Sunday, November 15, 2020

Libertarian free will would be a dangerous thing if we really had it

Here's a post of mine I found on a discussion forum while I was looking for a different post.

I think LFW would be an unpredictable and unruly thing to have. Under LFW, your desires and motives can have some influence over your behavior, but they're never sufficient to determine your behavior. In fact, no antecedent conditions prior to and up to the moment of choice are sufficient to determine what your choice will be.

Think about that. That means no matter what your goals are, your plans, your intentions, your desires, inclinations, etc. prior to your choice are sufficient to determine what that choice is. And in the absence of Frankfurt cases (which are merely hypothetical and almost never happen in the real world), you could have done otherwise. With that being the case, nobody could possibly know what they were about to do next. The only way you can know what you are about to do is if you assume what's going on in your head will determine what you're about to do. If what's going on in your head isn't sufficient to make that determination, then whatever action or choice you make should be a surprise to you.

If antecedent motives and desires can have some influence that falls short of determination, that means some probability can be attached to your future action. For example, if given some desire, there is a 100% probability that you will do X, that means the desire is sufficient to determine that you do X. So under libertarian free will, each influence must create a probability less than 100% that you will do X.

Now, imagine a situation in which your antecedent desire has enough influence to make it 60% probable that you will do X. With that being the case, it follow that if you were in that same situation with the same desire a hundred or a thousand times, we should expect that it would average out to where 60% of the time you did X and 40% of the time, you did not-X.

For those 40% of times you did not-X, they could not have possibly been done on purpose. To do something on purpose is to act out of your own antecedent plans, desires, and intentions. The 40% would just be accidents that you had no control over and didn't even see coming.

Now imagine that a lot of those choices are choices you make in traffic. There would be a lot more car accidents because some of the time in spite of your desire, intention, or motive to change lanes, or to avoid hitting somebody, you arbitrarily make a more dangerous choice. So LFW is quite dangerous.

It seems to me that if we have LFW, then it must come in degrees since influence comes in degrees. The stronger the influence, the closer to creating a 100% probability that you will act in a certain way. Once it reaches 100%, you no longer have LFW. That means the stronger an influence, the less LFW, and the weaker an influence, the more LFW. And that means you have the greatest deal of freedom when antecedent conditions don't even so much as influence your decisions. You have the greatest freedom when your actions are completely random and arbitrary.

It is a strange view when your own mental states are seen as obstacles to your freedom rather than what your freedom consists of.

For more on this subject, see William Lane Craig against Calvinism, Part 3B of 5.

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