Notes for 2/9/2026

 2/9/2026
[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]

Do insects have free will?
 
What, exactly, is free will?

Is free will compatible with determinism?

Yes: Compatibilism
No: Incompatibilism

What, exactly, is determinism?

Combination of two causal principles:

Universal causation: Every event must have a cause.

Causal uniformity: 
Strong: Given exactly the same causes, the exact same effects must follow.
Weak: Given relevantly similar causes, relevantly similar effects follow.


LaPlacian demon: (Pierre LaPlace) Given a complete knowledge of the state of material reality at some time and perfect knowledge of the laws of nature, every subsequent event would be perfectly predictable.


Incompatibilists say that if determinism is true, then there is no free will.

So, for them, the whole question is whether or not determinism is true.

Two varieties of incompatibilism:
Hard determinism: Determinism is true, and so we have no free will.
Libertarianism: We do have free will, and so determinism is false.

Sometimes libertarianism is called “contra-causal free will” (i.e., against the field of physical causes)

Why accept hard determinism rather than libertarianism?

Mainly because we have never observed a case where we knew an event not to have a cause.


Some people think (wrongly) that it is a conceptual truth that every event has a cause.


The BIGGEST problem for determinists has been the turn toward quantum physics.

Quantum Mechanics includes a commitment (usually) to irreducible indeterminacy. Some events at the very small level happen spontaneously without being deterministically caused.

Determinism appears to be false.

Some hard determinists think that determinism might be true after all (even in quantum physics).

But most accept a position called “near determinism” according to which the “macro world” is deterministic except in the RARE cases where macro-scale events narrowly depend on micro-scale indeterminism.

But also, even if material reality is ultimately indeterministic, how is this at all relevant to free will?
(We’ll come back to this.)


Incompatibilism: Either determinism or free will, but not both.

Hard determinism: Determinism is true, so there is no free will.

Libertarianism: Free will exists, so determinism is false.

Primary motive for incompatibilism is a commitment to the ‘Alternatives Principle’

S performs an action A1 freely at a time T only if at T S has the power to perform at least one alternative action A2 instead of A1.

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