Freedom

Does free will fare any better under a Dualistic or Deistic system than it does under materialism?

Comments

I don't think so. The central puzzle is to understand how, in the presence of impersonal and seemingly comprehensive causal processes, we humans can really make the free choices we think we do about largely (if not entirely) physical matters--whether to pick up the phone that's ringing, or where to go to lunch, for example. The problem is to say how my eating at Fatzo's was freely chosen if this action was caused by physical events in my body, including physical events in my brain, which in turn were brought about through a chain of events that traces back to hereditary or environmental features that are outside my control--factors that ultimately pre-date me, in fact. That some of these events might have arise from indeterministic micro-physical processes doesn't really help, since these processes are also out of my control.

One answer to this puzzle is to say (very roughly) that an action is free if the causal chain that brings it about goes through my character in the right way. There are many worries about the adequacy of this type of "compatibilist" answer, and some of these can be solved through illuminating accounts of "the right way" or "my character". But this isn't made easier by adopting the dualistic view that the mental is distinct from the physical. One of the most pressing problems for the dualist is to explain how a separate realm of minds or mental features can causally interact with things in the physical realm, as they surely can. The central problem of free will is that "mental causes", however these are understood, seem usurped by impersonal and purely physical causal processes (determinisitc or indeterministic) that are entirely outside our control.

Deism only seems to make things worse by introducing an additional causal factor, God, which potentially conflicts with the personal causal control that we take ourselves to have over many everyday concerns. I won't comment on this problem other than to say that as much wrestling has been done with it as with the "central" problem I described above.

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