free will
Are you sticking with your old job, or are you dropping it to follow that new career path? Are you having fruits for breakfast this morning, or will you eat some unhealthy food? Faced with many paths your life may take, sometimes you feel that you have control over which path you will actually take; you then deliberate on this; and then you act accordingly. When this happens, does anything cause you to choose or act in whatever way you did? Do you cause it? Does your character? Your will? Suppose that the conjunction of a) the laws of nature plus b) the state in which the entire universe is in right now, completely determines iii) the state in which the entire universe will be five minutes from now. Five minutes pass, and meanwhile, you have chosen to eat the fruits, and you ate them. Obviously, you are part of the universe. But then, who determined, caused, or controlled your decision and action? Was it you (your character, your will) or was it the conjunction of the laws of nature together with the previous state of the universe?
In what sense, if any, could your life have followed different paths? Could you really have done otherwise? If so, what could have caused you to do otherwise, and was that thing something ultimately under your control? And so, are you responsible for your decisions and actions? Can you be truly morally responsible even under the hypothesis that you are never able to do something else other than what you actually do? Does it ever make sense to feel guilty about past actions you took? Do you ever act freely or with free will?
In the Summer of 2022, I taught a course on Free Will. In this course, we carefully study these and related questions. We ask which sort of presuppositions they have, which answers they allow for, and which reasons we have to prefer one or another of such answers. (Unfortunately: we do not tackle questions about new careers and healthy food.)
The course was in the Summer and online async. Summer courses are intensive—3 credits in 6 weeks. Async classes have no live discussions. These two elements combined require a different course structure. For example, it’s important that students have a routine (“Every Monday, do X”), and also that they have introductory texts that are accessible, concise, and connected to primary source readings in obvious ways. Teaching Free Will, I assigned Robert Kane’s ‘A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will’ (and Helen Beebee’s ‘Free Will’ to more advanced discussions) and paired them up with primary readings.
Images and diagrams can represent complex ideas in simpler ways. Thus, I have been encouraging students to use them when trying to grasp and reason about abstract ideas. As van Inwagen exemplified, Free Will allows for some interesting applications of this method. For example, in the first homework in the course, I ask students to represent determinism, fatalism, and other views, by modifying a ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ figure. Here’s the assignment, and soon you will find samples of drawings by students here.