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So once one distinguishes those options, I think it helps a great deal to sort out some of the problems that come in this area.

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One does not need to say that absence of blameworthiness.

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Implies lack of freedom. Sometimes you're not blameworthy because it's not something you've done at all.

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Sometimes you're not blameworthy because you did the right thing.

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Well, Hume's most distinctive contribution to the freewill debate is different from this.

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I mean, I've argued that this this definition of liberty is quite an important one.

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And I think it's a defensible one. The idea that a free action is one that you do intentionally and that you're morally

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responsible or potentially morally responsible for actions that you do in those circumstances,

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and that if you're threatened with a gun or whatever, that doesn't change, that you're acting intentionally.

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Hume's most distinctive contribution to the free will debate is actually somewhat different from that.

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What he does in enquiry Section eight is to provide an argument for determinism.

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And he appeals here to the understanding of necessity, that scene enquiry, Section seven.

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So be warned, when you read enquiry Section eight, as you're required to for this course,

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if you don't know what goes on in enquiry Section seven, you might find it a little bit confusing.

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So here's the passage in enquiry Section eight, where he appeals back to what he has said in enquiry Section seven.

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Our idea of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity observable in the operations of nature

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beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects and the consequent inference from one to the other.

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We have no notion of any necessity or connexion. So Hughes very famous contribution to the understanding of the notion of cause.

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Is this. He asks, what do we mean by one thing causing another or one thing necessarily bringing about another?

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His answer is that we get the notion of causation purely by seeing constant conjunctions of things,

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we see motion of one billiard ball followed by motion in another ball.

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Again and again and again. As a result, when we see the one moving, we naturally infer that the other will move.

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Remember what Hume says about induction? We do that just naturally by instinct.

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And he thinks that that instinct is what gives us the notion of causation.

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We find ourselves inferring B from A and as a result, because we find ourselves making that inference.

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That's why we attribute a necessity to the connexion between A and B, why we say A is the cause of B.

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The inference comes first. We find ourselves making the inference.

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That's why we say there's a causal link. OK.

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So what he's now saying is. Think about that notion of causation and necessity.

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And apply it to the free will debate. What comes out of that?

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Well, if these circumstances that is constant conjunction and the consequent inference of the mind, if these circumstances form in reality,

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the whole of that necessity which we conceive in matter,

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and if these circumstances be also universally acknowledged to take place in the operations of the mind.

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The dispute is at an end. Now, that's from much later in the section in between, has given lots of arguments to say that this is the case.

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But if you look at human action,

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you find the same sort of consistency between motives and actions as you find between motion of one billiard ball, a motion of another.

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Human behaviour is predictable in the same sort of way as the behaviour of the physical world.

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Of course, sometimes it's very complex. So is the physical world. Trying to predict the weather, for example, is extraordinarily difficult.

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Predicting the actions of people is often very much easier. And he makes the point with a lot of illustrations.

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He shows how everything we do in life or almost everything we do takes for granted a uniformity of behaviour amongst other people.

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We do treat people as predictable. He gives one rather gruesome example of a prisoner who is in a jail awaiting capital punishment.

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And he points out that the prisoner may reason that the walls are too strong for him to get through the window is too strong for him to break.

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He foresees his death from the axe or whatever it may be,

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but he also foresees it powerfully because he thinks that he is not going to be able

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to influence the guard because he foresees that he will be taken to the scaffold,

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that people will act in the way that they are prescribed to act.

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So in working out what's going to happen to him, he is combining reasoning about physical things and reasoning about moral things.

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That is people's behaviour. And we do that quite naturally all the time.

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We combine this kind of these kinds of reasoning.

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Well, in that case, if the only understanding we have of necessity or causality in the physical world comes from uniform behaviour and predictability.

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And if those apply just as much to the moral world, the world of human action,

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then there's just as much reason for ascribing determinism to human action as there is to the physical world.

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So most of s.E.C Part One is devoted to arguing these things that human actions manifest uniformity.

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They're generally recognised as doing so. People's standardly draw inferences about human behaviour.

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Just in the way that they do about physical things. So he says what may seem rather paradoxical.

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All mankind have acknowledged the doctrine of necessity in their whole practise and reasoning, even while while they profess the country opinion.

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So lots of people deny the doctrine of determinism, but actually humans saying in everything they do,

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they actually manifest a belief in it, a belief in causation, governing human action.

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So why do they deny determinism? Why do they deny a doctrine to which their own behaviour commits them?

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Well, Hume thinks this is because people have a strong propensity to believe that they penetrate farther into

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the powers of nature and perceive something like a necessary connexion between the cause and the effect.

62
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So this, again, comes back to humans understanding of causation.

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People think when they see one billiard ball hitting another, they think they understand why it happens.

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Actually, Hume has said they don't remember about gravitation, that people thought gravitation was weird and incomprehensible.

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How can one thing attract another across space? They thought that was weird,

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whereas they thought the motion of billiard balls and collision of billiard balls was absolutely straightforward and comprehensible.

67
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And Hume's great contribution here is to say, no, it isn't, actually, if you think about it.

68
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It isn't intrinsically comprehensible why billiard balls move as they do.

69
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And I argued in the second or third lecture that this was actually anticipating modern science.

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Modern physicists do not expect the behaviour of things, e.g., in quantum mechanics to be intuitively comprehensible.

71
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Well, if the behaviour of billiard balls isn't actually really comprehensible in the way that people thought it was,

72
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then that can cure us of the illusion that somehow there is a greater necessity in physical things that than there is in human behaviour.

73
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At least that's how he Marqise. Another important argument that he makes is that morality actually requires determinism,

74
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and here we get to get back to the issue of morality incident, either a few more slides than you have.

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I'll give you them next time. So why?

76
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What is the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility?

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The libertarians say if we determined we can't be free, we can't be morally responsible.

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Hume actually turns that on its head and says, hang on. What is it that makes you morally responsible for what you do?

79
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Surely it is because the action arises from you.

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It's because you did the action, because the action was brought about by your intentions, your desires, your reasoning.

81
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That's what makes the action morally responsible. So determinism actually assists moral responsibility, it doesn't undermine it.

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How can an action, which I do be one that I'm morally responsible for?