The Free Will Problem 476 This is how Peter van Inwagen reasons (1983: 206–8). He concludes, on the basis of
these reflections, that he has reason to believe that determinism is false since he has
reason to believe that there is free will, and that incompatibilism is true.
7 Some cautious libertarians do their best to avoid this implication. For an exemplar
effort, see Kane (1996).
8 This is similar to how Mark Balaguer formulates the free will problem (2010: 1–15).
We find Balaguer’s formulation especially instructive in this regard and commend it
to others interested in thinking further about how to formulate the free will problem.
9 For a similar diagram, see van Inwagen (1993: 184).
10 There are further puzzles about free agency that the preceding treatment was not able
to capture, and this suggests that there are yet other ways to formulate free will prob-
lems. For example, one way to theorize about a person’s freedom is in terms of her
ability to do what she judges best to do under the pressure of her desires and the
forces of her internal psychology when these seem incongruent with these judgments.
Is a person free to act contrary to, for example, her strongest desires? Can she act con-
trary to the way her own psychological structure orients her in how she acts? Maybe
there is a way to press these questions into the models and formulations of problems
set out above. But it seems strained. Here, we have slightly different questions that
might need to be approached by thinking in terms of slightly different problems.
We’ll not pursue this further in the pages to follow, but we do wish to note it as a
further possibility.
11 For example, see B.F. Skinner (1971) and Paul Edwards (1958). A word of caution:
In some fields outside of philosophy, mostly in the social sciences, it is typically
assumed that free will resists any scientific approach to human conduct. That is, it is
assumed that the only way to treat free will is by way of the supplanting or the insu-
lating strategies. Naturally, wishing to advance their discipline, they tend toward the
supplanting strategy. These scholars therefore tend to see free will only in incompati-
bilist terms, and do not consider the compatibilist’s reconciling stance toward free
will, a stance that embraces an explanation of free will and free action that is nested
within a scientific framework making use of causal explanation. Psychology text-
books, for instance, typically express a view like this. Here is one representative
passage:
If human beings have some degree of freedom of choice, then a psychological
system based on strict determinism cannot do justice to its subject matter. On the
other hand, if causality is to be found in all natural processes, including human
behavior, then belief in freedom of choice is unwarranted and may even work
against our progress in understanding human experience and behavior. (Viney,
1993: 27)
The author continues:
The doctrine of free will is the philosophical position that assumes that human
beings make choices that are, to some degree, independent of antecedent con-
ditions. The doctrine assumes that there is some sense in which the integrated
personality can rise above genetic, chemical, physical, and social influences. (Ibid.)
As illustrated in these passages, the central conceptual mistake these scholars seem to
make is that free will means that an agent’s conduct is not caused or determined, and
hence, that freely willed conduct cannot be nested within any explanatory framework
that attempts to explain the causes of it.