Daniel C Dennett Elbow Room The Varieties Of Free Will Worth Wanting资料.pdfVIP

Could Have Done Otherwise I . Do We Care Whether We Could Have Done Otherwise? In the midst of all the discord and disagreement among philosophers about free will, there are a few calm islands of near unanimity. As van Inwagen notes: Almost all philosophers agree that a necessary condition for holding an agent responsible for an act is believing that the agent conld have refrained from performing that act. (van Inwagen 1975 , p. 189) But if this is so, then whatever else I may have done in the preceding chapters, I have not yet touched the central issue of free will, for I have not y e t declared a position on the could have done otherwise principle: the principle that holds that one has acted freely (and responsibly) only if one could have done otherwise. It is time, at last, to turn to this central, stable area in the logical geography of the free will problem. First I will show that this widely accepted principle is simply false. Then I will turn to some residual problems about the meaning of canM-Austins frog at the bottom of the beer mug (see chapter one, page 19). The could have done otherwise principle has been debated for generations, and the favorite strategy of compatibilists-who must show that free will and determinism are compatible after all-is to maintain that could have done otherwise does not mean what it seems at first to mean; the sense of the phrase denied by determinism is irrelevant to the sense required for freedom. It is so obvious that this is what the com- patibilists have to say that many skeptics view the proffered compatibilist analyses of the meaning of could have done otherwise as little m6re than self-deceived special pleading. James (1921, p.149) called this theme a quagmire of evasion and Kant (Critiqne of Practical Reason, Abbot tran