[MD] Free Will

[Matt Kundert]

Steve said:
Playing the causation game doesn't depend on any particular 
metaphysics. But once you start looking for explanations in terms of 
causes, the serpent of causation is found to run over everything.

Matt:
That's a good way of putting it.  One of the most powerful, succinct 
statements of this view--that once you start "playing the causation 
game" the viewpoint of morality based on free will seems to 
disappear before your very eyes--is Thomas Nagel's "Moral Luck."  
Nagel ultimately believes morality does need a notion of free will, but 
he nevertheless acknowledges how paradoxical the Kantian 
framework is (which he considers necessary to morality).  The idea 
is that free will is flexed when you have _control_, and Nagel's point 
is that when you look too close, you don't have control over much.

Bernard Williams paper of the same name (both appeared at the 
same time, as part of the same colloquium) is also useful on this issue, 
except Williams thinks that the Kantian framework is (therefore) 
bankrupt.  His Shame and Necessity is a largescale attempt to fund our 
notions of ethical behavior without the notion of a will (he thinks "will," 
which nearly comes attached with "free," is ultimately a Christian 
vocable that is unnecessary for ethical behavior).  Likewise, Iris 
Murdoch's first chapter to The Sovereignty of Good makes beautiful, 
quick work of this notion of an isolatable, _free_standing will that just 
decides to do stuff.  She renders a wonderful, alternative 
phenomenological account of how we actually make choices.

Nagel's "Moral Luck" is collected in his Mortal Questions.
Williams's "Moral Luck" is collected in his Moral Luck.

Matt