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From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: freedom and reason (attn russ, rich, & laura)
Message-ID: <5343@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 26-Mar-85 04:41:29 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5343
Posted: Tue Mar 26 04:41:29 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Mar-85 04:41:29 EST
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Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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I think that Tony Wuersch is talking about *freedom*, not *free will*.
If you point a gun to my head you have considerably diminished my freedom,
but I don't think that you have diminished my free will. I would grant that
certain individuals -- say catatonics, or the severely retarded, or people
in comas may not have free will, but then, they aren't the people that
are asking the question.

People have sent me a lot of mail about this. There seems to be a
universal misunderstanding of what I said. Most people who have sent me
mail have sent me mail which interprets my argument as follows:

people ask ``do I have free will''?
in asking such a question, one presumes that the answer is yes.
therefore, by force of will, the answer is yes.

this argument stinks.

Well, yes, I agree that this is a lousy argument, but this is not the one
I was making. I will try to be clearer.

When I ask ``d o I have free will''? I am implicitly asserting that there
is something worthwhile about asking questions. After all, I am bothering
to do this rather than doing something else. The reason that it is good
to ask questions is that it is a way of acquiring true knowledge. But
why should true knowledge be of any use to me? Because, the more true
knowledge I have, the fewer mistakes I should make. Aha. if knowledge
is important because it enables us to make fewer mistakes, it follows then
that we *can* make mistakes. In particular, we are free to make choices,
some of which we would consider mistakes.

If I do not have free will then I cannot ``make a mistake'' -- every thing
that I do is outside of the realm of personal choice and therefore is
inevitable. It may be inevitable that certain people speculate on
whether or not they have free will, of course, but the hard part is
explaining the great bulk of evidence that seems to indicate that it is
a good thing to learn since we can avoid making mistakes that way.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!laura