problem, any more than there is a problem about how my sentences can be
composed of both English words and Roman letters.
One of the main theses of this book is that the correct solution of the
Compatibility Problem does not imply the nonexistence of the Traditional
Problem; therefore my division of the problem of free will and
determinism into two is no idle exercise. But before I say more about this
division of the problem and about the ways in which I shall use it to
organize this book, I shall explain what I mean by
free will
and
determinism
in sufficient detail to forestall certain possible
misunderstandings.
1.3 In Chapter III, I shall formulate the thesis of determinism with as
much precision as I am able to give it. Our present purposes will be served
by a short, preliminary account of what is meant by determinism.
Determinism is quite simply the thesis that the past
determines
a unique
future. But let us see what that might mean.
Presumably, at any given moment there are many "possible futures",
many ways in which the world might go on. Or at
end of p.2
least this is true if we understand 'possible' in a sufficiently liberal way:
there are certainly many "picturable" or "conceivable" or "consistently
describable" futures. But many of the futures that are possible in this sense
are impossible in another: they are
physically
impossible. For example,
though I can picture to myself what it would be like for there to be a total
eclipse of the sun this afternoon, though I can say without contradicting
myself that a total eclipse of the sun will be visible this afternoon, there is
an obvious sense in which this future I might imagine or describe is
physically impossible. To say this is not to say that it is contrary to the
laws of nature — if we may allow ourselves this piece of terminology —
that there should be an eclipse this afternoon, for the laws of nature do not
by themselves dictate when particular events like eclipses shall occur.
2
To
say that a "possible future" containing an imminent eclipse is physically
impossible is rather to say that given the past, the
actual
past,
and
the laws
of nature, no eclipse will occur; that the past and the laws of nature
together rule out any possibility of an eclipse this afternoon. Those who,
like me, do not object to talk of "possible worlds" may think of the matter
this way: while there are presumably possible worlds in which the laws of
nature are the actual laws and in which there is an eclipse this afternoon,
there is no possible world in which (i) the laws of nature are the actual
laws, (ii) the past is the actual past, and (iii) there will be an eclipse this
afternoon.
This example shows that there is a clear sense in which certain
"imaginable", "conceivable", or "consistently describable" futures are
physically impossible.
Determinism
may now be defined: it is the thesis
that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future.
3
There
must, of course, be
at least
one physically possible future; if there is more
than one, if at some instant there are two or more ways in which the world
could go on, then
indeterminism
is true.
Determinism in this sense must be carefully distinguished from what
we might call the Principle of Universal Causation, that is, from the thesis
that every event (or fact, change, or state of affairs) has a cause. It is far
from obvious what the logical relations that hold between these two theses
are. I doubt, for example, whether the Principle of Universal Causation
end of p.3
(1) if an event (or fact, change, state of affairs, or what have you)
has a cause, then its cause is always itself an event (or what
have you) and never a substance or continuant, such as a man;
(2) if an event (or what have you) A was the cause of an event B, then it
follows, given that A happened and given the laws of nature, that A
"causally
necessitated"
B, that B could not have failed to happen;
(3) every chain of causes that has no earliest member is such that,
for every time t, some event in that chain happens earlier than t.
It is easy to see why each of these premisses is necessary for the deduction
of determinism from the Principle of Universal Causation.
Suppose that the Principle of Universal Causation is true and suppose
that premiss (1) is false. Suppose, that is, that the doctrine of
immanent
or
agent
causation is true.
4
Suppose, to be more specific, that a certain
change occurs in an agent, Tom, and Tom himself is the cause of this
change, and no earlier state of affairs necessitated this change. Then the
thesis of determinism is false. But our description of this case is internally
consistent, for it does not entail that any event is without a cause. In
particular, the change in Tom has a cause: Tom himself. The cause of this
change, it is true, has no cause, but this does not entail the falsity of the
Principle of Universal Causation, since its cause is not an event or change
but a man, that is, a continuant.
5
Suppose that the Principle of Universal Causation is true and suppose
that premiss (1) is true and suppose that premiss (2) is false. That is,
suppose that every event is caused by some earlier event or events but that
these earlier causes do not
necessitate,
but merely
produce,
their effects.
(That this supposition is consistent with our concept of causation — that is
to say, with
the
concept of causation, for every concept is the concept it is
and is not some other concept — has been argued by Professor Anscombe
in her inaugural lecture.
6
I shall present
end of p.4
entails
determinism. In order to deduce the latter from the former, we
should need at least three premisses:
and defend similar arguments in Chapter IV.) I think it is easy to see that,
if these suppositions are correct, then, while every event has a prior cause,

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