Galen Strawson, a British analytic philosopher, has made significant contributions to the free will debate with his argument that true free will, as commonly understood, is impossible. His position is a form of hard determinism or impossibilism, which suggests that free will cannot exist in the way it is traditionally conceived.
In Strawson's view, for an individual to have free will, they would need to be truly responsible for their actions. However, he asserts that such responsibility is impossible because it would require one to be the cause of oneself, or the cause of the cause of oneself, and so on, ad infinitum. This is the core of what he calls the "basic argument" against free will, which can be outlined as follows:
You do what you do, in any situation, because of the way you are.
To be truly responsible for what you do, you must be truly responsible for the way you are—at least in certain mental respects.
But you cannot be truly responsible for the way you are, so you cannot be truly responsible for what you do.
The argument hinges on the idea that any aspect of oneself that affects one's actions must have been caused by one's genetic inheritance and experiences—over which one has no control—or be the result of some pure chance, for which one is also not responsible. Therefore, Strawson concludes that true moral responsibility for actions, which free will necessitates, is impossible.
Strawson's argument challenges the notion of "ultimate moral responsibility," which is the idea that an individual can be the ultimate source of their actions in a way that justifies praise or blame. Strawson believes that if our actions are the result of a chain of events that we ultimately did not set into motion, then holding individuals ultimately morally responsible for their actions is unwarranted.
It's important to note that Strawson's argument doesn't necessarily deny that people can act voluntarily or that they have what might be called a "local" free will—that is, the ability to act according to their desires and plans without external coercion. However, he argues that this sense of freedom does not provide the kind of ultimate self-determination required for true moral responsibility.
Strawson's perspective has implications for ethics, the justice system, and how we understand human behavior. It suggests a shift from a retributive justice system, which punishes individuals on the basis that they are fundamentally responsible for their wrongdoing, towards a system based on deterrence, rehabilitation, and societal protection. In terms of ethics, it can lead to greater empathy and compassion, as it recognizes that individuals are, to a large extent, products of circumstances beyond their control.
In conclusion, Galen Strawson's position on free will posits that the traditional notion of ultimate moral responsibility is untenable because it requires an impossible self-causation. Instead, he suggests that our actions are the results of a chain of causes that precede our own existence, mixed with randomness, and therefore, we cannot be ultimately morally responsible for our actions in the way that is often assumed in discussions of free will.
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