RomanJoe wrote:

Gary wrote:

Does the reality of freewill, (.i.e.), the capacity to choose otherwise, entail that a person's choices are indeterminately determined and vice versa? If their choice is determined then it is no longer free, but if it is indeterminate then it is random and no longer under the person's control. 

Seems like a false dichotomy. When the free will proponent claims that our choices are indeterminate, he is not claiming that they are random, sporadic, etc. My philosophy professor thinks this is the case--he holds that our choices are free and, consequently, causeless. But when the free will proponent uses the term indeterminate with regards to free choice, he is claiming that our choices do not stand in a strict determinate relation to a prior cause. For instance, when the sun hits the lake's surface, the lake has no choice on how it will react--it simply has the determined effect of becoming warm. However, when the sun hits the surface of a human's skin there is of course the determined material reaction (the skin turning warm) but there is also another possible effect which doesn't act in the same strict and determinate fashion as the skin's material reaction. The sun's heat may provoke a free choice, a decision to go into the shade, to tan on the deck, to look up into the sky, what have you.

So the choice is indeterminate insofar as it doesn't behave in the strict material fashion we observe in other mundane causal chains. A free choice can be provoked by prior causes but the causes do not determine the choice because they don't elicit a strict and entirely expected effect.

I probably didn't do the best job of explaining this. Hopefully others will chip in.

I think this is pretty much it. Effects can influence something and yet not strictly determine it. The agent has the last say, and the agents willing is reason responsive, the crucial element of free will. 

DanielCC wrote:

Gary wrote:

Does the reality of freewill, (.i.e.), the capacity to choose otherwise, entail that a person's choices are indeterminately determined and vice versa? If their choice is determined then it is no longer free, but if it is indeterminate then it is random and no longer under the person's control. 

This is the classic animadversion against Free Will and one of the most difficult problems in all of philosophy. My preferred answer is that free violations are neither externally determined nor indeterminate - instead they belong to a sui generis third category.

To briefly elaborate on this form of Libertarianism I'm going to speak of the PSR instead of the casual principle, since the latter has a habit of leading us to think of volition as a species of normal causation and thus invites the charge of casua sui. Thus phrased the animadeversion constitutes a dilema something like this:

PSR Claim: every contingent fact has an explanation for its holding

Therefore: so called free actions are explained by something and thus not free

Denial of the PSR premise: free actions lack an explanation and thus happen for no reason. Hence they can hardly be called 'actions', the deliberate choice of an agent.

The Libertarian claims the PSR premise is misread by the proponent of this argument. Instead they claim free actions are self-explanatory, thus an explanatory chain of facts can terminate in a free choice, just as it might in the action of a necessary being. This has the consequence that some contingent propositions are self-explanatory

(This has certain far reaching consequences in Natural Theology, for instace it defeats Modal Collapse/BCCF objections to the PSR and it arguabley invalidates Thomistic/Aristotelean arguments which have 'everything that is changing is changed by another' as a premise)
 

So I guess you would agree with Pruss' first option rather than the second one he takes?

" However, a different way to construe the Taxicab Problem is to ask about what happens when we apply the PSR to the proposition allegedly explaining the BCCF.  But this issue has already been discussed when we discussed the van Inwagen objection to the PSR.  There are two live options at this point.  The proposition explaining the BCCF might be a contingent but self-explanatory proposition.  For instance, it might be that the proposition that a necessarily existing agent freely chose to do A for reason R is self-explanatory in the sense that once you understand the proposition, you understand that everything about it has been explained: the choice is explained by the reason and the fact that the choice is free, and the necessity of the agent’s existence is, perhaps, self-explanatory, or perhaps explanation is understood modulo necessary propositions.  The other, I think preferable, option is that that the BCCF is explained by a necessary proposition of the form: a necessarily existing God freely chose what to create while impressed by reason R."