Topic: Free Will

Quotes

A.J. Ayer, Philosophical Essays (1954)

• If it is a matter of pure chance that a man should act in one way rather than another, he may be free, but he can hardly be responsible.#Quoted in Philippa Foot, “Free Will as Involving Determinism” (1957)

Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (1982)

• Our term “will” denotes only the resulting intention, leaving out any special reference to thought, instinct, or emotion as possible sources of that intention. Greek, on the other hand, is able to express intention only together with one of its causes, but never in its own right.#

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

• ‘Tis only upon the principles of necessity, that a person acquires any merit or demerit from his actions. . . . Actions are by their very nature temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the characters and disposition of the person, who perform’d them, they infix not themselves upon him, and can neither redound to his honour, if good, nor infamy, if evil.#Quoted in Philippa Foot, “Free Will as Involving Determinism” (1957)

F.A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (1952)

• Since the word ‘free’ has been formed to describe a certain subjective experience and can scarcely be defined except by reference to that experience, it could at most be asserted that the term [free will] is meaningless. But this would make any denial of the existence of free will as meaningless as its assertion.#

F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1968)

• Even if the assertion of a universal determinism were meaningful, scarcely any of the conclusions usually derived from it would therefore follow.#

Henry Rogers, “An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Jonathan Edwards” (1834)

• Moral actions take their complexion solely from the nature of the motives which produce them, while actions which spring from no motive at all, even though prompted by a self-determining power, are sufficiently dignified by the name of folly.#
• There never was an instance of an Arminian who did not, like every body else, think that he was perfectly right in pronouncing men virtuous or vicious precisely in proportion to the strength and inveteracy of inclination and habit; and in resenting injury, not a whit the less in compassion to that desperate malignity of the passions which had inflicted it.#

John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding (1690)

• Voluntary, then, is not opposed to necessary, but to involuntary. For a man may prefer what he can do, to what he cannot do; the state he is in, to its absence or change; though necessity has made it in itself unalterable.#
• It is as insignificant to ask whether man’s will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square . . . Liberty, which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute or modification of the will, which is also but a power.#
• If it be reasonable to suppose and talk of faculties as distinct beings that can act (as we do, when we say the will orders, and the will is free), it is fit that we should make a speaking faculty, and a walking faculty, and a dancing faculty, by which these actions are produced, which are but several modes of motion; as well as we make the will and understanding to be faculties, by which the actions of choosing and perceiving are produced, which are but several modes of thinking.#
• The question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free.#

Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754)

• Choice and preference can no more be in a state of indifference, than motion can be in a state of rest.#

Ludwig Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

• Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, he chooses between incompatible ends. In this sense he is a moral person; in this sense he is free. However, it is not permissible to interpret this freedom as independence of the universe and its laws.#
• Freedom of the will does not mean that the decisions that guide a man’s action fall, as it were, from outside into the fabric of the universe and add to it something that had no relation to and was independent of the elements which had formed the universe before.#

Philippa Foot, “Free Will as Involving Determinism” (1957)

• Assigning a motive to an action is not bringing it under any law; it is rather saying something about the kind of action it was.#

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1274)

• The dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures.#