Hi fate7,
I couldn't wait for your clarification, so I decided to give you
Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus (and the Epicureans generally) and the
Stoics' opinions on free will. Yes, I'm a philosophy geek, and I also
major in it at university.
Anyways, on to your answer.
***
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
The text below is part of the entry for 'free will' in the Stanford
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, which is Copyright 2002 Timothy O'Connor.
The entry deals with the concept of free will, it's origins (Plato's
distinction between the 'animal' and the 'rational'), and some of the
thought that has followed it, of Greek and non-Greek origin. It's a
useful discussion of some basics which might lead you to follow the
'path' of thought from the Ancient Greeks to the modern day
philosophers.
"1.2 Free Will as deliberative choosing on the basis of desires and
values
A natural suggestion, then, is to modify the minimalist thesis by
taking account of (what may be) distinctively human capacities and
self-conception. And indeed, philosophers since Plato have commonly
distinguished the ‘animal’ and ‘rational’ parts of our nature, with
the latter implying a great deal more psychological complexity. Our
rational nature includes our ability to judge some ends as ‘good’ or
worth pursuing and value them even though satisfying them may result
in considerable unpleasantness for ourselves. (Note that such
judgments need not be based in moral value.) We might say that we act
with free will when we act upon our considered judgments/valuings
about what is good for us, whether or not our doing so conflicts with
an ‘animal’ desire. (See Watson 1982 for a subtle development of this
sort of view.) But this would seem unduly restrictive, since we
clearly hold many people responsible for actions proceeding from
‘animal’ desires that conflict with their own assessment of what would
be best in the circumstances. More plausible is the suggestion that
one acts with free will when one's deliberation is sensitive to one's
own judgments concerning what is best in the circumstances, whether or
not one acts upon such a judgment.
Here we are clearly in the neighborhood of the ‘rational appetite’
accounts of will one finds in the medieval Aristotelians. The most
elaborate medieval treatment is Thomas Aquinas's.[1] His account
involves identifying several distinct varieties of willings. Here I
note only a few of his basic claims. Aquinas thinks our nature
determines us to will certain general ends ordered to the most general
goal of goodness. These we will of necessity, not freely. Freedom
enters the picture when we consider various means to these ends, none
of which appear to us either as unqualifiedly good or as uniquely
satisfying the end we wish to fulfill. There is, then, free choice of
means to our ends, along with a more basic freedom not to consider
something, thereby perhaps avoiding willing it unavoidably once we
recognized its value. Free choice is an activity that involves both
our intellectual and volitional capacities, as it consists in both
judgment and active commitment. A thorny question for this view is
whether will or intellect is the ultimate determinant of free choices.
How we understand Aquinas on this point will go a long ways towards
determining whether or not he is a sort of compatibilist about freedom
and determinism. (See below. Good expositions of Aquinas' account are
Donagan, 1985, and Stump, 1997.)
There are two general worries about theories of free will that
principally rely on the capacity to deliberate about possible actions
in the light of one's conception of the good. First, there are agents
who deliberately choose to act as they do but who are motivated to do
so by a compulsive, controlling sort of desire. (And there seems to be
no principled bar to a compulsive desire's being informing a
considered judgment of the agent about what the good is for him.) Such
agents are not willing freely. Secondly, we can imagine a person's
psychology being externally manipulated by another agent (via
neurophysiological implant, say), such that the agent is caused to
deliberate and come to desire strongly a particular action which he
previously was not disposed to choose. The deliberative process could
be perfectly normal, reflective, and rational, but seemingly not
freely made. The agent's freedom seems undermined or at least greatly
diminished by such psychological tampering.
1.3 Self-mastery, rightly-ordered appetite
Some theorists are much impressed by cases of inner, psychological
compulsion and define freedom of will in contrast to this phenomenon.
For such thinkers, true freedom of the will involves liberation from
the tyranny of base desires and acquisition of desires for the Good.
Plato, for example, posits rational, spirited, and appetitive aspects
to the soul and holds that willings issue from the higher, rational
part alone. In other cases, one is dominated by the irrational desires
of the two lower parts.[2] This is particularly characteristic of
those working in a theological context -- for example, the New
Testament writer St. Paul, speaking of Christian freedom (Romans
vi-viii; Galatians v), and those influenced by him on this point, such
as Augustine. (The latter, in both early and later writings, allows
for a freedom of will that is not ordered to the good, but maintains
that it is of less value than the rightly-ordered freedom. See, for
example, the discussion in Books II-III of On Free Choice.) More
recently, Susan Wolf (1990) defends an asymmetry thesis concerning
freedom and responsibility. On her view, an agent acts freely only if
he had the ability to choose the True and the Good. For an agent who
does so choose, the requisite ability is automatically implied. But
those who reject the Good choose freely only if they could have acted
differently. This is a further substantive condition on freedom,
making freedom of will a more demanding condition in cases of bad
choices.
In considering such rightly-ordered-appetites views of freedom, I
again focus on abstract features common to all. It explicitly handles
the inner-compulsion worry facing the simple deliberation-based
accounts. The other, external manipulation problem could perhaps be
handled through the addition of an historical requirement: agents will
freely only if their willings are not in part explicable by episodes
of external manipulation which bypass their critical and deliberative
faculties. But another problem suggests itself: an agent who was a
‘natural saint’, always and effortlessly choosing the good with no
contrary inclination, would not have freedom of will among his
virtues. Doubtless we would greatly admire such a person, but would it
be an admiration suffused with moral praise of the person or would it,
rather, be restricted to the goodness of the person's qualities? (Cf.
Kant, 1788.) The appropriate response to such a person, it seems, is
on an analogy with aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty, in
contrast to the admiration of the person who chooses the good in the
face of real temptation to act selfishly. Since this view of freedom
of will as orientation to the good sometimes results from theological
reflections, it is worth noting that other theologian-philosophers
emphasize the importance for human beings of being able to reject
divine love: love of God that is not freely given -- given in the face
of a significant possibility of one's having not done so -- would be a
sham, all the more so since, were it inevitable, it would find its
ultimate and complete explanation in God Himself."
***
http://www.ku.edu/~acudd/phil140-s18/ are the lecture slides from a
26th of October 1998 lecture at the University of Kansas. They deal
with the dilemma of free will and determinism, Aristotle on 'voluntary
action', involuntary action, and the criteria that are used to absolve
someone of responsibility for her actions, which you might be
interested in reading about.
***
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/ptpdlp/essays/leech4.html is an
essay by Oliver Leech entitled "The Free-Will Determinism Problem in
Greek Philosophy: Aristotle" Please do not plagiarise his work! The
following are quotes from the above essay:
"The problem of free will and determinism seems not to have been a
major issue directly exercising the minds of philosophers of the
ancient world. There are probably two main reasons for this. First,
'the prevailing view of the universe in their day did not presuppose
an omnipotent deity. The Olympians were certainly magnificently
superhuman but they fell far short of total power. Even Zeus, the
greatest of the gods, did not have everything his own way as many a
myth testifies. However, once the Judaeo-Christian notion of the
Almighty came to dominate the thinking of Europe, then doubts emerged
about the scope of human freedom. For, if God is the omnipotent
creator of all, then his created beings may well enquire whether they
are his totally passive automata or endowed with independent choice
and responsibility. Second, the Greeks lacked a deep-seated belief in
scientific determinism. Scientists and non-scientists alike, we
children of the modem world cannot escape strong conditioning into the
belief that all physical events have physical causes, that we live in
a universe governed by inexorable laws of nature. Once we apply this
general principle to human behaviour we are bound to ask whether our
actions are the expression of our free will or simply mechanistic
reactions to stimuli. "
"In Book Two of his Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle describes the origin
and development of character. For Aristotle there is in us no innate
character, no inherited (or astrologically determined) set of
qualities that make us the types of people that we are. What we do
possess at birth, however, is a capacity, an undifferentiated
potentiality, out of which a particular set of qualities called our
character develops. His denial of inborn character he explains by
reference to the quaint physics of his day: 'a stone, which has a
natural tendency downwards, cannot be habituated to rise however often
you try to train it by throwing it into the air.' There is an implicit
definition of natural here. Aristotle takes it to entail
unchangeabihty. if character were natural (innate), it could not be
subject to change. Since, he implies, there is evidence that character
within one individual is variable and malleable, then it cannot be
part of an inborn nature."
First, I have no character when I am born. Second, the character that
develops in me or, the type of person I become, is the consequence of
the habits of behaviour I adopt and maintain. Now which particular
habits these turn out to be seems to depend on the nature of the
environment in which I am reared. If I am brought up in the household
of George Washington and repeatedly behave in a thrifty and honest
mariner, then, according to Aristotle, thrift and honesty will become
part of my fixed disposition; if, however, I am brought UP in the
household of Fagin, then I will turn into well trained pickpocket with
dishonesty a fixed part of my disposition. In both cases since my
character is formed by external influences on the condition of tabula
rasa in which I was born, it is difficult to see any justification for
attributing of any responsibility to me for my character and, for that
matter, for the actions I carry out which are expressions of my
character. To put it slightly differently, there seems to be no place
in Aristotle's system for a self which exists over and above my
character and, furthermore, my character itself has been formed as a
consequence of environmental influence over which, even if there were
a separate agent, some concept of a self, it would have no influence.
It was not my decision as to which household should nurture me and I
had not pre-existing character with which to resist the attrition of
habituation." [determinism of character]
"First, I have no character when I am born. Second, the character that
develops in me or, the type of person I become, is the consequence of
the habits of behaviour I adopt and maintain. Now which particular
habits these turn out to be seems to depend on the nature of the
environment in which I am reared. If I am brought up in the household
of George Washington and repeatedly behave in a thrifty and honest
mariner, then, according to Aristotle, thrift and honesty will become
part of my fixed disposition; if, however, I am brought UP in the
household of Fagin, then I will turn into well trained pickpocket with
dishonesty a fixed part of my disposition. In both cases since my
character is formed by external influences on the condition of tabula
rasa in which I was born, it is difficult to see any justification for
attributing of any responsibility to me for my character and, for that
matter, for the actions I carry out which are expressions of my
character. To put it slightly differently, there seems to be no place
in Aristotle's system for a self which exists over and above my
character and, furthermore, my character itself has been formed as a
consequence of environmental influence over which, even if there were
a separate agent, some concept of a self, it would have no influence.
It was not my decision as to which household should nurture me and I
had not pre-existing character with which to resist the attrition of
habituation."
***
http://www-phil.tamu.edu/~sdaniel/Notes/96class4.html
"Aristotle: we are free insofar as we are responsible for our actions,
and we are responsible only for those actions that we do voluntarily
(that is, as a result of our choices). Insofar as our habits or
dispositions are the result of choices we have made in the past, any
choices or actions based on them are voluntary and are our
responsibility. We are responsible for any action that results from
our "culpable" ignorance or negligence if any reasonable person in our
circumstances could have avoided such ignorance or negligence. We are
also responsible for learning how a "reasonable" person thinks, and
that means not allowing ourselves to become selfish or lazy.
Ultimately, we are responsible for developing through our actions the
character and personality traits that form the foundation on which our
actions are based. We are not responsible for involuntary actions,
that is, those actions over which we have no control and which result
from coercion, constraint, or justifiable ignorance."
from "Class Four: Soft Determinism and Indeterminism" located at
http://www-phil.tamu.edu/~sdaniel/Notes/96class4.html
***
The following notes on the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers come from
Long, A. A., and Sedley, D. N. (eds) (1987) 'The Hellenistic
Philosophers' (vol. 1) Cambridge University Press. All page numbers
refer to this text.
The Epicureans:
Epicurus, "On nature" (102-3)
""From the very outset we always have seeds directing us some towards
these, some towards those, some towards these and those, actions and
thoughts and characters, in greater and smaller numbers. Consequently
that which we develop - characteristics of this or that kind - is at
first absolutely up to us; and the things which of necessity flow in
through our passages from that which surrounds us are at one stage up
to us and dependent on beliefs of our own making"
Cicero, "On fate"
"At this initial stage, if I were disposed to agree with Epicurus and
to deny that every proposition is either true or false, I would rather
accept that blow than allow that all things happen through fate. For
the former view is at least arguable, whereas the latter is truly
intolerable" (104)
The Stoics:
Alexander, "On fate"
"to say that even if all things happen by fate the possible and the
contingent are not eliminated, because that which nothing prevents
from happening is possible even if it does not happen, and that the
contradictories of things which happen by fate are not prevented, so
that they are possible even if they do not happen; and to adduce as
proof that they are not prevented from happening by the fact that the
things preventing them are unknown to us, although they exist in any
case (since the causes which destine their contradictories to happen
are also the causes of their not happening, if, as they say, it is
impossible that identical circumstances should produce contradictory
results..." (233-4)
Aetius
"The Stoics [describe fate as] a sequence of causes, that is, an
inescapable ordering of interconnexion" (336)
Alexander, "On fate"
"They [the Stoics] say that since the world is a unity which includes
all existing things in itself and is governed by a living, rational,
intelligent nature, the government of existing things which it
possesses is an everlasting one proceeding in a sequence of ordering.
The things which happen first become causes to those which happen
other them" (337)
***
Search Terms: '+Plato +determinism +free +will" "+Aristotle
+determinism +free +will"
***
I recommend that you have a look at the Complete Works of Plato, which
you can find in every (I would guess) university library and in most
good book stores. Another 'classic' that's relevant to you is
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, particularly books two and three. I
could give you the 'important' bit of these texts here, but you'd miss
the context and the whole build up of the argument - and plus, I
couldn't explain it to you nearly as well as Plato and Aristotle do in
their own words.
If you need any clarification or further sources, please don't
hesitate to ask me!
-shananigans |
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