Notes for 2/11/2026

 2/11/2026
[Philosophy Club every Monday, 4-5 pm, in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences room 436 ("The Cave")]
[Bioethics Club: Mondays from 5:30pm-6:30pm in Leigh Hall 408]

Is free will all-or-nothing or does it come in degrees? Compatibilism affirms that determinism could be true but we could still have free will.

A better expression of compatibilism is that the truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant to the question of whether or not we can have free will.

Compatibilists reject the alternatives principle as being part of what defines free will.

Rather, compatibilists think that the concept of free will needs to be defined in some other way than in terms of alternatives.

Compatibilism is mainly motivated by the ‘Reasons Principle’:
S performs A freely at T only if A is consistent with the totality of reasons S has at T for acting.
 
Compatibilism suggests that what really matters to a choice being “free” is that it is consistent with our internal motivations for acting.

Example 1: John Locke’s locked room example.



Example 2: Free money.



Example 3: Pencil in the eye.


 

Voluntarism is the position that you have a choice about something (that whether or not you do it is voluntary).


One of many things the German philosopher Immanuel Kant is famous for his saying, “’Ought’ implies ‘can’.”

Any claim that someone ought to behave in some way presupposes that it is possible for them to do so.



Rationality is generally considered to be prescriptive (that is, you ought to be rational).

So, prescriptive rationality seems to imply rational voluntarism.


Rational voluntarism is a common assumption in advocating the teaching of logic, critical thinking, and philosophy.


Why bother teaching someone the difference between good and bad reasoning if no one has any choice about whether or not to put such knowledge to use?


If determinism is true, then it is determined whether or not you will be rational.

If you are determined not to be rational, then there seems no point in advising you to be rational.

This can be generalized to any type of advice, whatsoever.


If I advise you to avoid smoking, this advice seems pointless if you have no ability to avoid smoking.

The problem here relates to the position known as fatalism.

Can determinism be meaningfully distinguished from fatalism?

Fatalism can be defined as the view that if determinism is true, then nothing we do can change what happens.



Does determinism imply fatalism?
Does compatibilism imply fatalism?



In one sense, fatalism is certainly true:

If event E is determined to occur, then E will, in fact occur. E cannot be prevented except by changing something in the series of causes that determine E.

. . . C3 -> C2 -> C1 -> E

But each member of this series is determined and could not have happened differently given its causes, and so on.

Since no one can change what is in fact determined to happen, then nothing we do can change what happens.



But fatalism is false if it is understood as the view that nothing we do can change what happens (or that whatever is determined to happen will happen whether or not we try to prevent it).



 
Suppose a fatalist argues as follows:
If I am fated to die by drinking poison, then I will die by drinking poison, and nothing I do can change this. But if I am NOT fated to die by drinking poison, then I will not die by drinking poison. Therefore, whether or not I drink this poison in front of me makes no difference to the question of whether I die by drinking poison.



That is, fatalism supposes that our own choices/actions make no difference to what happens. But this is clearly false.