Freedom and Morality

• He who does not act freely is not

responsible for his actions; and
the Filipino people, not being the
master of its liberty, is not
responsible for either its
misfortunes or its woes – Jose
Rizal, The Indolence of the
Filipinos
Free Will, Free Action and Moral
Responsibility
What does it mean to be free?

• “A free agent is he that can do as he will, and forbear as he will,

and that liberty is the absence of external impediments.” –
Thomas Hobbes
• “power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination
of the will – David Hume
Accounts of the Will

• Faculties Model of the Will

• Reason – Responsive View of the Will
Faculties Model of the Will

• Originated from the writings of Plato and Aristotle

• Only free agents possess the faculties of intellect and will
• The interaction between the intellect and the will enables the
free agents to have free will
• Intellect or the rational faculty - the power of cognition
• Will, or the volitional faculty - an appetite for the good; that is, it is
naturally drawn to goodness
Reason – Responsive View of the Will

• An agent acts with free will if she is responsive to the appropriate

rational considerations, and she does not act with a free will if she
lacks such responsiveness.
• Coercion and manipulation undermine free will because it makes
the agents not reasons-responsive.
• Manipulated agents are not reasons-responsive, and in virtue of this lack
free will.
Does man have free will and therefore can be held morally
accountable for his acts?
Three Schools of Thought on Free Will and
Moral Responsibility

• Libertarianism
• Hard Determinism
• Soft Determinism
Libertarianism

• Man have genuine freedom to make a morally undetermined

decision, although our behaviour may be partially determined by
external factors
• The inanimate world is mechanistic and that the determining
causal chain of reactions may even affect the inanimate but
human behaviour is not wholly determined by external factors
Personality and the Moral Self
Personality
• Empirical concept
• Governed by causal laws which can
be observed
• Formed by one’s heredity and
environment
• Limits our choices and makes us
more inclined to choose certain
kinds of actions rather than others
Moral Self
• Ethical concept
• Operative when we are faced with
moral choice
• Capable of overriding the personality
and making a causally undetermined
choice which satisfied our sense of
moral duty
Libertarianism: Free will and Moral
Responsibility

• Man has free will and therefore he is morally responsible for his
actions.
• Man can be punished for immoral actions because he is genuinely
responsible for their actions.
Hard Determinism

• Hard determinist believes that the universe is deterministic

• The state of the universe is determined by what happened in the past and
we could not anything about it.
• Every event, including every human action, is the necessary result of prior
causes operating according to the laws of nature.
Philosophical Determinism

• Based on the theory of universal causation – the belief that

everything in the universe including all human actions and choices
has a cause
• Illusion of a moral choice
• Result of our ignorance of what causes these choices and of our true
condition
Psychological Determinism

• All human behaviour, thoughts and feelings are the inevetable

outcome of complex psychological laws.
• Influencing factors on human behaviour
• Hereditary
• Society
• Culture
• Environment
Theological Determinism

• The belief that the causal chain can be traced back to an

uncaused causer which is God
Scientific Determinism

• Based on the theory of Universal Causation

• For every physical event there is a physical cause and this causal
chain can be traced back to the moment of the Big Bang
• There are regularities in the way nature behave and scientific laws
enable us to predict how things will behave
Hard Determinism

• Humans do not have genuine free will

• Since moral responsibility requires free will then no one is morally
responsible for his actions
Compatibilism (Soft determinism)

• Two main claims of Compatibilism

• Determinism is true
• Every event including every human action is causally determined
• We act freely when we are not constrained or coerced
Compatibilism (Soft Determinism)

• Human behaviour and actions are wholly determined by causal

events but human free will does exists when defined as the
capacity to act according to one’s nature
• All actions are wholly governed by causes
• Internal causes – voluntary action of the will
• External causes –involuntary action of compulsion
• Freedom is acting according to one’s nature which is determined
by external factors such as heredity, education and background
Free will as defined by compatibilist

• Aristotle
• humans are responsible for the actions they freely choose to do—i.e., for
their voluntary actions.
• Humans have freedom in two senses
• they can choose between the alternatives that result from their dispositions
• they can change or develop the dispositions that present them with these
alternatives.
Free will as defined by compatibilist

• John Stuart Mill

• a person is free when “his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but
he theirs,” while an unfree person is one who obeys his desires even when
he has good reason not to.
• Frankfurt
• Having free will is a matter of identifying with one’s desires in a certain
sense.