Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum / What are the conditions necessary for free will?

**Posted by RomanJoe** 12/06/2018 8:21 pm

Pure agent causation divorced from any event causation? Self-causation? Being conscious of the movement of one's will prior to any efficient causation to carry out the will? Is, as Classical Liberal Theist was arguing in the other thread, free will incoherent? Please feel free to share your opinion.

**Posted by ficino** 12/06/2018 9:20 pm

Hello Joe, leaving aside the problem of the agent's consciousness, which I suspect won't be decisive, I think a necessary condition of libertarian free will is that the agent have "dominion" over the willed action, or be the first cause/source of the motion of will. I think the Thomist position about the causal primacy of God as first mover/cause rules out libertarian free will for rational creatures.

**Posted by Due_Kindheartedness** 12/07/2018 3:17 am

Power of contrary choice.

**Posted by DanielCC** 12/07/2018 5:12 am

I have posted about the issues with Thomism and Free Will here:

https://ontologicalinvestigations.blogspot.com/2018/01/five-proofs-critique-aristotelian-proof.html

To recap: free will requires the principle of alternative possibilities. Free actions being self-caused sounds strange but their being self-explanatory less so - this is another reason in my mind why the notion of causation is vaguer than the notion of explanation.

**Posted by ClassicalLiberal.Theist** 12/07/2018 6:23 pm

RomanJoe wrote:
Pure agent causation divorced from any event causation? Self-causation? Being conscious of the movement of one's will prior to any efficient causation to carry out the will? Is, as Classical Liberal Theist was arguing in the other thread, free will incoherent? Please feel free to share your opinion.

This will get interesting...

**Posted by RomanJoe** 12/09/2018 4:32 pm

ficino wrote:
Hello Joe, leaving aside the problem of the agent's consciousness, which I suspect won't be decisive, I think a necessary condition of libertarian free will is that the agent have "dominion" over the willed action, or be the first cause/source of the motion of will. I think the Thomist position about the causal primacy of God as first mover/cause rules out libertarian free will for rational creatures.

Does a libertarian free will violate the principle of causality? Is it self-actualizing?

**Posted by ficino** 12/09/2018 8:42 pm

Yes, I think the LFW position violates premises that Thomistic arguments about God's causality seek to establish. The human (or the angel, if there are such) must be the first cause of the motions of its will if its will is to be "free."

There is a big literature on this even for Aristotle, who has to accommodate his LFW thesis to his unmoved mover thesis. And Ari has fewer doctrines about God's providence to deal with than Aquinas does.