Free actions as a natural kind
- PDF / 504,662 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 56 Downloads / 181 Views
Free actions as a natural kind Oisín Deery1 Received: 30 August 2018 / Accepted: 15 December 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view also overcomes difficulties confronted by previous views according to which free actions might be a natural kind. On my view, free actions exist and we often act freely, as long as we possess various features that are related in the right sorts of ways to each other and to the world. In turn, we acquire and retain the concept as long as most of us possess enough of those features. Keywords Free will · Action · Natural kinds · Moral responsibility · Revisionism
1 Introduction Does free will exist? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes,” by maintaining that FREE ACTION is a natural-kind concept and free actions are a natural kind.1 The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind (Sims 2018) and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist treatments of the concept FREE ACTION (Heller 1996; Vargas 2013; Nichols 2015).
1 I will use capitals for concepts (e.g., FREE ACTION) and single quotation marks for terms (e.g., ‘free action’), where relevant.
B 1
Oisín Deery [email protected] Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
123
Synthese
2 Free will and reference In recent years, a lively debate has emerged that addresses the question whether free actions exist, by asking whether the concept FREE ACTION refers (Heller 1996; Hurley 2000; Vargas 2013; Nichols 2015; Caruso 2015; Deery 2015a; McCormick 2016, forthcoming; cf. Sims 2018). On this approach, if FREE ACTION refers to any of our behaviors, then free actions exist; otherwise not.2 The ensuing debate focuses on whether we can preserve the concept FREE ACTION rather than eliminate it, on the assumption that it is associated with errors.3 The most commonly suggested error is that the concept falsely presupposes indeterminism as being usefully implicated in free actions (Vargas 2013, pp. 21–72; Nichols 2015, pp. 54–55; cf. May 2014; Deery et al. 2015). In what follows, we will not assume this particular error but will instead consider how theories might handle errors more generally.4 For descriptivists, concepts are treated as analogous to theoretical terms, which refer (if they do) to whatever satisfies a critical set of claims associated with them (Lewis 1972, p. 213). Accordingly, FREE ACTION refers just in case some class of behaviors satisfies the major presupposi
Data Loading...
