Freedom

Overview

This chapter looks at human freedom in the context of the problem of free will and conceptions of it in existentialist
philosophy.

The chapter has two sections. Section one deals with challenges to the view that we are natural libertarians. It focuses
on the challenge of determinism. The aim is to discuss some contemporary responses to the problem and to have you
to reflect about whether free will and determinism are compatible.

Section two explores the views about human freedom of two existentialist thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel
Marcel. Presentation of the thinkers’ disagreement over the means to achieve authentic freedom aims to provide
further insights into human freedom and have you to think about true freedom.

Free will

It is true that we are natural libertarians. We believe that we are acting out of our own
free will, that we have freedom. A theologico-philosophical point that challenges this
belief is a question which was prominent in european medieval period. The question is
whether we have free will when God is omniscient. If God knows everything that will
happen, then I do not have freedom of decision to perform an action. This is because I
would be forced to do the action. I would be forced to do it because God’s knowledge
is perfect. God’s knowledge would not be perfect if it is not true that I will be
performing the action.1 For example, if it is foreknown by God that I will be eating ice
cream on my next birthday, then my eating of the ice cream on that day would not be
my choice. I will be compelled to eat ice cream on that day. If it is not true that I will be
eating ice cream on that day, then God’s knowledge is imperfect. So, it seems that
because there is divine foreknowledge, it cannot be the case that we have free will. St.
Augustine’s (354-430 CE) response to this is that, despite God’s omniscience, we still
do have freedom of decision, for if we do not, it would not make sense to conceive of
God as punishing wrongdoers.2
Another point that challenges the belief that we have free will is determinism.
Determinism is the view that everything has been set up before human existence. It
challenges the belief because if the world is deterministic, then our free will is by-
product of the laws of nature. According to this, while it feels like we are acting out of
free will, we are actually not at all. If one’s actions are caused, for instance, by her
genes or environment, it would appear that the actions are not her doing.
Although there may be some other case that attempts to show that determinism is right,
a work on introduction to philosophical problems include a case about Robert Alton
Harris. Robert Harris was put to death in a gas chamber in 1992 for murdering two

1
Norman Swartz, “Foreknowledge and Free Will,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://www.iep.utm.edu/foreknow/; accessed 16 September 2015

2
“Augustine”, by Christopher Kirwan, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted
Honderich (OUP, 1995): pp. 64-66. Cf. Saint Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Anna S.
Benjamin and L.H. Hackstaff (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964): pp. 3, 36.

1
teenagers. Harris committed the crime when he was 25 years old.3 There is a view that
Robert Harris ought not to be seen as responsible for his actions. That is because they
are a result of bad circumstances in his childhood. They are products of his heredity or
environment.4 His father thought he (Robert) wasn’t one of his own and his mother
later rejected him (when he was younger) as one of her children. (Robert was first sent
to prison at the age of 14.) That his mother rejected him is a result of his mother’s
resentment towards her husband’s ill treatment to Robert.
Although one might view Robert’s case as utterly pitiful, if one puts oneself in the
shoes of Robert, it would probably be uncertain if she would think that she is not
responsible for her actions. One would probably loathe being in those circumstances.
But that would not put her in the position that makes her to say that her circumstances
are forcing her to do actions and that she has no control over her choices. This view,
called compatibilism, is one endorsed by 60 percent of professional philosophers.5
One way to explore the compatibilist view is to elaborate on a challenge to “the
principle of alternative possibilities” (PAP). The principle is looked at by Harry G.
Frankfurt as one that “states that a person is morally responsible for what he has done
only if he could have done otherwise.”6 According to this meaning of PAP, freedom
means to be not in a situation where you are cornered to do only one thing. The
challenge is famously put forth by Frankfurt.7 The so-called “Frankfurt examples” or
“Frankfurt-type examples” challenge PAP by showing that even if there are no
alternative possibilities available to a person, she is still morally responsible – she is
still free.
In the following scenario, Frankfurt would say that the captive is still morally
responsible. This scenario is one where a person is held captive. The taker has
completely strapped his captive to a chair. He has made her hold a gun. Using strong
material, he made sure that she would only be able to move a finger, placed in front of
the gun’s trigger. In front of her, there is another person who is also securely tied to a

3
Miles Corwin, “Robert Harris”, in Laurence BonJour and Ann Baker, eds., Philosophical
Problems: An Annotated Anthology (Pearson Longman, 2005), pp. 456-459. Available at http://plato-
philosophy.org/lesson-plans-2/pre-college-course-material/; accessed 10 April 2015

4
This is clear in Robert Blatchford’s "Not Guilty". Robert Blatchford, Not Guilty (New York:
Albert and Charles Boni, Inc., 1913), pp. 108-120, 130-131; available at
http://faculty.gordonstate.edu/jthrasher-sneathen/Blatchford.pdf; accessed 10 April 2015

5
This is reported in Mark Balaguer, Free Will (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
2014), p. 48. Most professional philosophers are academics in universities.

6
Harry G. Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” in Metaphysics: The
Big Questions, 2nd ed., eds. Peter van Inwagen and Dean W. Zimmerman (United Kingdom: Blackwell,
2008), p. 471.

7
Ibid.

2
chair. If she pulls the trigger, the person in front would surely be shot. Now, the taker
would push the captive’s finger to push the trigger. The question is, at this instant, is the
captive free?
The compatibilist response to the question is in the affirmative. One can still choose in
her mind to not shoot the person. The force exerted may not stop the taker’s push, but
in one’s mind, the captive has chosen not to shoot and has acted on this choice.8

Human freedom in existentialist philosophy

Human freedom, understood as autonomy (the state of being able to direct our lives), is
an important theme in a number of philosophers. These philosophers were dubbed as
existentialists by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who numbers himself with them. The
full meaning and extent of the existentialist human freedom may be seen in a famous
disagreement between two existentialists, Sartre and Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). Their
debate is about whether true freedom or autonomy is achieved in isolation from one’s
community or in participation in it. For Sartre, it is in contradicting others that one finds
herself to be truly free. One of his famous lines that relate to this is, “Hell is other
people”, which is said by the character Garcin in his play No Exit.9 This has been
understood to mean that because one’s actions affect others (so, others’ actions would
affect her), she is not totally free.10 People’s actions ultimately restrict us. What is
implied then is that true freedom entails finding ways to make others’ actions not affect
you.
An important point in Sartre’s philosophy which provides a background to his view is
his view of humans as self-determining beings. In “Existentialism and Humanism,”
Sartre says that “man is what he makes of himself.” Sartre believes that humans do not
have a pre-conceived essence. Sartre explains the meaning of this as follows:
If one considers an article of manufacture – as, for example, a book or a
paper-knife – one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of
it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a paper-knife and to the
preexistent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at
bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in
a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for
one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what
it was for. Let us say, then, of the paper-knife that its essence – that is to say the
sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition
possible – precedes its existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or
book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world
from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.

8
An important point to note about the Frankfurt-type examples is that one would be hard-pressed
to find such examples in real life. I owe this point to Michaelis Michael.

9
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1989).

10
This is stated, for example, in a course lecture notes on existentialism, specifically on Sartre’s
No Exit. See http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/no%20exit.htm; accessed 6
September 2015

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 When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the
time, as a supernal artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it
be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibniz himself, we always imply that
the will follows, more or less, from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so
that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating. Thus, the
conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in
the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a
conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a
definition and a formula. Thus each individual man is the realization of a certain
conception which dwells in the divine understanding….
…. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We
mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and
defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it
is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then
he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there
is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he
conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after
already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is
nothing else but that which he makes of himself….11

According to this, the process of molding one’s essence begins the moment one is born.
One is master of herself. From this, it would appear that Sartre does not think an
individual needs others in creating herself. An attempt to put this more philosophically
is to point out that, according to Thomas Flynn, a Sartre scholar, the freedom Sartre
talks about has ontological basis. He says that for Sartre, our being is a ‘presence-to-
self’, not a ‘in-itself’. A ‘presence-to-self’ is “transcendence or ‘nihilation’ of our
self”.12 This appears to mean that our being is both ‘awareness’ and ‘control’ of
ourselves. If to be is to be in ‘control’ of ourselves, then that means that we are masters
of ourselves.
For Marcel, according to a secondary source, it is only when one engages with others in
the community is one truly free or autonomous. Autonomy is captured in the view that
self is not isolated or isolatable.13 Marcel is known for the line, esse est co-esse (one’s
essence is to co-exist). According to this, it is in one’s dealings with others that one
defines oneself. One’s family, or significant others, co-workers, co-parishioners, among
many we deal with, contribute to one’s being free. In “Truth and Freedom,” Marcel
discusses freedom of the individual as that which links with obligations in society.
Obligations are not to be looked at as coercive, for to relinquish obligations is to
“endanger the community”. To endanger the community to which the individual

11
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen, 1948) in The Continental
Philosophy Reader, eds. Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 67.

12
Thomas Flynn, "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/;
accessed 4 August 2014

13
Jill Graper Hernandez, “Gabriel Marcel”, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://www.iep.utm.edu/marcel/; accessed 18 August 2014

4
belongs must not be done because it is that which “does assure [him] the freedom to be
himself”.14

According to the disagreement, that there is human freedom is out of the question.
Human freedom is viewed as valuable. The problem is which means is effective to
make it true or to preserve it. Is one truly free when she disregards others? Or is it when
she considers others’ point of view (for instance) that she is?

References
Saint Augustine. On Free Choice of the Will. Trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L.H. Hackstaff.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964.
Balaguer, Mark. Free Will. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014. (This is a book in
The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. Authors of titles in the series, like those of Oxford
University Press’s A Very Short Introduction series, are leading thinkers. For more information
on this series, see https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/mit-press-essential-knowledge-series.)
Blatchford, Robert. Not Guilty. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, Inc., 1913, pp. 108-120,
130-131. Available at http://faculty.gordonstate.edu/jthrasher-sneathen/Blatchford.pdf;
accessed 10 April 2015
Corwin, Miles. “Robert Harris”, in Laurence BonJour and Ann Baker, eds. Philosophical
Problems: An Annotated Anthology (Pearson Longman, 2005), pp. 456-459. Accessed through
Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) Pre-College Philosophy Lesson
Plans available at http://plato-philosophy.org/lesson-plans-2/pre-college-course-material/;
accessed 20 April 2015
Flynn, Thomas. "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/; accessed 4 August 2014
Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of
Philosophy 66 (1969): pp. 828–839.
Hernandez, Jill Graper. “Gabriel Marcel”, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available
at http://www.iep.utm.edu/marcel/; 18 August 2014. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
and The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy are good online resources.)
Kirwan, Christopher. “Augustine”, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. by Ted
Honderich (OUP, 1995): pp. 64-66.
Marcel, Gabriel. “Truth and Freedom.” Philosophy Today Vol. 9, No. 4 (1965): pp. 227-237.
Mendelsohn, Michael. “Saint Augustine”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available
at (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#PhiAnt); accessed 7 July 2014
Pink, Thomas. “Chapter 1: The Free Will Problem,” Free Will: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 1-21.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen, 1948), in The Continental
Philosophy Reader, eds. Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater: pp. 65-76. London: Routledge,
1996.
Swartz, Norman. “Foreknowledge and Free Will”, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Available at http://www.iep.utm.edu/foreknow/; accessed 16 September 2015

14
Gabriel Marcel, “Truth and Freedom,” Philosophy Today Vol. 9, No. 4 (1965): pp. 230-231.