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OK. The basic problem of free will comes down to the notion of moral responsibility.

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We think of people as morally responsible for what they do freely.

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We don't blame them for what they're forced to do, or at least we blame them.

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Typically, a great deal less than we will often say.

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They're not free. They have no choice in the matter. So that's a very commonsensical way of thinking about things.

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You can only be morally responsible for what you do freely of your own choice.

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But then with the rise of science,

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it becomes more and more plausible to see ourselves as causally determined that what we do actually has underlying causes in our brains,

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etc., that such that a being who knew everything about us would be able to predict in advance exactly what we were going to do.

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Well, if what I do is causally necessary, can I probably be blamed for that?

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Am I in effect, not free if I'm determined? So determinism is the thesis that all events are determined by prior causes.

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So take any event, let's call it E! Given the calls laws that govern the universe, whatever they are, given the prior state of the world,

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the state of everything in the world before it occurred, then it was inevitable.

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That's one way of understanding the the notion of determinism.

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So here's a quotation from Hume's enquiry. It is agreed that matter in all its operations is actuated by unnecessary force and

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that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause.

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That no other effect in such particular circumstances could possibly have resulted from it.

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So Hume there is saying that this is something that philosophers generally agree when it comes to the behaviour of physical things, material objects.

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But Hume wanted to argue that it's also true of human actions, and that is the thesis of universal determinism,

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that it's true not only of things in the physical world, but things in what one might call the moral world, the world of people and actions.

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Well, there are a number of different positions here, and it's very important to understand how they fit together.

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So first of all, we need to ask, is the thesis that we have genuine free will compatible with determinism?

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Now, when I say genuine free will. What I take that to mean is the kind of free will that is required for moral responsibility.

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Is that compatible with determinism? Well, some people say no.

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Some people say yes. If you say no, then you're an incompatible ist.

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And it follows that at most one of the two theses can be true.

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Because neither of them might be. But that most one of them can be.

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So those who say that we do have freewill of the morally significant kind, but that determinism is false.

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They are called libertarians. So if you hear the word libertarian in the context of the free will debate, that's what it means.

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Someone who thinks that free will is incompatible with determinism. But we do have free will and therefore determinism is false.

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On the other side, you get hard determinist. So a hard determinist is someone who says everything is determined and it follows from that,

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that we are not free, that we don't have morally significant freedom. So that's one side of the debate.

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Now, you might think of the libertarians and hard determinists as being fundamentally opposed,

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but actually in some ways their positions are quite close together because they

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agree on the conceptual point that determinism and freedom are incompatible.

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And that's a pretty fundamental agreement between them.

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They simply disagree on, as it were, the fact of the matter, whether determinism is true or not.

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So on the other side of the debate are compatible ists and compatible ists.

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Let's say that we can have free will at even if determinism is true, determinism and free will are compatible.

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Now, you can be a compatibles without being a determinist. You can that I'm probably I probably fall into that position myself.

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I think freewill and determinism are compatible. But actually, I don't believe in determinism because certain things to do with modern physics.

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But those who take a compatibles position and all determinists,

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which is certainly the vast majority of compatibly down the ages, they are called soft determinists.

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Now, the consequence argument is a very well-known argument, particularly pushed by Peter Van Wagon,

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an argument for the claim that determinism is incompatible with free will.

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It goes like this, if determinism is true, then all human actions are causally determined consequences of the laws of nature and prior conditions.

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That's just what determinism says.

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Hence, I cannot do otherwise than I actually do, except by falsifying the laws of nature or changing past conditions.

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If what I do inevitably comes about, given those initial conditions and given the laws,

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then the only way I could do something different is by changing the prior conditions, which obviously I can't get past.

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They're gone or by changing the laws. And I clearly can't do that either.

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But if I can't do otherwise than I actually do, then I don't have free will.

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So if determinism is true, we lack free will. I've given it there in a very sketchy form, of course.

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It can be filled out in various ways, but it looks quite a persuasive argument.

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The fundamental thrust of it is that if everything I do was, as it were, inevitable from before I was born, how can I possibly be said to be free?

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There's nothing I could have done different.

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Well, the traditional way of opposing this kind of argument, not just the consequent argument in its modern formulations,

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but generally the idea that that freewill is incompatible with determinism on the ground that I couldn't do otherwise if determinism is true.

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The standard ways to interpret. I could do otherwise or I couldn't do otherwise.

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Differently. So the incompatible IST is saying that I can only be said to do to be able to do

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otherwise if it's causally possible in that exact situation for me to do otherwise.

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So being incompatible is.

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Wants to say that I'm only really free if put in that exact situation with the state of my brain and everything being exactly what it was.

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Something different could have happened. Otherwise I cannot be said to be able to do otherwise.

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Now, the compatibles will take a quite different view. The compatibles will prefer something like this.

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It would be possible for me to do otherwise. In a similar but not identical situation in which I chose to do so.

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So the compatibilities says, well, I chose ice cream rather than fruit.

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It was a free choice. I could have done otherwise. I could have chosen fruit.

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Of course, in that situation where I had a preference for ice cream, it was inevitable that I was going to juice the ice cream.

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Sure. But had I preferred the fruit, I would have taken the fruit.

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So I was entirely free to do as I chose. So that's a very different reading of could do otherwise.

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Now, Harry, Frankfurt has argued that quite apart from this issue of interpretation.

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Freedom doesn't even require the possibility of doing either doing otherwise.

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In either of these senses. So that's a rather more radical way of opposing the incompatible position.

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So here's an example. Suppose I go through door A.

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Maybe I am. I need to get out of the building. Maybe there's some emergency or something like that.

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And there's two doors. Doray dhobi. I choose to go through Doray.

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Now, that is a free action, I freely chose A rather than door B, but I suppose, in fact, B is locked.

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Suppose in fact, had I tried. Door B, I would have found I couldn't go that way and had to go through door.

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Anyway. In that case, we have an example where I have in a sense, I had no choice.

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It was inevitable that I would go through Door A. I couldn't do otherwise.

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But yet, in the circumstances where I chose to do door a remaining completely ignorant about the state of Dobi,

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I it seems plausible to say that I've done it freely. So therefore it's possible to do something freely, even when you couldn't have done otherwise.

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And this illustrates that what makes an action inevitable doesn't always bring it about.

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What makes this action inevitable is that Door B is locked.

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So in those circumstances, it was inevitable I was going to go through door A rather than be.

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But Dalby's being locked didn't actually bring it about. What I went through.

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And Frank, that give some other examples, the usual kind of mad scientist crops up,

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somebody who is able to predict in advance what I'm going to choose.

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And this person decides that if I choose to do what he doesn't want me to do,

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then he's going to interfere with my brain in some clever way and make sure that I actually do what he wants.

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Now, suppose in those circumstances I actually freely do what he wants me to do anyway.

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In that case, he doesn't have to take any action.

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I do what I do freely, but in fact, I couldn't have done otherwise, I couldn't have done otherwise because he would have intervened.

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Well, there's a lot of interesting discussion about these cases. I mean, just to make one obvious objection, one can say, well, OK,

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maybe it was inevitable that I went through door A rather than B, but I did actually have a choice.

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I could have done otherwise. I could have tried Dalby before going through DoRight, and that would be doing otherwise than I did.

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In the case of the evil scientist.

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I could have embarked on the course of thought that would have led me to action B, in which case he would have intervened.

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But that would have been me doing otherwise than I did, which was quite freely to choose a.

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So the argument, as you can imagine, can get quite complex.

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Well, a couple of times in talking about freedom, the word choice has naturally appeared.

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I've been talking about choosing one thing rather than another. Choosing freely and so on.

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And I suspect that this close connexion between freedom and choice lies behind the.

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The intuition that is the natural thought that to be free, it has to be possible for you to do otherwise.

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In cases like the Frankfurt examples with Dorian Dalby, you can see that I do make a choice.

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I choose to go through Doré in another sense. I do not have a choice.

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I do not have a choice which door to go through, because, in fact, Doray is the only one that I could go through.

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So you can see that there are subtle nuances here in the notion of choice. The notion of choice is also slippery in other ways.

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Suppose, for example, I'm walking along the road, my phone goes.

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I pull it out of my pocket.

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And then some apparently agitated guy comes up to me with a gun, holds the gun to me and says, Give me your mobile phone or I'll shoot you.

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Right. Do I have a choice? A case where it's absolutely blindingly obvious what I'm going to do.

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I'm going to give him the mobile phone. You could.

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It's tempting to say I don't have a choice. On the other hand, you can see that there's a sense in which I do have a choice.

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I could if I thought he was bluffing or I thought his gun was just a replica gun or something like that,

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or if I felt suicidal, I could refuse to give him the phone.

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So there is a sense in which I have a choice, a sense in which I don't. Suppose we're having some Raoh and perhaps in some.

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In some laboratory where I'm wired up and some clever neuropsychologist is deliberately putting me in a situation where I get very angry.

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He's able to look at the brain scans and say, are Milliken's going to hit him?

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Well, suppose he can suppose he can predict that. Does it mean I don't have a choice?

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Well, you could say in a sense, maybe it does. But in another sense, it doesn't.

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Maybe the neuro psychologist can say, are Milliken's going to choose to hit him?

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In which case, he's predicting that I will choose. Well, doesn't that mean that I do have a choice?

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So the notion is very slippery. It's very easy for the word choice to be bandied about in these discussions with no clear concept of choice in play.

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So be very wary when you come across discussions in the free will debate.

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Do not allow words like choice to be used without clarification of exactly what is meant by it.

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So let's distinguish various ways in which one might. Well, various things that one might intend in saying I had no choice.

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Well, one could mean that what happened was in no way dependent on my decisions or actions.

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One could mean that my actions were physically forced on me. I had no choice but to open the door.

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He was holding my hand and forcing it. We could mean that my actions were predetermined in some way by non rational factors.

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Perhaps drugs, perhaps brainwashing. We could mean that my actions were predetermined by my own desires and consequent reasoning.

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Now, that's a very odd sense of I had no choice.

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If, in fact, what I do is determined by my own desires and reasoning, I work out what I want to do.

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I work out how to achieve what I want. And then I make the decision based on those preferences and that reasoning.

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It's very odd to say there that I have no choice. But you will find that some people will say that.

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Finally, it might mean it was blindingly obvious what I should do.

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I suppose in the first round of the effort, the third round of the FIA cup,

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say Manchester United, are playing some very weak team that amazingly has managed to get through.

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And you might say it was no contest, 20 nil. It was no contest.

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You don't actually mean it was no contest. You mean it wasn't a meaningful contest in the same way.

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Sometimes it can be so obvious what to do as in the case of the mobile phone and the gun that we say.

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I had no choice. Actually, what we mean is I had a blindingly obvious choice.

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Now, an argument that can be brought to bear here, I think quite powerfully, is called the paradigm case argument.

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This is an argument that was extremely popular in the heyday of Oxford, ordinary language philosophy.

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It's far less popular now. But I think in this particular case, it has very considerable force.

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Let's ask what we mean by choice. How do we learn the use of the word choice?

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Typical example might be as a child, your mother offers you.

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A choice of puddings. Ice cream, cake, fruit. Which would you like?

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You make a choice. That's how we learn the meaning of the word choice, don't we?

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Go on, dear, it's up to you. You choose. That's where we get the notion of choice from.

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Now, if that's right, if that's, as it were, a paradigm case, a standard example of choice,

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the kind of case that we used to learn the meaning of the word, then how can it possibly be said that in such a circumstance we don't have a choice?

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It's very peculiar to say that. Now, all this does is sort out meanings of words.

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I mean, anyone who claims that this kind of argument can settle deep philosophical issues is probably deluding themselves.

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So my aim here is just to say it isn't. Or at least to suggest that it's an abuse of the word choice.

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If you deny that that kind of circumstance involves a choice,

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you're detaching your use of the word choice from its normal meaning so far that it's hard to use it and keep any grip on what we mean by it.