Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. In my present post I shall restrict myself to the first four responses, those of Bob Wilson, Chrisguy, and Cindy (two posts). I say this because jonnyparker has made an extremely important suggestion that I plan to take up later, and DaveB has asked a question that I still need to think about. And, as already indicated, I plan to proceed very slowly here, so I shall try not to cover too much ground too quickly.
Anyway, Cindy wrote:
I think you are absolutely right about that, Cindy, and what is true of the average Arminian in the pew is also true, I believe, of Arminian scholars and libertarian philosophers: they too make varying (and often confusing) claims about the nature of free will, as your link to that warranted faith site also illustrates, so part of our task here is to clarify some of these different claims. For starters, however, it is perhaps enough to know that, according to the Arminians, God created us as free moral agents and has left us free to reject him forever, if that is what we freely choose to do.
Now even as you have rightly pointed to the necessity of sorting our way through varying hypotheses concerning the nature of free will, so Bob Wilson and Chrisguy have drawn our attention to one of the most important of these hypotheses. As Bob Wilson put it, “My first impression is that ‘freedom’ is thought to mean that one is always able to choose contrary to influencing factors that push in a given direction”; and as Chrisguy put it, “The concept of freedom I would propose is this: the agent in question is able, at the particular time he has freedom (which may not be always), to do otherwise.” If I have understood these remarks correctly, the suggestion here seems to be that freedom requires something like a power of contrary choice; that is, it requires a set of alternatives to choose between, each of which is a genuine psychological possibility for the one doing the choosing. So if I did some action A yesterday, perhaps we can say, along with certain libertarians, that I did A freely only if in the exact circumstances in which I did A it was also within my power to refrain from doing A; and it was within my power to refrain from doing A only if it was psychologically possible for me not to do A. Does that, Bob and Chrisguy, seem to capture your suggestions adequately?
Let us, in any case, accept these suggestions for now, since we can always revisit them if the need should later arise. Let us grant, in other words, that the power of contrary choice is an important necessary condition of someone’s acting freely. Even if this should be so, however, most libertarians would concede that such a power is in no way a sufficient condition of someone’s acting freely. Don’t let that philosophical jargon throw you, since the point is really very simple, namely this: A person might do A, have the power to refrain from doing A in those exact same circumstances, and still not do A freely.
Suppose, by way of illustration, that in a moment of delusion a schizophrenic young man, standing in the kitchen with a butcher knife in his hand and having forgotten to take his medication, should suddenly come to believe that his loving mother is a sinister invader from space who has devoured his real mother and is therefore not his real mother at all. Suppose further that the young man’s delusion should create for him a context of alternative possibilities that would not have existed apart from it; it creates, in other words, a context in which he finds it psychologically possible to slash his mother to death as well as psychologically possible to refrain from killing her (after all, other sinister invaders could easily turn him into their next meal as a punishment for killing his mother!). So whichever decision he makes, his irrational deliberation, as chancy as such things can be, could have produced the contrary choice under the same initial conditions. Here, at least, the presence of alternative possibilities seems incompatible with genuine moral freedom precisely because it entails a degree of irrationality that is itself incompatible with such freedom. Would you agree with that? If so, then we do not yet have a complete account of freedom.
Accordingly, here is a further question: If we suppose for now that the power of contrary choice is indeed a necessary condition of acting freely, what further condition might also be required?
Thanks again for these responses.
-Tom