free will,
predestination
and determinism
free will,
predestination
and determinism
John Cowburn SJ
Marquette Studies in Philosophy
No. 56
Andrew Tallon, Series Editor
© 2008 Marquette University Press
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141
All rights reserved.
www.marquette.edu/mupress/
Library of Congress CataLoging-in-PubLiCation Data
Cowburn, John.
Free will, predestination, and determinism / John Cowburn.
p. cm. — (Marquette studies in philosophy ; no. 56)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-754-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-87462-754-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Free will and determinism—History. 2. Free will and determinism—Religious
aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines. I. Title.
BJ1461.C68 2008
123’.5—dc22
2007050788
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
tabLe of Contents
Part one: tHe free-WiLL DoCtrine
1. free will ................................................................................ 15
Three kinds of event: ................................................................ 15
Determined .......................................................................... 15
Random................................................................................ 15
Free....................................................................................... 16
The free-will doctrine ............................................................... 17
Five free acts............................................................................. 18
The precondition: multiple possibility ...................................... 21
The phases of a decision ........................................................... 24
The first phase: making the judgement(s) .............................. 25
The second phase: making the decision ................................. 26
The third phase: the action.................................................... 26
The person ............................................................................... 27
The causal self-sufficiency of the decision ................................. 27
After the decision ..................................................................... 28
Free will and morality .............................................................. 29
Why I chose those examples ..................................................... 29
Final observations .................................................................... 30
2. kindS of thingS whiCh we do of our free will ................. 31
Interior acts .............................................................................. 31
Physical actions ........................................................................ 32
Deep choices, often made implicitly......................................... 33
Choosing one’s own nature ................................................... 33
Being for or against other persons ......................................... 36
Moral and immoral decisions ................................................ 36
Definitive options .................................................................... 37
The regularity of human behaviour .......................................... 39
3. freedom ................................................................................. 41
Freedom ................................................................................... 41
Normal limitations on freedom ................................................ 42
Abnormal lack of freedom ........................................................ 43
Degrees of freedom .................................................................. 43
Exercise of free will when no external freedom ......................... 44
6
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
4. the inner faCe of free-will:
ownerShip of aCtS and reSponSibility .............................. 46
The ownership of free acts ........................................................ 46
Responsibility .......................................................................... 47
The first sense, which looks to the future .............................. 48
The second sense, the virtue .................................................. 51
The third sense, which looks to the past ................................ 51
Degrees of responsibility .......................................................... 53
An objection to the idea of responsibility ................................. 54
5. the outer faCe of free will: unprediCtability .................. 56
What a future act is .................................................................. 56
The source of the knowledge .................................................... 56
Three theses.............................................................................. 58
A first argument, using actions ................................................. 59
A second argument .................................................................. 60
That categorical statements about particular future free acts
are neither true nor false ....................................................... 61
That there is no such thing as a definite future free act ............. 63
Some authors who deny foreknowledge.................................... 63
Some possible statements about events: .................................... 64
Predictions not of particular events ....................................... 64
Probability in predictions ...................................................... 64
Statements about what could have happened ........................ 66
Statements about what would have happened ....................... 67
Foreknowledge in some films ................................................... 67
Newcomb’s Paradox ................................................................. 71
6. ChanCe ................................................................................... 73
Chance .................................................................................... 73
Atomic particles .................................................................... 73
Life ....................................................................................... 73
Some inanimate beings ......................................................... 74
Chance in human life ............................................................... 74
That prediction is impossible with certainty,
possible with probability ....................................................... 76
Statistical necessity and probability .......................................... 76
Contents
7
Part tWo: free-WiLL:
tHe tHeoLogiCaL ProbLeMs
7. human free-will in the bible and the fatherS .................. 79
Free will in the Old Testament ................................................. 79
Free will in the New Testament ................................................ 81
The synoptic gospels and Acts ............................................... 81
Paul ...................................................................................... 83
John...................................................................................... 86
The Greek Fathers .................................................................... 86
Pelagianism .............................................................................. 87
Augustine ................................................................................. 89
Semi-Pelagianism and more about Augustine ........................... 93
The following centuries ............................................................ 94
Theory and practice: theology and spirituality .......................... 95
8. the middle ageS and later SCholaStiCiSm .......................... 97
The scholastic idea of God & the idea that God has total prior
control .................................................................................. 97
That God wills everything at once or is “outside time” ............. 99
The problem of evil: God and the past ..................................... 99
Free will affirmed ................................................................... 100
9. during and after the reformation .................................. 102
Protestants, Luther to 19th cent including Arminius .............. 102
Catholics, Reformation to 17th century ................................. 106
Ignatius, Trent, affirm free will ............................................ 106
Bañez and Molina ............................................................... 107
Jansenism............................................................................ 112
Catholics in the 19th-20th centuries ...................................... 112
Protestants in the 20th century .............................................. 112
10. CritiCiSm of viewS preSented ........................................... 114
The outright denial of free will ............................................... 114
That God has prior control .................................................... 116
Two “reverential” ideas ........................................................... 119
The idea that God chooses those who are finally saved ........ 119
The idea that credit belongs to God alone ........................... 120
Reverence ........................................................................... 120
Some isms .............................................................................. 121
Pelagianism ......................................................................... 121
8
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
Semipelagianism ................................................................. 122
Theologism ......................................................................... 122
Banezianism and Molinism ................................................. 122
11. the divine knowledge and my theory ............................ 124
The affirmation of foreknowledge........................................... 124
In the Old Testament .......................................................... 124
In the New Testament ......................................................... 125
In the Church later ............................................................. 127
The idea that God is outside time, observing events ............... 127
The theory .......................................................................... 128
Criticism of the theory........................................................ 128
The theory that God foreknows events because he decides them
........................................................................................... 129
Two kinds of knowledge ..................................................... 129
The idea that all divine knowledge is originator-knowledge. 130
Stages in the divine knowledge............................................ 130
The idea that there is one divine “look” ............................... 131
Criticism of this idea........................................................... 132
Probable knowledge ............................................................... 132
God knows events as they occur ............................................. 132
God hopes and wishes ............................................................ 133
Some theological problems..................................................... 135
The divine omniscience....................................................... 135
Activity and reception ......................................................... 136
Chance ............................................................................... 137
Predictions in the Scriptures ................................................... 138
Some authors ......................................................................... 139
Some particular divine decisions ............................................ 140
Part tHree: tHe PHiLosoPHiCaL ControVersy:
DeterMinisM Versus free-WiLL
12. determiniSm ...................................................................... 144
Determinism stated ................................................................ 144
Fatalism ................................................................................. 145
Plato and Aristotle ................................................................. 146
Shakespeare ............................................................................ 147
Post-medieval philosophy ....................................................... 149
The influence of science; determinism .................................... 151
Contents
9
Science in general, especially physics ................................... 151
Science and determinism .................................................... 151
Philosophy, influenced by science........................................... 155
Scientific psychology .............................................................. 156
Theoretical psychology ........................................................ 156
Clinical psychology ............................................................. 161
Some particular fields ............................................................. 162
Criminology ....................................................................... 162
History as a science ............................................................. 162
Literature, influenced by science ......................................... 164
13. CompatibiliSm and impliCationS of determiniSm........... 165
Compatibilism ....................................................................... 165
The truth lies in between ........................................................ 168
Implications of determinism .................................................. 168
Possibility ........................................................................... 168
Responsibility ..................................................................... 168
Morality.............................................................................. 170
Political freedom ................................................................. 171
14. for determiniSm ............................................................... 172
Philosophical arguments for determinism .............................. 172
Empiricism ......................................................................... 172
Clarity ................................................................................ 172
The principle of sufficient reason ........................................ 173
The dilemma: If not determined, then random ................... 174
The argument from statements about the future ................. 175
How determinists explain our sense of free will ...................... 175
The emotional appeal of determinism .................................... 176
15. Settling the argument and replieS to theSe argumentS
Settling the argument ............................................................. 179
Replies to the arguments ........................................................ 180
Empiricism ......................................................................... 181
Clarity ................................................................................ 182
The principle of causality .................................................... 182
If not determined, then random ......................................... 184
The argument from statements about the future ................. 186
The humaneness of determinism ............................................ 186
Conclusion ............................................................................ 187
10
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
16. againSt determiniSm ......................................................... 188
The refutation ........................................................................ 195
The impracticality of determinism.......................................... 192
The unreality of determinism ................................................. 195
Why determinism is bad ........................................................ 195
The human agent ................................................................ 196
The person and his or her responsibility .............................. 197
The denial of morality ......................................................... 198
Our judgement on the world as it is now ............................ 200
Determinism and the future of society ................................... 200
Conclusion ............................................................................ 201
17. determiniSm and Criminal JuStiCe .................................. 203
Heredity and eugenics ........................................................... 203
Environmentalism and liberal criminology: ............................ 206
The denial of responsibility ................................................. 206
The rejection of punishment ............................................... 207
What to do about crime...................................................... 208
Comments on the liberal theory............................................. 210
Refutation of determinism in this context .............................. 213
Deeper objections .................................................................. 214
A positive position ................................................................. 214
Degrees of responsibility ........................................................ 215
A note on retribution ............................................................. 217
Part four: MaKing DeCisions anD afterWarDs
18: purely rational deCiSionS ................................................ 219
The facts................................................................................. 219
The values .............................................................................. 220
The implicit content of possible decisions .............................. 221
Abiding volitions which we already have ................................ 221
Moral obligations ................................................................... 221
Possibility ............................................................................... 222
How binding the decision will be ........................................... 224
Talking with others ................................................................ 224
Weighing ............................................................................... 225
19. deCiSionS whiCh involve emotionS ................................. 226
What is meant by emotions here ............................................ 226
sense-level .......................................................................... 226
Contents
11
higher emotions .................................................................. 227
Decisions which should be made on moral grounds,
when emotions are involved ................................................ 227
Decisions which should be made on purely rational gounds,
when emotions are involved ................................................ 228
Decisions which should be mainly determined by emotions,
when there is no serious moral or rational objection ........... 229
negative judgements on emotions ....................................... 229
positive judgements on emotions ........................................ 230
Decisions which are taken on both rational and
emotional grounds .............................................................. 231
20. doing god’S will ............................................................... 233
Moral choices ......................................................................... 233
Non-moral cases where there is one right thing to do ............. 234
Where there is not one right thing to do ................................ 236
Reasons for preferring the Non-Directive View ...................... 239
21: making the deCiSion and afterwardS ............................. 241
Immediately before the decision ............................................. 241
The not making of decisions................................................... 242
Permanent systematic avoidance of decision........................ 242
Unsystematic avoidance of decisions ................................... 244
Pretending to be about to decide......................................... 246
When to make a decision ....................................................... 246
Talking with others ................................................................ 248
“Hovering” over alternatives ................................................... 248
The decision ........................................................................... 249
After the decision ................................................................... 249
Reconsidering decisions ......................................................... 251
ConCluSion .............................................................................. 255
bibliography............................................................................ 256
INDEX OF NAMES......................................................................... 265
INDEX OF SUBJECTS ..................................................................... 268
Professor Bernhardi:
The problem was no longer Austrian politics or politics as
such; suddenly it had become a problem of general ethics, of
responsibility, and in the last analysis it was the question of
free will.
Hofrat Winkler:
Yes, it always comes to that when one goes deeply into
things.
From Professor Bernhardi, a play written in 1912 by Arthur Schnitzler.
introDuCtion
It is not, I think, common for a single book to deal with both the
theological and the philosophical questions connected with free will.
That is what this book does.
In Part I, I state what I call the free will doctrine, without proving
it and without going into any theological issues. Anyone interested
only in philosophy should read this Part and then skip to Part III, in
which I refute determinism and so prove free will.
In Part II, I discuss the theological questions connected with free
will: these are the questions of whether, as a matter of Christian faith,
human beings have free will; whether, if we do, God nevertheless
controls our actions; and whether he foreknows our actions. Anyone
interested only in theology should read Part I and then this Part.
In Part IV, I analyse the making of decisions. This is perhaps psychological rather than philosophical, with a chapter of spirituality
thrown in.
To avoid clutter in the footnotes I have omitted facts of publication and given only the surnames of authors and the titles of books
and articles. More information is in the bibliography at the back of
the book.
When the expression occurs only once or twice in a sentence, I use
“he or she” when referring to a person who may be either a man or
a woman, but I do not write, for instance: “When a person makes
a decision he or she may need to consult his or her spouse and take
note of what she or he wants”. In these cases I use “he” as short for
“he or she”.
Most biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard
Version; if another version is used, this is noted (NJB means the New
Jerusalem Bible).
Part 1
tHe free WiLL DoCtrine
CHaPter 1
free WiLL
tHree KinDs of eVent
DeterMineD, WHiCH is to say PreDeterMineD, eVents
There is a regularity in nature. This is expressed in laws which, unlike civil laws, do not say what ought to happen but what in fact does
happen. Laws which are not statistical say what necessarily happens
in particular cases. For instance, the sun necessarily rose this morning here at precisely 6.23 Australian Eastern Time. Also, if I hold a
cup up in the air and let go of it, it falls: I do not say that it usually
falls but simply that it falls, meaning that nothing else is possible.
It is generally believed that these laws of nature are universal in
both space and time, so that, for instance, scientists make calculations about the moons of Jupiter assuming that they “obey” the same
laws of gravity as are applicable on our earth, and other scientists
speculate about the beginning of the universe assuming that the
same laws of nature applied then as apply now.
The word “necessary” now usually means necessary for something:
for instance, we might say that to become a member of a choir it is
necessary to be able to sing and it may be necessary to be able to read
music. It used, however, to be used on its own, so that an event was
said to be necessary if it followed necessarily from its antecedents,
and the belief that all actions are determined or “lawful”, which is
now called determinism, was called “the doctrine of philosophical
necessity”. There are, however, two other kinds of event, or, at least,
there are two other ideas of events.
ranDoM eVents, tHings WHiCH HaPPen by CHanCe
By a random event I mean, first, one which, given its antecedents,
involves multiple possibility. I do not mean only that we, when we
know the antecedents of an event, sometimes think that several things
are possible: I mean that there is more than one possibility, whether
16
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
we know that or not. The randomness may not be total: for instance,
if a stallion is mated with a mare, it may be certain that the offspring
will be a foal but it may be equally possible for it to be male and for
it to be female and in that respect there will be randomness. I mean,
secondly, that no one chooses between the possibilities. One of them
just happens. I shall have more to say about this in chapter 6.
free aCts
Free acts are the subject of this book and hence I shall be brief
about them here.
To say that a person in a particular situation has free will means
two things. The first is that it is possible for him to make one decision, and it is also possible for him to make at least one other decision.1 He has alternatives.2 If, for example, a woman has been working for one firm and is offered a position in another, to say that she
has free will means, for one thing, that it is possible for her to accept
the offer and it is also possible for her to refuse it.
To say that a person has free will means, second, that he or she
– not anyone else but he himself or she herself – chooses to make
one of the possible decisions and not any of the others. This choice
occurs in consciousness: that is, it is in consciousness that persons
determine their decisions or perform what is called “self-determina1 Great care is needed when formulating the idea expressed here, that immediately before he makes his decision it is possible for the person to make
a certain decision and it is also possible for him not to make it. If it is said
that he can make or not make it, this can be taken to mean that either he
is able to make it or he is able not to make it, that is, that he is able to do
one or other of those things and we do not know which: this is not a statement of belief in free will. If it is said that he can make the decision and
not make it, this can be taken to mean that he can do not either but both
of these things, which is absurd. If it is said that he can make the decision
and can not make it, this can be taken to mean that he both can and cannot
do it, which is also absurd. The formulation in the text above is, I believe,
unambiguous.
2 The Latin word alter means “the other, of two”, and certain purists use
“alternative” only in this way: they do not speak of two alternatives but
of something and its alternative, as in medicine and alternative medicine.
Others speak of two alternatives, but never of more. I shall speak of a person
having alternatives, and there may be more than two. As the Oxford English
Dictionary says, this is justified by usage.
11 Free Will
17
tion”. It is impossible directly to see into another person’s consciousness – we cannot, for instance, look into another person’s mind and
observe his or her thinking in the way that a doctor can look into
another person’s lungs and observe what is happening there – and
therefore, while we experience our own self-determinations, we cannot directly observe anyone else’s. Consequently, self-determination
is often overlooked by people who approach a discussion of free will
by taking the stance of observers of other people. To understand free
will, however, it is essential to bear in mind that it involves not only
multiple possibility but also “self-determination”. I shall in this book
be talking almost entirely about free will, which involves choices between known alternatives.
If the two aspects of free will are kept in mind, it is easy to tell
when people believe in free will, even if they do not use the term. For
instance, if someone thinks about different things which he can do,
establishing a number of possibilities open to him, and if he intends
to choose between them, he believes that he has free will. Similarly,
when Isaiah says:
If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land;
but if you refuse and rebel,
you shall be devoured by the sword, (Isa 1:19-20)
he clearly assumes, first, that his hearers are able to obey and also
able to persist in rebellion; he assumes, second, that they are going to
choose between these alternatives: he therefore believes in free will,
though he does not say so in as many words.
By referring to the two aspects of the free act it is also possible to
tell when people do not believe in free will. If people say that when
we come to a moment of choice, only one decision is possible for us,
they do not believe in free will; and if others say that several decisions are possible and that at the last moment God determines the
one which we make, they do not believe that we have free will, either,
even if they say that they do.
tHe free WiLL DoCtrine
The free will doctrine, loosely formulated, is that in general human
beings who have reached the age of reason, and who are not suffering
18
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
from severe mental or emotional disturbance, by nature have free
will with respect to their attitudes and to actions which are in their
power, which they are are able to think about. That is, they can usually choose to be for or against something, they can choose between
action and inaction, and they can choose between different actions
which are possible for them, which they can think about, at least
briefly, beforehand. There are some things which people do involuntarily: for instance, we all press down on whatever we are standing
or sitting on, and a person may involuntarily react in a certain way
if a loud noise (say a gun going off or a plate falling and breaking)
sounds near them: the clause “which they are able to think about”
excludes such reactions from the assertion of free will. Also, a person
who is addicted to a drug, to smoking or to alcohol may be unable
to refrain from acting in accord with his or her addiction if the opportunity to do so presents itself: the words “who are not suffering
from severe mental or physical disturbance” mean that such persons,
in such situations, are not said to have free will.
Clearly, a free act is different from both determined and random
events. The multiplicity of possibilities makes it different from a predetermined event, and the conscious choice makes it different from
a random event. Robert Kane says: “When described from a physical
perspective alone, free will looks like chance”:3 it is the psychological
element that makes it totally different.
fiVe free aCts
Before analysing free will in general terms I will tell five stories
about persons making free choices, so that we will know what is being analysed. I shall set them like quotations.
First, a widower lived alone in New York. His son, who had
married and lived in a different city, had not kept close contact
with him, but he and his daughter, who was thirty and a teacher
of French, and who lived in an apartment not far away, were close.
One day she returned from a trip to Europe with the news that she
planned to get married to a fifty-year-old black African scientist
who lived and worked in France. The father was dumbfounded.
To begin with, he did not know what to think. It was good, in general, that his daughter was going to get married. Also, she was no
fool and she had no history of falling in and out of love or of being
3 Kane, The Significance of Free Will, p. 147.
11 Free Will
attracted by unsuitable men; on the contrary, she had always been
a good judge of character and emotionally balanced, so that if she
wanted to marry this man he was probably right for her. On the
other hand, that he should have been so much older than she was,
and that they were going to live in France, seemed to the father to
make the marriage highly inadvisable. He also experienced conflicting feelings. At times his love for his daughter made him feel
happy for her. At other times he felt inclined to oppose the marriage because if his daughter went to live in France it would be the
end of their close association, and all the pain that he felt when he
lost his wife was revived in him at the prospect of losing his daughter; also, she had come to replace his wife in his emotions and he
was jealous, especially since the prospective husband was almost
as old as he was. Moreover, like many people of his generation he
had some residual racism. All these thoughts and feelings bounced
about in his agitated mind and heart, and he changed from, “She
has a right to marry whomever she chooses, and she has a right to
my acceptance of him, I can see that” and, “I love her, and if this
is what she wants I’ll accept it” to, “I don’t have to accept this!”
After a while he realised that he could go either way: it was possible for him to put his mind to looking at the question from the
bright side, to be unselfish, and both inwardly and in his words
to his daughter to accept the marriage; and it was also possible for
him to look at the dark side of what was proposed, deliberately to
be jealous, possessive, prejudiced and obstructive, and to oppose
the marriage. After a struggle, he decided to be generous, and he
accepted. Though he felt a wrench he also felt a sort of peace.
Second, a widow with children who had worked for many years
in one city was offered a bigger job in another city. She asked
herself, “What would be the better course of action, to accept it
or not?” She noted that there was no moral obligation either way.
Then she went over the reasons why it would be good to accept the
job: the benefit of greater responsibility and job satisfaction, the
danger of her losing interest in her work and in life if she remained
where she was until retirement, and the additional money for herself and her children. She looked at the reasons for staying where
she was: the psychological strain of adjusting to a new job in a new
city; the pain, for every member of her family, of separation from
friends; and the sheer bother of moving. She asked herself whether
she had such a strong desire to go or to stay that she could never
be happy if she did not go or if she went, and she found no such
desire in herself. At this point, then, she judged that it would be
19
20
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
good for some reasons and motives to take the job and good for
other reasons and motives to refuse it, and that neither to go nor
to stay was the only right thing to do. She knew, too, that she had
enough courage and enterprise to be psychologically capable of
accepting the offer; on the other hand, it was not irresistible: that
is, both courses of action were possible in every way. After a week
of turning the alternatives over in her mind, after long talks with
her children and close friends, and a walk in the country, she made
her decision and took the job.
Third, a woman of twenty-three had graduated from university,
had a good job and looked forward to a career. What she hoped
was that she would establish herself and then, when she was about
thirty, get married and have children. She met a single man of
thirty-five, they fell in love and he asked her to marry him. She
saw three possibilities: get married soon and have children, as he
would like; get married soon and put off having children until
she was in her thirties; say “No” to the proposal. She saw that
everything depended on her emotions and she decided to prefer
her love for the man, and his happiness, to her desire for six years
as a single woman advancing in a career: they got married. and
expected to become parents fairly soon.
Fourth, a man with cancer had learned that he was almost certainly going to die in a few months time. At first he could not believe this, and he said that somewhere in the world there must be
a doctor who could cure him, but after a time he mentally gave in
and took it to be a fact that he was going to die. He did not, however, want to die and he was bitter and angry. Then, after a time,
he saw that he had a choice: he could either continue to refuse to
accept death and as it were “go down fighting”, or he could accept
it and die peacefully. After a struggle, and a period of depression,
he chose to accept death, and from then on had inner peace.
Fifth, A. E. Ellis (a pseudonym) has written a novel, The Rack,
which seems to be autobiographical, about a young man in a T.B.
sanatorium in France who saw that it was possible for him to leave
and also possible for him to stay. He knew that on Christmas Eve the
staff and the other patients would be occupied and that he would be
left alone for a long time. He said to himself:
After all, I am free. If I stay here and accept treatment, it is [will
be] of my own volition. If I decide that I don’t wish it, I have
11 Free Will
21
only to explain to Dr Vernet, and then pack my bags. The worst
I have to fear is death, which, after all, is always inevitable. On
the other hand, if I stay and agree to undergo whatever treatment
is proposed, I can regard it dispassionately, almost in the light of
an experiment which I myself am making. All that matters is that
it should be I who consciously make the choice: on Christmas
Eve, when completely alone, I shall weigh up the alternatives and
decide.4
tHe PreConDition: MuLtiPLe PossibiLity
In each of the above stories, more than one option is possible. For
instance, it is possible for the woman in the second story to accept
the offer and move, and it is also possible for her to refuse it and stay
where she is. It is possible for the woman in the third story to say to
the man: “I do not want to get married yet and so I will say ‘No’ to
your proposal. For your sake, I hope that you will find a woman who
is willing to marry you, now”.
Every option must be intrinsically possible. Consider this story:
A man went to an architect and said that he had bought a block
of land, of such and such dimensions, and that he wanted to build
on it a single-storey house, with certain rooms, the dimensions of
each of which he gave. The architect said, “The areas of the rooms,
added together, come to more than that of the block of land; it is,
therefore, impossible to build the house which you have described
on the block which you have bought”. The man said, “You mean
you cannot design the house I want, so I will try another architect”, to which the architect replied: “The problem is not my lack
of skill; no architect on earth could help you; it just cannot be
done”.
The architect can choose between different ways of dealing with the
client, but obviously there is no choice between building and not
building the house, because it is just not possible to build it. Also, I
shall assume here that it is not merely technologically beyond us but
intrinsically impossible to change the past. Someone writing a novel
set in the thirties can write that a man bought a car in 1930 and later,
when he comes to 1939, return to what he had written earlier and
change it. Also, suppose that a director, the author and some actors
are rehearsing a play about a man who opposes his daughter’s mar4 Ellis, The Rack, p. 55.
22
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
riage to an Asian for two acts and then, in Act III, gives in. The actor
who is playing him may say, when they are rehearsing Act III, that it
would help him if in Act I he had had an accident and been helped
by an Asian doctor. This suggestion can be accepted by the author,
in which case the suggestion is written into the script and, when the
incident occurs in Act I, it may seem pointless to the audience but it
will help them to understand the man’s change of heart later, in Act
III. If, however, an author is writing about actual events, he can mention them or not but he cannot alter the fact that they happened.
Moreover, each option must be possible for the person concerned,
so that multiple possibility does not mean unlimited possibility. Obviously, what is possible for a person at any moment is limited by
external factors: one cannot fly from Melbourne to London in one
hour, a person with fifty thousand dollars cannot buy a house worth
a million, and some people in gaols and asylums are constrained by
walls. Also, what we can do is limited by factors within us: some people cannot sing, some people cannot do mathematics beyond simple
arithmetic, and man might say: “Try as I might, I simply cannot like
my fiancee’s brother – I can’t help it, he gets on my nerves”. All that
the exercise of free will presupposes is that in a particular case the
options are not limited to one.5
Also, multiple possibility does not mean equal moral goodness,
reasonableness or attractiveness of all possibilities:
• First, we are not always, and necessarily, morally good persons. It
is possible for a person to see clearly that an attitude or action would
be immoral, and nevertheless choose it.
• Second, we do not necessarily choose what seems to us to be,
from a rational point of view, the best (the definition of man as “a
rational animal” does not mean that we always act rationally).6 It
would be possible for the man in the TB sanitorium to judge that
it would be most practical for him to stay there – he could say to
5 If something cannot be altered or prevented, a person can still choose
what attitude to take towards it. This is the case of the man with cancer in
the story above.
6 Wojtyla says that it is sometimes maintained that a person necessarily
chooses whatever seems to him or her to be the greatest good; a person,
according to this theory, can choose a lesser good, but only if it seems to be
the greater. This, he says, is false. (The Acting Person, pp. 133-134.)
11 Free Will
23
himself, “If someone else were in this situation, I would say to him,
‘It’s your choice, but it would be better for you to stay’” – and still be
able to leave. It is often said that the object of the will is “the good”;
even if that is true, it is not “the best”.
• Third, we do not necessarily choose what we emotionally prefer. If
the widow in my second story feels emotionally drawn towards staying where she is, she is still capable of leaving, and at times people say
to one another: “You can’t always do what you feel like doing, you
must be practical”. What I call “multiple possibility” is often called
“indifference”: this word usually means the absence of any preference
or emotional leaning one way or the other and I do not use it because
free will is often exercised where a strong preference exists so that the
person is anything but indifferent, in the ordinary sense of the word.
As I hope my examples have made clear, many decisions are not approached in a cold, rational way, but neither are they determined by
this or that emotion.
• Fourth, when practical considerations are leading us to choose
one thing and our emotional preference is to choose another, or
when there is conflict between different practical or other considerations, or emotions, what we choose is not determined by whatever of these is the most strong. It is not as though we are capable
of choosing either way only when the various influences on us are
evenly balanced.
• Fifth, a person does not necessarily choose according to his or
her psychological type. According to the Myers-Briggs classification,
which has sixteen basic types, one kind of person tends to shun disagreements. If such a person loves the music of Bartok and hears
someone say that there is no good twentieth-century music, instead
of saying, “But surely Bartok is a great composer”, as anyone else who
appreciated Bartok would do, this person tends to let it pass. But to
speak up for Bartok would not be impossible. Similarly – and here I
move from psychological type to moral character – if a person is of
a generous disposition he or she does not necessarily help you if you
need help, and a mean man can surprise everyone, including himself,
by being generous for once. A dishonest person is not entitled to say:
“Don’t expect me to tell the truth. I can’t. I’m dishonest”.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
• Sixth, unconscious factors do not determine our choices, though
they may influence them. If I have to make a certain choice, unconscious factors may make me feel inclined to choose in a particular
way, without knowing why, or they may cause me to look for reasons
for making that choice; but, except in the case of compulsive behaviour which springs from “severe mental or emotional disturbance”,
they do not make anything else impossible.
• Seventh, either nature or nurture or both may limit our possibilities and cause us to have certain tendencies, but neither determines
all our choices: whatever genes I have inherited, and whatever environment I have lived in, I am often in situations in which I am both
capable of choosing this and capable of choosing that.
To sum up, a person at a crossroads can feel pulled by something
along one of the roads, or he can feel that something inside him is
pushing him in a particular direction, but it is still possible for him
to go either way. I conclude by saying that multiple possibility is not
the essence of free will, as it is also found in random events. For this
reason, when scientists affirm the Principle of Indeterminacy, they
do not implicitly affirm free will.
tHe PossibiLity of a WiLL to eViL
Scholastic authors maintained that what they called the “formal
object” of the will is “the good”, so that a thing can be willed only in
so far as it is judged to be good. This means that if something appears
to us to be good without qualification or limitation, it would be impossible for us not to will it, which means that we necessarily will to
be happy. This means that we have free will only with respect to what
they call “particular goods”, which they define as things which are
good only in certain respects. I believe, however, that it is possible for
a person to reject the good and happiness – for example, if a person
believes that he can be rich, powerful and unhappy or else poor, weak
and happy, he can choose wealth and power, not happiness – and a
person can will his or her own destruction and misery.
tHe PHases of a DeCision
Making a decision involves two phases, and if a free act involves
a physical action, there is a third phase, the action. I will here say
11 Free Will
25
briefly what these phases are, and go into more detail in chapters
18-21.
tHe first PHase: MaKing tHe juDgeMent or juDgeMents
By a judgement I mean an intellectual act in which a person says,
in his or her mind and perhaps also aloud, something which he or
she believes to be true. For instance, a few minutes ago I heard a
noise on my window and said to myself, “It is raining”, believing that
rain was falling outside: that was a judgement. Other judgements
which I have made are: “Shakespeare was a greater dramatist than
Molière”, “Human beings have evolved from beasts” and “Life is not
absurd” – all those being things which I believe to be true. Judgements are expressed in propositions, but, as we shall soon see, not all
propositions express judgements.
No one can decide to do something which he or she believes to be
impossible. For instance, because we all know that it is impossible
for us to jump three metres in the air, none of us can decide to do
that. We can decide to try to do it, but trying to do it, as distinct
from doing it, is possible; we can say to ourselves the words, “I will
now jump three metres in the air”, but as we say them we know that
we do not mean them (try it and see); if we mistakenly thought that
we could jump three metres we could decide to do it: but it is quite
impossible to know that something is impossible and decide to do
it. Therefore, to exercise free will a person must – unless it is obvious
– make judgements of possibility. In the four stories which I told, the
man with cancer is capable of accepting death, and also capable of
defiantly refusing to accept it, and the man in the sanatorium clearly
establishes that he is able to stay and also able to leave: those are their
alternatives.
In the first phase the person considers the alternatives and makes
judgements about them. He may see, or think he sees, that one
course of action is morally obligatory, in which case the final judgement might be, for instance: “I am morally obliged to pay”, He may
judge that one course (which is not immoral) is the only sensible one,
or the only one which is emotionally “right”. Alternatively, he may
make different positive judgements about several of the alternatives,
saying, for instance, that to take a certain job would have these advantages and those disadvantages, while to take another job instead
26
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
would have different advantages and disadvantages. The judgements
made by the man in the sanitorium are of this kind.
tHe seConD PHase: CHoosing, or MaKing tHe DeCision
In the second phase, the person makes his or her decision or choice.
In the stories which I told, the father decides to accept his daughter’s
marriage, the woman decides to take the job, the woman decides to
get married and have children, the man with cancer decides to accept
death and on Christmas Eve the man with T.B. is going to decide
whether or not to remain in the sanitorium. As I said, even when the
first phase ends with a clear and certain judgement to the effect that
one alternative is the only one which is not immoral, or that one is
best on either rational or emotional grounds, the person does not
necessarily choose it. Therefore it is not as though when one makes
a judgement the decision follows automatically from it. The decision
is a highly significant act in its own right.
A person makes a decision by saying in his or her mind words such
as “I accept the situation”, “I’ll take the job”, “I accept death”, “I’ll
marry him” or “I will leave this sanatorium”. These are propositions,
but they do not express judgements because in uttering them the
person does not say something which he or she believes to be true:
they are what have been called performative utterances like “I promise to come” or the word “Yes” said when a vote is taken. Suppose
that a woman is buying a television set and asks the salesman if it will
bring in a certain channel, and the salesman answers, “Yes, it will”;
and suppose that, later, the salesman asks her, “Will you buy it?”
and, making her decision there and then, she answers, “Yes, I will”.
The salesman’s “It will” expresses a judgement, whereas the woman’s
“I will” expresses a both a decision and her entry into an agreement
with the salesman. (The words do not mean: “I believe it to be true
that I am going to buy this set”.) Similarly, when the widow in the
story which I told earlier says to herself, “I’ll take the job”, she is not
making a prediction, which is a kind of judgement: she is ending her
deliberation by making a decision. Her utterance of these words in
her mind is performative.
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27
tHe tHirD PHase: tHe aCtion
When there is question of deciding whether or not to perform
some action, there is a third phase: the action itself, or the inaction.
tHe Person
During all this time I have been talking about “a person” making a decision and the question can be asked: what is meant by “a
person”? This is one of those basic words like “time” which everyone
uses and understands, but which are difficult to define. As some ancient authors said, a person is a who or a someone; also, a person is
an individual existing intellectual being, taken as a whole. A person
is also a self.
This last word is important. Since I do not have direct control over
the beating of my heart I can talk about it as if it were distinct from
myself and say, for instance, that my heart is beating rapidly. I cannot, however, attribute decision-making to an organ in myself that
is distinct from me and say, for instance, that my brain decided that
I would go to Sydney. Some authors maintain that the human brain
is a computer, with a program which is partly inbuilt and partly
the result of input which it has received in the course of its owner’s
life. According to these authors, if someone asks me to dinner next
Thursday the request goes into my brain, which has my preferences
in it and also my information and commitments; either at once or
after a delay, while the brain does its work, out pops the answer,
“Yes”, “No”, or “What about some other time?” What is missing
from this picture is the person, who is not the brain or any part of
it, or a little entity somewhere inside it, which controls his or her
decision-making.
tHe CausaL seLf-suffiCienCy of tHe DeCision
There exist what I might call causal chains in which, for instance,
a leaking pipe causes water to accumulate under a floor, the water
causes insulation to rot, wires touch, there is a spark which causes a
fire and the fire destroys a precious painting. Here each event follows
necessarily from what happened before it, as in falling dominos. If,
later, someone sets out to find the explanation of what happened to
the painting, he works upstream through the chain of events and
when he finds the leaking pipe he may say, “What caused this pipe
28
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
to leak?” and so pursue a second line of causes. If there is a free act
in a series of events, at that point more than one thing could have
happened, someone made a choice, set the direction of the series and
was to some extent a beginning, not a link in a chain of necessary
causes. If, then, searching for an explanation of something, we work
our way upstream along a causal chain and come to a free act, we do
not simply continue on through it: we have found a cause of what
happened. As A. Seth Pringle-Pattison said, in the case of a free act
the person is “the source of the action: we cannot go behind him and
treat him as a thoroughfare through which certain forces operate and
contrive to produce a particular result”.7
after tHe DeCision
After a person has made a decision, he or she has a certain attitude, such as acceptance of coming death, or an intention to perform
an action or actions. If the decision is about actions, these follow,
sometimes immediately – when we are talking, for instance, we no
sooner decide to say something than we find ourselves saying it – and
sometimes later. Sometimes only one action follows; at other times,
from one decision flow many actions; indeed, from a single decision
made by one person may come thousands of actions of hundreds of
people.
Before a decision is made, several things are possible and none is
actual; after it, one is actual and the others are no longer possible, in
the sense that it is not possible for them to have been chosen in that
particular decision.
Some actions are irreversible: for instance, if someone tells a secret,
nothing will make the information secret again. Other actions are
reversible, not in the sense that one can cause them not to have happened but in the sense that one can cancel their effects: for instance,
one can hang a picture on one’s wall, then change one’s mind, take it
down and put another in its place. If one makes a decision, nothing
can change the fact that one made it, but at a future time one can
change one’s attitude: for instance, if the man in my first example
were to decide not to accept his daughter’s marriage, it would be
possible for him later to change his attitude and accept it; if one has
7 Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, p.
292.
11 Free Will
29
decided to do something and not yet done it, one can change one’s
mind and not do it; more significantly, after one has done something
which cannot be undone, one can change one’s attitude and wish
that one had not done it.
free WiLL anD MoraLity
It is surely clear that no one can be morally obliged to do something which is quite impossible for him. Hence if we say that someone is morally obliged to do something, we assume that it is possible
for him to do it: that is, “ought to” presupposes “able to”. It is only
slightly less obvious that if someone cannot help doing something,
it does not make sense to say that he is morally obliged to do it: for
instance, it would not make sense to say that we are morally obliged
to grow older. That is, “ought to” presupposes “able not to”. When,
therefore, we affirm or assume the existence of morality we presuppose that human beings have free will. I shall return to this question
later and discuss attempts which have been made to attribute meaning to “ought” statements, and even to affirm the existence of moral
obligations, when free will is denied.8
On the other hand, free will and morality are not so closely linked
that every exercise of free will is a choice between something morally good and something morally bad, as seems to be implied when
it is said that “free will is the power to do as we should” or when it
is defined as the power to choose between good and evil. The choice
between moral good and moral evil is a very important kind of free
choice, but many important decisions are made between alternatives
all of which are morally good.9
8 See below, p. 170.
9 Bonhoeffer says that it is one of the great follies of certain moralists that
they maintain the fiction that at every moment of his or her life a person
must make a final and infinite choice, a conscious decision between good
and evil. Certainly, he says, there are times when people make such choices,
but it is important to understand that these are particular times, not all of
life; otherwise, he says, there is “that unhealthy takeover of life by the ethical, that abnormal fanatisising, that total moralising of life, which leads to
a constant stream of judging or exhorting comments, to interfering, and
to an unsolicited meddling with the activities of concrete life that are not
governed by fundamental principles” (Ethics, p. 366).
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
WHy i CHose tHe exaMPLes aboVe
A general rule of scientific method is: Start with simple cases. I
have seen a lecturer on free will observe this rule by saying: “For
example, when I put out my arm like this” – here he raised his right
arm to shoulder height – “I can raise or lower it”, and I have heard
of empirical studies of free will in which a lot of people were brought
into a room and each was given a card with three squares on it and
told to choose a square, any square, and put a cross on it. To understand free will, however, it is necessary to study decisions which
matter because significant differences exist between the alternatives.
My examples are of this kind.
a finaL obserVation
I have been talking about the free will doctrine for want of a better
word. I would call it a theory if that did not suggest, to people unfamiliar with the way the word is used in science, that it is uncertain.
It is sometimes called “libertarianism” as opposed to determinism,
but that word is used in a general way for the promotion of liberty
and even of licence or anarchy. By using the word “doctrine” I may
suggest to some people that it is a religious belief, but I will take that
risk. I do not mean to imply that it cannot be proved.
CHaPter 2
KinDs of tHing WHiCH We Do
of our oWn free WiLL
Some authors say that whereas the intellect is concerned with the
past and the present, the will is concerned with the future. However,
we can think about the future and make acts of the will about the
past. Others say that we make intellectual judgements about things
as they were or as they are, whereas we make voluntary decisions about
things as they should be. However, we can think about what should
be, and the object of the will can be past or present events as they
were or are. Yet others seem to assume that an act of the will is what
comes between thought and physical action, whereas, as I am about
to say, many volitions are not followed by physical actions.
interior aCts
We have free will with respect to many purely mental activities.
For example, a person who has some problems can generally choose
to think about one of them and put the others aside for a while, or
indeed to think about none of them. On meeting someone whose
name I cannot remember, I can either try to remember the name
or not bother to do so. Also, I can often choose where to direct my
attention: if, for instance, I am one of a group of people who are
talking while another conversation is going on nearby, I can either
pay attention to what my companions are saying or listen instead
to the other conversation; and someone at a lecture or sermon can
listen attentively to the speaker or think about something else, as he
or she chooses.
We do not have – or we do not have much – free will about our
sensations. It is true that if I see something I can close my eyes and
so stop seeing it, but if I hear a noise I may not be able to switch off
my hearing as I might switch off a radio. Also, if I stand on the edge
of a steep drop and feel frightened, even when I am protected by a
glass wall, that may be involuntary. However, we have free will with
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
respect to many volitional attitudes. For instance, in the examples
which I gave in chapter 1, the man whose daughter was getting married was able to accept the situation or to refuse to accept it: he had
a choice of volitional attitudes. Also, if someone in a competition
learns, while the judges are considering their verdict, that another
competitor desperately needs to win, he may find that he can continue to hope that he himself will win, or switch to hoping that the
other will win.
PHysiCaL aCtions
With respect to some physical actions we do not have free will. For
instance, in general one cannot help pressing down on whatever one
happens to be standing or sitting on. However, we have free will with
respect to many outward or physical actions. First, we are often able
to perform, or not perform, single simple actions like saying “Aye”
when a vote is taken. In many situations inaction is a kind of action:
for instance, to be silent when a lie is told about a friend is not to do
nothing, but to let the friend down.
Second, we have free will with respect to complex actions, by which
I mean those which in our minds are single actions, while physically
they are many little actions. If, for instance, a person decides to go
from one room to another, and does so, he performs a great number
of little actions – he lifts his left foot, moves it forward, puts it down,
transfers his weight to it, lifts his right foot, and so on – without
thinking about each of them and deciding to perform it. Is each of
these small actions free? It would seem not to be, since the person
does not think about it and decide to perform it; but it is part of a
larger action, which is free.
Third, we at times decide to perform series of actions, which we
gather together in our minds and in single decisions decide to perform. If, for instance, I say to myself, “I will go and visit my father”,
I implicitly decide to walk to the bus-stop, to get into the bus when
it comes, to buy my ticket, and so on. When I step into the bus I do
not ask myself whether I will buy a ticket or not and make a decision
about this, and it might look as though I buy a ticket as if I were a
programmed robot rather than a free agent, but the action as a whole
is free.
2 1 Kinds of Thing Which We Do of Our Own Free Will
33
Fourth, we sometimes make free decisions about series of actions
extending years into the future. For instance, people decide to do
university courses, or to work for the foreseeable future for a cause
such as feminism or protection of the environment. People doing
university courses may appear not to be acting freely as they go to
classes and write essays without asking themselves, each time, “Will
I do this or not?” Seeing them streaming into their classrooms, one
might suppose that their actions were predetermined rather than
free, but for them going to class is part of a larger action called doing
a course, which they are doing freely.
Finally, we make decisions about our lives which reach far into the
future and even to our deaths. When, for example, a man decides
to become a priest, that is for life; if a woman decides to become a
doctor or lawyer, she usually decides to work as a doctor or lawyer
until she is too old to work any more; and if two people decide to
get married, they intend to live together until one or the other dies,
which they do not expect to happen until they are old. Again, as
people carry out these decisions in the course of their lives they may
appear not to be acting freely, because they do not consider every
single thing which they do, and explicitly choose between doing it
and not doing it. However, because their actions flow from free decisions they are free.
DeeP CHoiCes, often MaDe iMPLiCitLy
CHoosing one’s oWn nature
It seems that everyone is “given” his or her height and psychological type. We do not choose these things and if one is “quiet, reserved,
logical to the point of hair-splitting, interested mainly in ideas and
with sharply defined areas of interest”, one cannot change that and
become “warm-hearted, talkative, popular, conscientious, a born cooperator, good at creating harmony, always doing something nice
for someone, little interested in abstract ideas” (these are opposite
types in the Myers-Briggs system). Other elements of our natures are,
however, not determined for us and immutable, and in many ways
we can and do choose our own natures.
Sometimes people quite consciously choose to be this or that kind
of man or woman. For instance, a boy of seventeen may decide to
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
be, for the rest of his life, dignified, reserved, courteous, conservatively dressed and “well-spoken”, though no one in his family is like
this, and he may announce that henceforth he wants to be known as
James, not Jim. At first he play-acts at being this kind of person. He
wears conservative clothes like a stage costume and his accent, which
is “put on”, occasionally slips. Eventually, however, the style becomes
his second nature and then he is what he had set out to become.
More often, people implicitly choose to be certain kinds of men
or women. If a woman decides to do law rather than medicine, she
decides to do certain things, but in the process she decides to be a
lawyer, with the qualities which lawyers develop in themselves rather
than those which are characteristic of other professions. If a man
decides to get married and have children, he decides to be a husband
and father. If a woman decides to perform generous or mean actions,
she decides to be generous or mean, at least at the moment. If a man
decides to forgive or exact vengeance, he decides to be a forgiving or
vengeful person. Finally, to decide to do good or evil is to decide to
be good or bad.
Few writers have stressed more than Sartre the idea that we freely
make ourselves. “Man,” he says, “is nothing else but that which he
makes of himself ”;1 “man is responsible for what he is”;2 and “we
ourselves decide our being”.3 “The coward,” he says, “makes himself
cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic”.4 This is summed up in the
dictum, “Existence precedes essence”, which means that living precedes nature or that our decisions determine our characters.5 (Sartre
overdoes this, talking as if nothing at all is “given”, which is obviously
untrue.) Ricoeur says that considering a decision means considering
different selves which one can be. He says that at this stage “I do not
know which I shall be. ... I try myself out in various roles in the mode
of ‘maybe’”; then I make a decision and “I choose myself in determin1 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 28.
2 ibid., p. 29.
3 ibid.
4 ibid., p. 47.
5 Simone de Beauvoir applied this to women, who, she said in effect, are
not this or that by nature but by choice.
2 1 Kinds of Thing Which We Do of Our Own Free Will
35
ing what I shall be in my doing”.6 Karl Rahner says that the original
object of free will is the subject himself, and that all decisions about
beings in the world around the subject are exercises of free will only
in so far as through them the subject can attain himself in space and
time. At heart, he says, free will is not the power to do this or that
thing in the world, but the power to decide actively about oneself
and actively to be oneself. “Freedom,” he says, “is the capacity of the
subject to decide about himself in his single totality.”7 If, however, a
state official has to decide whether or not to grant a stay of execution,
it seems false to say that his free will is not his power to let another
person live or die (which is what “to do this or that thing in the
world” means in this instance), but his power to decide whether to
be this or that kind of human being. It is both.
Gaston Fessard, among others, says that the free act marks a passage from non-being to being: one is possibly this or that, but not
actually anything; then one chooses and is something.8 This seems to
me to be untrue, because one has no choice between not being and
being: one is, then chooses. Some free acts mark the passage from
factual being to personal being, as a person voluntarily accepts the
nature which he or she has been born with; other free acts mark the
passage from a more or less indeterminate being to a clearly defined
one, or a change from one kind of being to another: in every case the
starting-point is being, not non-being.
I said earlier that a person’s character or psychological type does
not predetermine all his or her actions – it is possible, I said, to act
out of character or against type on a particular occasion.9 I will now
go further and say that within the limits of what their natures (including, perhaps, their psychological types) allow, it is possible for
people to change their characters permanently. Sartre says: “There
is always the possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for
the hero to stop being a hero”.10 Some men who had not been good
husbands or fathers have seen the error of their ways, decided to
6 Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, pp. 140, 172.
7 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 94.
8 See Pousset, Life and Faith in Freedom. This is a book about Fessard.
9 See above, p. 23.
10 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 43.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
reform themselves, and over a period of years turned themselves into
men who spontaneously or “naturally” did the right things. Most
notably, a person who has been morally bad can repent and reform
his or her character, and it is possible for a good person to embark
on an immoral course of action stretching far into the future. This
means that after a person has decided to be a certain kind of person,
he or she frequently renews the decision. If, for instance, a man has
a role of some kind in which he has a certain character – he is, for
instance, a conscientious worker, a thoughtful husband or a zealous
priest – situations sometimes arise in which stepping out of the role
or acting out of character is a real possibility, and has some attraction
for him; if at those times he decides not to change but to go on as
before, he implicitly renews his earlier decision and strengthens his
intention of persevering in it.
being for or against otHer Persons
Rahner says that as one of the basic facts about human life is that
we are in this world with other people, a basic choice which everyone
makes is to be for or against “the other” or “the Thou”. Indeed, he
says that this is the basic moral choice:
The one moral (or immoral) basic act in which man comes to
himself and decides basically about himself is also the (loving or
unloving) communication with the concrete Thou in which man
experiences, accepts or denies his basic a priori reference to the
Thou as such. Everything else is a factor in this or a consequence
of it or an impulse towards it.11
In someone like Sade the option against others is quite explicit: his
whole system is based on total negation of “the other”. In saying that
our basic obligation is to love God and our neighbour, Jesus said that
underlying all we do there should be a basic option for “the other”.
As a rule, I think, this option is unexpressed or implicit, either way.
MoraL anD iMMoraL DeCisions
I will not here attempt to present a phenomenology of the evil act,
but I will say again that immorality, by which I mean deliberately or
freely made decisions which the persons who make them believe to
11 Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of Love of Neighbour and Love of
God” in Theological Investigations, 6, 241.
2 1 Kinds of Thing Which We Do of Our Own Free Will
37
be wrong, is possible. Some authors say that what they call the formal object of the will is the good, and that therefore human beings
cannot will evil, believing it to be evil. They say that if human beings
act immorally it is because they have judged that something is good
when in fact it is bad.12 As I have maintained elsewhere, however, it
is possible for human beings to will evil, as such. In extreme forms of
moral evil there is what Camus (writing of Nazism) calls an “insensate passion for nothingness”,13 or the will to destroy being. In less
extreme forms it may be harder to see, but it is there. By contrast,
morally good acts involve acceptance of reality. In this acceptance or
refusal there is contained a decision for or against God, whether or
not it is expressed, because God is the ultimate reality and the source
of all other reality. Rahner makes much of this, saying that every act
has in it “transcendence towards the absolute term and source of all
our intellectual and spiritual acts, and hence towards God”, and that
in every free act there is “an unthematic [unexpressed] ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to
this God of original, transcendental experience”.14
When Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, she admitted that she had expected to see an obviously evil
monster in the dock, but instead she saw an ordinary-looking man
who had done his job as an efficient public servant. He just happened to be sending millions of people to their deaths instead of (for
instance) running a business, and she coined the phrase “the banality
of evil”, which has passed into the language. She and others have
drawn the conclusion that anyone is capable of choosing evil, which
is not what is done only by the kinds of people one sees in horror
films. This is part of what the free-will doctrine means.
DefinitiVe oPtions
At one time a “doctrine of the single act” had a certain vogue. According to Ronald Knox in Enthusiasm, it was invented by a certain
Falconi, a mystical writer who died regarded as a saint, it was taken
up by Maleval and then by Miguel Molinos (1628-1696). Born in
Spain, Molinos went to Rome in 1664 and for many years was a cel12 Cowburn, Shadows and the Dark, pp. 55-57.
13 Camus, The Rebel, p. 185.
14 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 98.
38
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
ebrated spiritual director and writer of books and letters. His Spiritual Guide (1675) was translated into many languages, a man who
favoured him became a cardinal and writings against him by Jesuits
were put on the Index of Forbidden Books. According to his doctrine, which came to be called Quietism, a person should make, once
and for all, a perfect act of resignation to the will of God, and when
he has made this act he cannot, unless he explicitly retracts it before
God, offend God in any way. Molinos’s general idea was: “Make this
single act, once, and from then on relax, no effort is needed. For instance, if you fall asleep at prayer, you actually go on praying”.15 That
was comforting to sleepyheads and only mildly shocking to Jesuits
and other energetic spiritual directors, but Molinos applied his theory
to sex, too, and the word about it spread in Rome. The authors who
write about him seem to say that he himself was impotent and attributed this to his perfect act of resignation to the will of God, but not
all his followers were affected in this way and Molinos, perhaps as a
confessor, had to deal with people who had made perfect acts of resignation and, without retracting them, had committed adultery. He
told them that for their spiritual benefit God had allowed the devil to
manipulate their bodies and that they had not committed sin.16 This
was perhaps comforting to adulterers, but the Inquisition was not
prepared to tolerate it and somehow obtained letters which Molinos
had written. In 1685 he was arrested, two years later he was tried,
and his errors, of which there was a long list, were condemned (there
are seven pages of his errors in Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion
Symbolorum; many of them were taken from his letters). Though he
abjured his errors he was kept in prison until his death. As far as I
know, this theory of “the single act” has disappeared, thank goodness: it is possible for a person implicitly to retract an option he or she
has made for God, for another person or indeed for anything.
In more recent times it has been said in Christian circles that it is
impossible for a person in a single act to commit himself or herself
totally to anyone or anything and the conclusion has been drawn
that “there can be no act such that its commission or omission alone
15 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, # 2225.
16 ibid., ## 2241-2242.
2 1 Kinds of Thing Which We Do of Our Own Free Will
39
is mortally sinful”.17 Richard McCormick, who can be consulted for
further reading on this topic, says that “this understanding can easily
reflect a very unreal notion of the human act”.18 The underlying idea
seems similar to that of Molinos: if you are committed to God, cheer
up, your adultery was not a sin.
Another idea which has been circulating is that no one can make a
definitive choice. Life, it is said, is fluid, circumstances are constantly
changing, we can never see far ahead, hence our options can be only
“for the time being”, never “for ever”. This, of course, means that
when people get married and promise to be true to each other during all of their lives they do not really commit themselves totally and
so do not mean what they say. This is refuted by facts: many people
do commit themselves definitively, and maintain their commitments
strongly throughout their lives (and Edouard Pousset remarks that
“anyone who considers such decisions impossible, or who cannot
perceive anything corresponding to them in his own experience,
would be very hard put to understand what the Spiritual Exercises of
St Ignatius are about”19).
The position which I propose is this: it is possible for us to make
big decisions, bearing on all our lives, and even to make them quickly; once made, however, they are not so fixed that we cannot cancel
them, explicitly or implicitly, in single actions.
tHe reguLarity of HuMan beHaViour
When I say that it is possible for a person to act out of character,
to change his or her character permanently or to change the course
of his or her life at almost any moment, this does not imply that this
happens more often than not and that human behaviour is therefore
at all times completely haphazard or wildly irregular. Most people,
most of the time, act in character and in accord with decisions or
commitments which they have made, and with their likes and dislikes; hence an ordinary person’s actions have a certain consistency,
a biographer can usually find a pattern in his or her subject’s life
and historians do not encounter mad jumbles of activity of which
17 McCormick, Notes on Moral Theology 1965 through 1980, p. 304.
18 ibid. See also pp. 169-175 and 426-427.
19 Pousset, Life in Faith and Freedom, pp. 8-9.
40
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
no sense can be made. The free will doctrine is that human beings
can act out of character and change course in mid-stream, and all
that this can be taken to imply is that they probably sometimes do so,
which is what we observe.
CHaPter 3
freeDoM
freeDoM
Freedom and free will are not the same, and discussion of free will
becomes confused if they are not clearly distinguished. Therefore,
having said what free will is, I shall now say what freedom is.
First, freedom sometimes has a purely passive sense. For instance,
a seat is free if anyone may occupy it.
Second, freedom often means the absence of external constraint,
and in this sense being free is not being forced to act, nor prevented
from acting, by an outside influence. In this sense, a horse is free if
it is on its own in open country, less free if it is in a fenced paddock,
and not free at all if it is being ridden; and human beings are more or
less free depending on the extent to which outside influences – walls,
the police or economic necessity, for instance – permit them to do as
they choose, force them to do certain things or prevent them from
doing other things. Clearly, in this sense people are more free in
some countries than in others and people in gaol are far less free than
most others. It is surely clear from what I have said in the previous
chapters that to say that someone has free will is not the same as to say
that he or she is free of external constraint, and a free act in the sense of
an exercise of free will is not the same thing as the act of a being who or
which is free of external constraints. Hence it is possible, without logical inconsistency, to believe that human beings have free will and to
think that they should be allowed little freedom (this was the view
of many nineteenth-century Catholics). Also, just as it is possible
to believe that animals do not have free will and to be in favour of
letting them run wild, so it is possible to believe that human beings
do not have free will and to be in favour of giving them a great deal
of freedom.
Third, some people have forces inside them which are so strong
that they necessarily act in certain ways. The old moralists talked
42
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
about bad habits which are so strong that people are their slaves and
cannot break them. Psychologists talk of compulsions. Paul talked
of sin as a force in him making him do something he hated doing,
so that, he said, the thing was done not by him but by sin (Rom
7:15-16). Whether the irresistible force inside a person is a habit, a
compulsion or sin, it deprives him or her of freedom, which in this
connection is the absence of internal constraint.
Fourth, freedom is sometimes the absence of legal restrictions. For
instance, a restaurant may or may not be free to serve wine. It is
sometimes the absence of moral obligations. For instance, a woman
who has been looking after her aged mother, who depends on her
to such an extent that it would be immoral for her to go away for
any length of time, may, when her mother dies, become free to travel. Also, if he is invited to join in a tax-evasion scheme, an honest
man might say, “I couldn’t do that”, meaning, “I believe it would be
wrong for me to do that”.
Fifth, other people’s expectations can limit freedom: for instance,
if a young man believes that because of his father’s expectations he
must enter a certain profession, whether he wants to or not, he is not
entirely a free agent.
Sixth, our own commitments limit our freedom. For instance, a
university student who is invited to go overseas for two months in
the middle of the academic year may reply, “I’m not free at that
time”.
norMaL LiMitations on freeDoM
As freedom is good, one tends at first to think that any limitation
of a person’s freedom is bad, but very little thought is needed to
discover that some limitations of our freedom are perfectly normal
and good.
Certain laws which I might call metaphysical laws constrain us: we
are not free to become birds or animals, and we are not free to move
from the point in time at which we find ourselves (compelled to wait
for an hour, we cannot save ourselves from boredom by jumping
ahead in time). Also, the laws of the physical universe constrain us
and so limit our freedom. Physical human nature also constrains us
– we need food and sleep, we grow old, we cannot fly through the air
at hundreds of kilometres an hour. We involuntarily perform certain
3 1 Freedom
43
reflex actions – for instance, on touching a hot stove, we pull away
from it. At a higher level, when we have direct evidence of something
or see the force of a logical argument we may be forced to make a
certain judgement. It does not take much reflection to come to the
conclusion that it is, on the whole, good that our freedom is limited
in these ways.
Moreover, it is good that our freedom is limited by moral obligations. Who would want to live in a world where there was no morality, so that people were perfectly free to lie, to steal, to break promises
and kill? It is also a good thing that our freedom is limited to some
extent by laws, since these are necessary for people to live together in
society, which is something we need to do.
abnorMaL LaCK of freeDoM
Many people are prevented by barbed wire, armed policemen or
guerrillas from doing things which they ought to be able to do: they
cannot, for instance, speak as freely as we can. Others are, as we say,
imprisoned in poverty which is the result of oppression or exploitation, and which severely limits what they can do. Others, again, are
not free because of compulsions inside them: they are, for example,
addicted to drugs, to alcohol or to smoking.
Moreover, some people are excessively limited in what they can do
by what they believe to be moral obligations or by rules which they
believe they are obliged to obey. The Jewish people in Jesus’ time
were in this situation, and to those who believed in him he brought
freedom from “the Law”.
Finally, some people’s freedom is excessively restricted by unreasonable demands which other people make on them, or by unreasonable expectations which others have of them. I mentioned above a
young man whose father expects him to enter a certain profession,
and who therefore feels that he must do that: this is not a reasonable
limitation of freedom.
Degrees of freeDoM
If it is quite impossible for someone to do something, he is not
free to do it; if it is possible but something is making it unusually
44
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
difficult, he is free to do it but his freedom is limited. If, for example,
one person can walk with ease while another can walk only with
difficulty, the former has more freedom in his movements than the
latter. Also, if a person needs to obtain permission from a government official before he can travel anywhere, he is less free than others
who need no such permission, even if the permission is usually given,
because it is always in some measure difficult to ask for a permission.
If a person suffers from diffidence to such an extent that it requires
great effort for him to ask a question at a public meeting, his diffidence limits his freedom. Finally, if someone finds it inordinately
difficult to do something because of the expectations which others
have of him, these expectations limit his freedom. And all these limitations admit of degrees.
tHe exerCise of free WiLL
WHere tHere is no externaL freeDoM
We saw earlier that no one can decide to do something if he or she
believes it to be impossible.1 If, then, a person is absolutely not free
to do something, he cannot exercise free will about doing it or not: to
that extent, the loss of freedom entails a loss of the power to exercise
free will. However, if a man keeps his sanity he can generally choose
between, on the one hand, accepting his situation, his action or his
inaction, and, on the other hand, refusing to consent to it. Writing
about life in Nazi concentration camps, where the inmates had almost no outward freedom, Viktor Frankl says:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of
the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set
of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And there were always
choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to
make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would
or would not submit [interiorly] to those powers which threatened
to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedom and dignity to become moulded into
the form of the typical inmate.2
1 Above, p. 25.
2 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, pp. 65-66.
3 1 Freedom
45
Also, when we cannot help doing something we can sometimes
choose beforehand between doing it willingly or unwillingly: for instance, a very tired person who realises that he is going to be unable
to keep awake can accept that and let sleep come or not accept it
and, after a struggle which he knew he could not win, fall asleep
against his will. At other times a person can make a choice about an
action after it has begun, even though he cannot stop it: for instance,
a person who finds that he is weeping can either consent to his tears
and, from that moment, voluntarily weep, or he can wish he could
stop crying; a person who feels uncontrollable anger rising in him
can either consent to it or wish it would go away. In this way we are
always, as long as we remain sane, able to make free choices. As Sartre
says, we are condemned to be free.3 He does not mean that the possession of free will is a misfortune: it is his striking way of saying that
we have free will whether we want it or not.
On the other hand, if persons are unconscious, hypnotised or
heavily drugged, or if they are in panic or shock, they may be unable
to exercise free will. Drug addicts may be unable to abstain from
drugs, heavy smokers from smoking, and alcoholics from drinking, if
the drug, tobacco or drink is at hand. Other people may be unable to
control violent impulses. In many of these cases, the loss of free will
is the main reason why these conditions are regarded as abnormal.
3 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 129.
CHaPter 4
tHe inner faCe of free WiLL:
oWnersHiP of aCts anD resPonsibiLity
As I said earlier, free will involves not merely multiple possibility
but also choice or “self-determination”, and this occurs in subjectivity. Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) said:
Any explanation of free will, if it is to conform to reality, must
emphasise self-determination, and not consider only indifference
[multiple possibility].1 ... Indifference has a secondary role, while
self-determination has primary and fundamental significance.2
tHe oWnersHiP of free aCts
If a man involuntarily brakes his car when it skids and an accident
happens, he may later say: “My foot just went down on the brake”,
as though his foot had acted on its own and as though the action
was his foot’s, not his. If someone is forced by financial need to take
work which does not need his skills and which he dislikes, he may
feel, “This is not really me doing this work – I am not a waiter but a
teacher”, and not regard the work as really his. Also, if a young man
yields to parental or other pressure and embarks on a science course
when he would rather be doing arts, he may feel as though not he
but someone who looks like him is doing science, or he may feel
that his life as a science student belongs not to himself but to other
people, who are leading it through him. When, however, a person
does something wholly of his own free will, he feels as he does it
that it is his action, his work, and part of his life. For instance, if a
young woman is studying science because she wants to, she owns it
personally, whereas the young man who is doing science against his
will may give much time and dedicated effort to a sport, to music or
to drama, feeling as he rows, plays his guitar or rehearses a play that
1 See above, p. 26.
2 Wojtyla, The Acting Person, p. 121. I have changed the wording of the
English translation.
4 1 The Inner Face of Free Will: Ownership of Acts & Responsibility
47
then, and not when studying, he is doing “his own thing”. Hopkins
said that each being
Deals out that being [which] indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me,3
and this is most true of what persons do of their own free will.
resPonsibiLity
At one time the word “responsible” meant, in modern terms, “corresponding”: there was talk of a person suffering a doom responsible
to his black deeds (1629) and of the size of a man’s mouth being
responsible to the size of his body (1698). Later, “responsible” sometimes meant “of respectable appearance”: a wig was said to resemble
“a responsible head of hair” (1760) and Dickens said that a man was
wearing “a responsible dressing gown” (1852). Sometimes the word
meant “reliable”: Locke talked of a man being “honest and responsible” (1691), Jane Austen talked of “very responsible tenants” (1817)
and Charlotte Brontë said that someone had “a manly, responsible
look” (1853).4 These senses are now obsolete. In the seventeenth century “responsible” began to be used in the legal sense of “liable to be
called to account”: an author rejected the idea that monarchs are not
responsible to their peoples or parliaments for their excesses (1643)
and in The Provincial Letters (1656) Pascal said that a Jesuit superior
declared that the whole Society of Jesus took responsibility for any
book written by any Jesuit. The word was also used in the sense of
“old enough to be called to account for his or her actions”: for instance, an author said that a man “arrived at an age when he could be
treated as responsible” (1858). Gradually the word acquired a moral
as distinct from a purely legal sense and during the nineteenth century it was much used in philosophical ethics. Not that this distinction was always clear. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1865:
What is meant by moral responsibility? Responsibility means punishment. When we are said to have the feeling of being morally
3 Hopkins, poem 34.
4 Most of the information and examples in this paragraph are taken from
The Oxford English Dictionary.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
responsible for our actions, the idea of being punished for them is
uppermost in the speaker’s mind.5
This is a legal rather than a moral meaning of responsibility.
When the word acquired a moral sense, it was used, with this
sense, in philosophical ethics. For instance, just before his arrest Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about “The Structure of Responsible Life”
and “The Place of Responsibility”.6 In 1963 Reinhold Niebuhr wrote
The Responsible Self. For a long time Catholics did not make use of
the word, which had not been in the scholastic vocabulary, and they
talked of children reaching “the age of reason” when “the age of responsibility” would have been more exact, and of prudence when
responsibility would have been a better-understood term. Eventually, however, Catholics began to talk of responsibility, we now use
the word at least as much as anyone else, and Karol Wojtyla’s Love
and Responsibility is in this respect typical. In the course of the twentieth century, “responsible” became a word which everyone knows
and uses in three moral senses, which are related to one another and
which all imply free will.
tHe first sense, WHiCH LooKs to tHe future
We talk of someone being responsible for a garden, for publicity, or
for arranging a funeral; when a person becomes an adult he realises
that now he himself is principally responsible for his life; and when
a person is responsible for something very important we say that he
or she has “a heavy responsibility”. When we talk of responsibility in
this way we assume that we have intelligence and free will.
At times we speak of a person having responsibility when he is
not expected to use his judgement but simply to do as he has been
told – a person, for instance, may be responsible for putting out the
garbage on Wednesdays – but responsibility in the full sense involves
having to exercise judgement. For instance, being responsible for a
garden generally means having to decide what to plant and when,
and Albert R. Jonsen tells about a seminary where the students were
obliged to go to bed at 10.30 p.m. and to get up at 6 a.m., and
where someone went round every night and morning to check on
5 Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, p. 454.
6 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 257-297.
4 1 The Inner Face of Free Will: Ownership of Acts & Responsibility
49
them. When it was agreed that the students should have more responsibility, the rector abolished the inspection, saying that it would
henceforth be up to the students themselves to ensure that they were
in bed by 10.30 p.m. and up at 6 a.m., but the students protested,
saying that it should be left to them to decide how much sleep they
needed and when they should take it – only then, they said, when
they were able to exercise their judgement, would they feel that they
were being treated as responsible beings.7
The word “responsibility” has been used, in this forward-looking
way, in connection with having children. Whereas most Christians
had thought that married couples should make love more or less
regularly and leave it to God to decide whether to give them children
or not, and how many to give them, the Lambeth Conference of the
Church of England in 1928 said: “The Conference believes that the
responsibility of deciding upon the number and frequency of children
has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents”. In 1965 Vatican II, after saying that married couples have children and educate
them, said: “They will fulfil their task with human and Christian
responsibility”.8 The sense is clear: people should exercise their judgement about how many children to have, and exercise their free will
in such a way that they have that number. All this is contained in the
word “responsibility”.
For what are we responsible, in this sense of the word? Individually, we are responsible for our own lives, so far as we are able ourselves
to cause them to be full or empty, rich in achievement or a waste
of time, moral or immoral, Christian or pagan; and we are responsible for our own natures, so far as by our choices we form ourselves.
Most of us are also responsible for certain other people, and for some
things. Collectively, we are responsible for our society since all of us
together cause it to be caring or heartless, welcoming to foreigners
or xenophobic, and so on; we are responsible for the future course of
human history; in general, we are co-creators of what is to be, and as
such bear a heavy responsibility.
Many Catholic writers used to say that we should believe that God
is in complete control of the universe and that instead of trying to
7 Jonsen, Responsibility in Modern Religious Life, p. 196.
8 Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, # 50.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
determine the future we should prepare ourselves to accept whatever
he is going to give us. We should, they said, at all times practice
“abandonment to the divine providence”. Modern Catholics, however, preach responsibility rather than this abandonment. Protestants,
for their part, used to play down the importance of “works” but to
a large extent they have quietly changed their attitude and now emphasise human action and responsibility. I said above that before
his arrest Bonhoeffer wrote “The Structure of Responsible Life” and
“The Place of Responsibility”, and in prison he wrote that German
Lutherans were “beginning to discover the meaning of free responsibility” and that having seen that they were responsible for the future
of their country they were not leaving it in God’s hands but were
exercising “civil courage”.9
From whom, if anyone, do we get responsibility? At times we are
given responsibility by particular other people: a doctor, for instance,
is given responsibility for a patient by the patient or, if the patient
is a child, by the patient’s parents. Sometimes we get responsibility
from indefinite other people, such as the community at large or the
electorate. At other times we have not been given responsibility by
anyone else, but have it by the nature of the case: it seems to me, for
instance, that no one gives parents responsibility for their children,
but that they have it by virtue of the fact that they are the parents. Yet
it may be true to say that at a deeper level we get our responsibilities,
along with our existence, from God, who has created this world in
which we must make judgements about what should be done, make
decisions and carry them out, or in a word accept responsibility.
Responsibility, in the sense of the word which I am now discussing, can be borne by a single person or shared with others. If I am
put in sole charge of a garden or parish, it is wholly my responsibility,
but when an election is held I share with millions of other voters the
responsibility of deciding who will govern the country. Also, if a hierarchically ordered group of people is responsible for something, the
higher-ups usually have more responsibility than those lower down,
9 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 5-6. In the Lutheran tradition to which Bonhoeffer belonged, free will was generally affirmed: see
below, p. 103.
4 1 The Inner Face of Free Will: Ownership of Acts & Responsibility
51
especially if these are required to follow instructions given to them
from above.
tHe seConD sense of resPonsibiLity: tHe Virtue
A person who does not habitually consider the implications and
the certain and possible consequences of his or her actions (and inactions) is said to be irresponsible, and is usually regarded as unfit to
be given responsibility, in the first sense of the word. If, for instance,
a young woman is with an infant by the side of a swimming pool
when a telephone rings inside the house, and unthinkingly goes inside, answers the phone and talks on it for half an hour, leaving the
child unattended by the pool, she behaves irresponsibly, and if this is
typical of her she is a habitually irresponsible person. Responsibility,
then, in the second sense of the word, is the virtue of persons who
habitually, before they act, consider the implications and the certain
and possible consequences of their actions. Some people would add
to that definition the words “and who do what their responsibilities
require of them” or words to that effect, but it seems to me that if
someone who is fully aware of the risk involved leaves an infant near
a pool, that is not irresponsibility but negligence, and if someone is
responsible for large sums of other people’s money and misappropriates it, that is not irresponsible behaviour but crime.
tHe tHirD sense of resPonsibiLity: LooKing to tHe Past
We saw earlier that if we are looking for the explanation of something and we work upstream along a series of causes, when we come
to a free act we to some extent stop: this event did not necessarily follow from what had happened before and it was a beginning.10 In that
sense, the answer or response to the question, “Who or what brought
this about?” is: “This person”. If someone asks, “But what made him
or her do it?”, the answer should be: “Nothing made him or her do
it. Our search for the cause of what happened has ended”.
Hence, if at some time in the past I did something of my own free
will, I am now responsible for having done it, and if it had consequences which I foresaw (as certain or possible), I am responsible for
them and must recognise them as my doing. Suppose, for instance,
a homicidal maniac who was violently hostile towards his wife is in a
10 See above, p. 27.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
52
medical institution the doors of which are locked, and suppose that
the doctor in charge, knowing the whole story, allows him out for
a day without warning the wife, whom he nearly kills. In this case,
the doctor is responsible for the attack. We do not, except perhaps
metaphorically, use the word “responsible” in this way when we are
talking about non-personal causes: for instance, we would not as a
rule say that this or that molecule in marihuana is responsible for
the effects it induces, and if a mouse chewed through insulation and
there was a spark and a fire, we would say that it was the cause of the
euphoria or the fire, not that it was responsible for it.
Being responsible, in this sense of the word, can involve deserving
praise or blame, reward or punishment. If, for instance, someone
of his or her own free will risks life to rescue another person, he or
she is regarded as responsible for the other’s escape from death and
is praised, perhaps also rewarded, for the action, while the doctor in
my story about the maniac is sure to be blamed for the wife’s suffering, and may be punished in some way. Some authors define guilt as
liability to punishment,11 and the feeling of guilt as the anxiety of a
person who knows that he or she is likely to be punished; they then
say that the idea of responsibility is derived from this. This, however, puts things the wrong way round: it assumes punishment as a
fact, and derives the idea of responsibility from it, but responsibility
comes first and people are punished for crimes for which they are
responsible. Also, responsibility exists as a psychological experience
in its own right; sometimes (not always) it entails an expectation of
punishment or reward, but this is secondary.
It must be stressed that one is responsible for the consequences
of one’s actions only in so far as one foresees them, at least as possible. If, for instance, I park my car and while I am away a runaway
truck, which would otherwise have hit a child, crashes into it and is
stopped, I am not responsible for the child’s escape. I may, by the
way, tell the child’s parents that I am glad I parked where I did because I regard their child as more important than my car. Similarly,
consider this fictitious story:
I was a priest in a parish. A young man who suffered from depression often called me on the telephone and asked me to visit him,
11 See above, p. 47.
4 1 The Inner Face of Free Will: Ownership of Acts & Responsibility
53
which I often did. One night he called me when I was planning
a funeral service with the members of a deceased person’s family,
and I told him that I could not come at once but would come as
soon as I could. I finished the session with the family and, as it
was late, I went to bed. Next morning I learned that the depressed
young man had killed himself during the night. I at once wished
that I had gone to see him, since he might then not have killed
himself, but I would have been mistaken if I had thought that
I was responsible for his death, which I did not even know was
likely.
To be responsible for a consequence of an action, one need not,
before acting, explicitly say to oneself that the action will or might
have such and such a consequence: one needs only to know about
it. If, for example, a woman leaves her handbag open and someone,
seizing the opportunity, steals money from it, he might not say to
himself that if he takes the money he will cause the woman to be
deprived of something that belongs to her and perhaps seriously inconvenienced, but he knows that perfectly well and it is enough to
make him responsible for it; and if someone drives dangerously fast
he might not say to himself, “I am greatly increasing the probability
of a crash happening, in which someone may be badly hurt”, but
he knows that and so if a crash happens he will be responsible for
it, and if someone is killed in the accident he may be charged with
manslaughter.
We may ask: To whom are we responsible for what we have done?
If the word “responsible” comes from “response”, who is asking the
question? It seems to me that just as a person can have responsibility
without having been given it by anyone, so responsibility for past actions is understandable without reference to another person. Where,
however, I have been given responsibility by someone, I am usually
responsible to him or her for what I have done, and if at a deep level
we get our responsibilities, along with our existence, from God, for
all that we have done we are responsible to him. Also, future generations will hold us responsible, and praise or blame us, for what we are
now doing, so far as it will affect them.
Degrees of resPonsibiLity
Responsibility in the first sense has degrees. In many organisations,
for instance, people at the top have heavy burdens of responsibility
54
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
while low-level managers and accountants have almost none. In hospitals, the doctors have more responsibility than the nurses, and if
there is a team of doctors one of them may have the ultimate responsibility for making decisions. Let us suppose that a person is being
kept alive by a life-support system of some kind and that the doctor
in charge judges that it should be turned off (I am not here talking
about euthanasia but a legal and moral procedure); he consults the
relatives, who agree; he then gives the order and nurses or technicians
go to the machine and switch it off. Here the doctor is perhaps the
person who is most responsible for the patient; the relatives come
next, especially if the doctor makes it clear to them that he will not
act without their consent; and the nurses or technicians come last,
which is not to say that they have no responsibility at all.
Responsibility in the third sense, too, has degrees. If, for instance,
an author, helped by some other people, wrote a book which was
published and turned out to be of immense value, the author, the
people who helped him or her, the publisher and the various people
in the publishing house who worked on the book may all claim to
have been partly responsible for its having been written and published, but obviously some were more responsible than others. In the
medical case above, when the patient dies, the doctor, the relatives
and the nurses or technicians will know that they were responsible,
in different degrees, for what happened and it is to be hoped that
they will not later be blamed by themselves or others for participating in the action.
Finally, a person who has to make a big decision quickly and under
great emotional strain is usually less responsible for its consequences
than a person who is able to approach a decision calmly and with
plenty of time. If, for example, a teacher speaks roughly to a boy and
the parents learn that there has recently been a tragedy in his family,
they may judge that he was not fully responsible for his action and
tell their son to let the matter pass.
an objeCtion to tHe iDea of resPonsibiLity
It has been said that if it is true that we have free will, we seem to
be responsible for certain things and responsible for what we have
done, but because we are not responsible for having free will in the
4 1 The Inner Face of Free Will: Ownership of Acts & Responsibility
55
first place we are ultimately not responsible.12 Suppose, however, that
I unwittingly come to where an accident has just happened and see
someone bleeding profusely, and suppose that I see that it is up to me
to save his life, which I am capable of doing. If I walk away and he
dies I will be responsible for his death, whereas if I stay and stop the
bleeding I will be responsible for saving his life. It would not make
sense to say later that because I did not choose to be on the scene in
the first place I was not responsible for the man as soon as I saw him
and not responsible later for whatever I did. Similarly, our not being
responsible for having free will does not mean that we are ultimately
not responsible for our exercises of free will, now that we have it.
12 Wallace I. Matson presents this argument in “The Irrelevance of Free
will to Moral Responsibility and the Vacuity of the Latter”, p. 495. Peter
Radcliff answers him in “Matson and Hospers on Free Will and Responsibility”.
CHaPter 5
tHe outer faCe of free WiLL:
unPreDiCtabiLity
There seems to have been, from early times, a belief that the entire
future is determined and can be known. People consulted the stars,
the insides of animals, the flight of birds, crystal balls, Tarot cards,
playing cards, tea-leaves, fortune-tellers, oracles and sooth-sayers in
the endeavour to learn things which were going to happen. In runic
books, like the Centuries of Nostradamus, people found verses which
could be read as forecasts of things which had happened since the
books were written, and they endeavoured to find in other verses
forecasts of things still to come. But why am I writing in the past
tense? Fortune-tellers are still doing business, not only in native villages but in modern cities, horoscopes are being published and great
numbers of Western people consult astrologers and Tarot cards in the
belief that in these ways they can come to know the future.1
Many sophisticated people today, if they believe that the future can
in principle be known, add that this is impossible in practice. In this
chapter I propose to go further than that and show that free acts cannot be predicted with certainty, not because we cannot obtain sufficient information about their antecedents or because the calculations
which would be necessary are too complex, but because it is inherently impossible. I shall work first at a philosophical or secular level.
I shall later discuss the theological questions of divine foreknowledge
and foretelling of events; what I shall say here will be assumed there
and will be taken to imply that God does not have foreknowledge of
free acts, but there will be no discussion of this here.
WHat a future aCt is
We sometimes talk about “the future”, meaning a period of time
which as it were contains events: for instance, we may say that people
1 Lyons, Predicting the Future: An Illustrated History and Guide to the Techniques, published in 1960, is a huge book about Tarot cards etc. etc. etc.
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
57
getting married do not know what the future holds for them. Also,
we sometimes use “the future” as an expression for future events
none of which is specified: for instance, we may say that gypsies can
or cannot “predict the future”. But I am talking about particular
future events. Such an event is not something which will happen if
certain conditions are fulfilled or unless it is prevented: it is a particular
event which will occur. It is the exact opposite of a past event, which is
a particular event which did occur. Now let us suppose that in 2007
something is a future event situated in 2020. If, when 2020 comes, it
were not to happen, it would not have been, in 2007, a future event;
but, by hypothesis, in 2007 it is a future event; therefore it is impossible for it not to happen when 2020 comes. That is, just as a past
event, by definition, happened and no one and nothing can alter that
fact2, so a future event, by definition, will happen.
Some future events, such as eclipses of the sun and moon, will be
necessary and we can predict them with exactitude and certainty.
But can we ever have certain knowledge of future free acts? Such
knowledge would be expressed in a categorical statement like this:
“Starting on 1 January 2010 the Pope will appear on all non-liturgical occasions wearing a suit”. In what follows I shall be talking about
precisely this kind of knowledge. (By a categorical statement I mean
one that is unqualified, as opposed to a statement with “possibly” or
“probably” in it.)
tHe sourCe of tHe KnoWLeDge
Where a future event will be determined by its antecedents, which
exist now, we can in principle know it with certainty by studying
these. A future free decision, however, will not be determined by its
antecedents and if we knew all about them we would know only
what decisions are possible, not which possible decision will actually
be made. To have certain knowledge of future free acts, therefore, a
person needs to obtain it from the future. Austin Farrer says that it
seems that at times “the clairvoyant mind has made a raid on the
future, and returned with a fragmentary capture;”3 others suppose
that a crystal ball can be a time-telescope by means of which it is
possible to look into the future and observe events occurring there,
2 See above, p. 22.
3 Farrer, The Freedom of the Will, p. 159.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
58
more or less as by means of a space-telescope it is possible to look
into the distance and observe people’s actions there; H. G. Wells
and others have written of machines in which a person can travel
backwards through time, for instance from 2004 to 1904, carrying
his knowledge with him and so in 1904 knowing many things which
are going to happen because of free decisions not yet made; finally,
others suppose that a being who exists outside our universe can see
events which for us are in the future and tell us about them. In all
these cases, as Farrer says,
the ground of the seer’s prevision is simply the event he foresees, in
the very futurity of its occurrence. It is an object to his knowledge
for no other reason than its happening there. ... The free decision
is then the reason for the event, and the event is the reason for the
seer’s prevision of it.4
That is, while the knowledge precedes the event in time, the event is
causally prior to the foreknowledge of it.
tHree tHeses
I will now state three theses which I believe to be evident.
The first is this: if something is known by someone, it is
inherently possible for him or her to tell other people about it, and
they can tell others, so that if in principle future free acts can be
known, then in principle they can be known by anyone.
The second is: if it is inherently possible to know future free
acts, it is inherently possible to know any future free acts. If it is possible for anyone to travel backwards in time, say from 2004 to 1904,
he or she can tell the people of 1904 anything that is known in 2004;
and if it is possible for a being outside our universe to tell us about
future free acts, there cannot be a class of free acts about which this
being is utterly unable to give us information.
My third and most significant thesis is: people perform actions because of what they know, and hence knowledge influences
events. It is true that people sometimes have knowledge which they
are not allowed to use when they make decisions – they must ask
themselves, “If I had not heard about this, what would I have done?”
– but most knowledge may be used and all relevant information can
be used when decisions are made.
4 ibid., p. 160.
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
59
a first arguMent, using aCtion
I now argue as follows:
If future free acts and their consequences can be known,
then it is inherently possible for me to know about something I am
going to do at some future time, which will have serious bad consequences.
If I acquire this knowledge, I will be able to use it in making
my decision, for when I make decisions I can take into account all
the relevant information I have.
But I will nevertheless do the thing which will have the unfortunate consequences, because it would be a contradiction in terms
for a future event not to occur when its time comes (see the definition
of a future free event above). This is incredible, not to say absurd.
Therefore future free acts cannot be known.
Suppose, for example, that I am going to drive a car to Sydney
next May and that there will be a crash in which I will be killed,
and suppose that I learn that this is going to happen. On these two
suppositions, what will I do? I will take the car trip, knowingly and
freely, and be killed in the crash.
Let us consider an actual event which is now past. President Kennedy was killed in Dallas on 22 November 1963. That is for us now
a past event of which we have memories and records. If the idea of
a future event is valid, on 12 November 1963 it was a future event,
which was going to involve free acts. Now let us suppose that on 12
November 1963 a time-traveller from 1995 arrived and, on American television, told everyone about the assassination that was going
to occur. He described it in detail, and was generally believed. In particular, President Kennedy believed him. On that supposition, Kennedy, knowing what was going to happen, would have gone to Dallas
ten days later and been killed; and everyone, knowing in advance
what was going to happen, would have watched the shooting on
television. Which is absurd. Therefore free acts are unpredictable.
Finally, if you were a cabinet minister who had to decide whether
to resign or not, it would be possible for you to know beforehand
what you were going to decide to do, and to say to the press: “I have
not yet decided whether to resign or not. There are good reasons and
feelings on both sides, and I will need time to weigh them. I also
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
60
want to talk the matter over with my family and colleagues. It is going to be one of the most difficult decisions of my life, and I ask you
to be patient with me until ten o’clock next Monday morning. I say
until then because it has been revealed to me that at that precise moment I am going to decide to retire. So that is a fact and on Monday,
without further reference to me, you may tell the world that I have
decided to resign.” That is psychologically impossible. As Richard
Taylor says, “one cannot deliberate about what he is going to do ... at
the same time knowing what he is going to do”.5
The statement which I made above, that the future event is causally
prior to the foreknowledge of it, is incompatible with the fact that
the foreknowledge can be causally prior to the event, as this diagram
shows:
is causally prior to
PREDICTION
influences
DECISION
leads to
EVENT
There is a difference here between a space-telescope and a timetelescope: when I look at things going on in the distance, there is no
causal relationship between my seeing and what is happening, but if
I were to look at things going on in the future, there could be a causal
connection between my seeing and the events – for instance, in some
cases I could and would prevent them – whereas by hypothesis this
would be impossible.
a seConD arguMent
It is not immediately apparent that it is absurd for someone to
learn about a future event occurring in a situation in which he or
she is in no way involved. Suppose, for example, that you are in New
York in January, watching the Australian Open tennis championship
on television. The matches take place at times which in New York
would be inconvenient and one day, when you assume that you are
watching what you think is a replay, you realise that there has been
5 Taylor, “Deliberation and Foreknowledge”, p. 281. Ayers discusses this
in The Refutation of Determinism, pp. 29-31. He refers to Ryle, The Concept
of Mind, p. 197, and to Stout, “Freewill and Responsibility”. See also Pears,
“Predicting and Deciding” in Strawson (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of
Thought and Action and Roxbee Cox, “Can I Know Beforehand What I
am going to Decide?”. Incidentally, Richard Taylor does not believe in free
will.
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
61
a confusion because of the date line and that instead of watching a
match which was played in Melbourne some hours earlier, you are
watching a match which has not yet been played. You see an Australian player with a match point going for an ace on his second serve,
missing and eventually losing the match. You say, “What a stupid
thing to do”, and later you read the report of the match in The New
York Times, which of course corresponds exactly to what you saw. If
you happen to know the player in question, you feel like telephoning
him and telling him not to go for that smash, but then, of course,
you realise that he will certainly go for it and in the end lose the
match – you have seen this happening. Which is absurd, but it is not
so obviously absurd if you can do nothing about it.
However, I argue as follows: a statement which was true when it
was made cannot be caused to have been false then. I do not merely
say that it will not turn out to have been false: I say that it is impossible for it to have been false.6
Therefore if it is true in April 2007 that on 1 January 2010
the pope will appear in public at a non-liturgical service wearing a
clerical suit, that statement cannot be caused to have been false in
April 2007. Therefore on 1 January 2010 it will be impossible for the
pope to appear in public wearing a soutane.
But for the pope to have free will concerning that event in
2010, it will have to be possible for him to appear in a suit and also
possible for him to appear in a soutane. Therefore he will not have free
will on that occasion.
That is, categorical statements about particular future
actions are incompatible with their agents having free will. I have
proved not that we do not know enough to be able to predict free
acts, but that prediction of them is intrinsically impossible.
tHat CategoriCaL stateMents about PartiCuLar
future free aCts are neitHer true nor faLse
This means that it cannot be certainly true that a particular person
will freely choose to do a particular thing at a future time. Also, obviously, the statement cannot be false. It follows that categorical statements about particular future free acts are neither true nor false.
6 This is part of what I said earlier, that the past cannot be changed.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
Some authors have argued: if it is true that someone has done
something in the past, it does not follow that he was unable not to
do it; therefore if it is true that someone will do something in the
future, it does not follow that he will be unable not to do it; hence
there can be true statements about future free acts. This argument
is invalid because talking about a free decision before it is made is
totally different from talking about it after it has been made, when it
has a definite reality.
Also, my argument cannot be reduced to the following simple
logical deduction:
If it is true that something is going to happen, then it is
necessarily going to happen;
but a future free act is not necessarily going to happen;
therefore it is not true that it is going to happen,
as if the major (the first statement) were self-evident. That argument
can be refuted by saying that if it were valid it could be applied to past
events as well as to future events, and it could validly be argued:
If it is true that something happened, then it
necessarily happened; but a past free act did not necessarily happen; therefore it is not true that it happened,
which is absurd, because we can obviously make true statements
about past events which did not necessarily happen.
What looks like my argument was presented by Aristotle in Peri
Hermeneias or De Interpretatione. A slightly free translation of the
passage might run:
Let us suppose that statements about future events are true or
false. Then if something is white now, it was true earlier to say that
it was going to be white, and indeed it was always true to say of
anything that has happened that it was going to happen. But if it
was always true to say that it was going to happen, it could not not
have happened, and so it happened necessarily. Hence everything
happens necessarily, and nothing happens by chance. Which is
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
63
false. Therefore “it is not necessary that of every affirmation and
opposite negation one should be true and the other false”.7
tHat tHere is no suCH tHing
as a Definite future free aCt
It may seem strange to say that statements about future free acts
are neither true nor false, but there is a simple explanation for this.
Statements are true or false depending on whether or not they correspond to reality, and if there is no reality they are neither. For instance, it is true that there are trams in Melbourne because real trams
run in that real city; but it is neither true nor false that Miranda in
The Tempest has blue eyes, because she is not a real person and as a
fictitious person she exists only in the text of the play and has no
more characteristics than are mentioned or implied there, there is no
reference to the colour of her eyes and someone who is casting the
play need not be concerned about the colour of any possible actress’s
eyes. Now before a free decision is made, there exists multiple possibility but no actuality. The future, therefore, is not a determined
reality but rather a mass of mutually incompatible possibilities. It is,
therefore, not something to which definite statements about actuality can correspond or not; hence they cannot be either true or false.
In a word, statements about future free acts are neither true nor false
because there is no such definite thing as a future free act. Of course,
once a decision is made, multiple possibility is replaced by single actuality, there comes into being a definite reality to which statements
can correspond or not and they are no longer statements about future
free acts.
soMe autHors WHo Deny foreKnoWLeDge
7 Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias, chap 9, especially 19 b 1. There is some dispute over what Aristotle meant, especially since Elizabeth Anscombe’s article, “Aristotle and the Sea-Battle”, but I think that it has generally been
understood in the above sense. For a little more about the argument, see
below, pp. 175, 186. In his commentary on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas said
that when contradictory statements are made about “things which are”, one
must be true and the other false, but that this is not the case with “future
things which can be and not be” (In Peri Hermeneias, lect 15 ad finem): and
in another work he said: “From the moment it is produced in reality it has
definite truth (Ex quo productum est in rerum natura veritatem determinatam habet)” (De Veritate, 2 12 ad 1).
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
64
Jacques Maritain says that “the impossibility of being foreseen
with absolute certainty is a property of the free act as such”.8 Paul
Weiss says that free acts are de iure unpredictable,9 G. Stanley Kane
says that “acts done freely, in this sense of ‘freedom’, are in principle
unpredictable”,10 and Karl Rahner says that where the future is concerned, true knowledge consists in docta ignorantia or knowing that
we do not know it. He says:
If there is such a thing as genuine freedom [free will] at all, then
there is a “this-worldly” future which is indeterminate and obscure,
one which, so far as the historical subject himself is concerned, is
in principle only brought to light in the very act in which it is posited and so rendered present. Up to this point it has been hidden
in the limitless breadth of the possible.11
Finally, Niebuhr says:
In both nature and history each new thing is only one of an infinite number of possibilities which might have emerged at that
particular juncture. It is for this reason that, though we can trace
a series of causes in retrospect, we can never predict the future
with accuracy. There is a profound arbitrariness in every given fact,
which rational [i.e., rationalist] theories of causation tend to obscure.12
soMe PossibLe stateMents about eVents
PreDiCtions tHat are not of PartiCuLar eVents
In some circumstances it is possible to make predictions with certainty about the actions of great numbers of unspecified people. For
example, it is possible to predict with certainty that millions of men
and women will get married next year, though of no particular one
is it possible to say with certainty that he or she is going to get married.
ProbabiLity in PreDiCtions
8 Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, p. 16.
9 Weiss, Man’s Freedom, pp. 3-8.
10 G. Stanley Kane, “The Free will Defence Defended”, p. 438.
11 Rahner, “The Question of the Future” in Theological Investigations, 12,
197.
12 Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, p. 8.
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
65
Probability involves a certain indefiniteness and sometimes this is
in a person’s mind, not in reality: for instance, if someone asks me
where a certain person is and I reply, “He is probably in his office”,
the reality is quite definite and I say “probably” because my knowledge of reality is incomplete. Where future free acts are concerned,
the indefiniteness is real.
What I claim to have shown is that it is impossible to predict particular future free acts with certainty. It is not impossible to know
what a person is probably going to do. For instance, if a young man
and a young woman are free to marry and in love, they freely decide
what they do13 and at the same time they will probably marry. More
generally, because when people have to choose between alternatives
which are unevenly matched they usually choose the better one, we
can know what a person in such a situation will probably choose; and
because people usually act as they habitually do, if someone usually
drinks tea we can offer him tea or coffee knowing that he will probably ask for tea. Also, if I know what someone’s psychological type
is, I know what his natural tendencies are and can often say what he
will probably do in this or that situation – for instance, I might say of
someone that he will probably “undertake too much, then somehow
get it done”.14 Moreover, we often hear people saying things like this:
“I haven’t yet decided whether to accept that invitation or not, but
I probably won’t”. That is, because the free will doctrine is compatible with some regularity in human behaviour, it does not imply that
human beings are utterly haphazard in their behaviour but only that
when dealing with the future behaviour of particular persons we are
always dealing with probabilities, not certainties.
The truth or falsity of judgements about what people will probably do is independent of what they actually do later. For instance,
if someone who has never fired a gun before is going to shoot at a
distant target, I can say that he is probably going to miss, and if by
a fluke he scores a bull’s-eye and someone says to me, “You were
wrong”, I will be entitled to reply, “No, I wasn’t. He was probably
going to miss, but the improbable happened”.
13 Concerning free will in sexual love, see Cowburn, Love, pp. 178-179.
14 The words are quoted from a Myers-Briggs type.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
In a similar way, it can be possible at times to deduce from people’s
characters what they probably did in the past. Someone writing the
life of a historical person may at times be justified in filling in gaps in
the record by saying what the person, given his character and habits,
probably did. And if twelve people are in a locked house and one of
them is murdered, the investigating detective need not regard them
all as equally suspect but may be able quickly to size them up and
classify them as “almost certainly innocent”, “probably innocent”,
“possible suspect” and “probable culprit”. What is impossible is to
deduce from someone’s character that he certainly did this or that.
stateMents about WHat CouLD HaVe HaPPeneD
If someone did something freely in the past, it is generally possible
to point to the alternatives which were before him which he did not
choose and to say that he could have done this or that. For instance,
if I find two jackets in a shop which fit me and choose one of them,
it can be said later that I could have bought the other.
stateMents about WHat WouLD HaVe HaPPeneD
It is also possible, sometimes, to say what would have happened
if someone had made a different choice at some past moment. For
instance, after an operation a surgeon may say to a patient, “If you
had waited much longer before coming to see me, I would not have
been able to save your life”, and if someone goes into the ocean and
brings out a poor swimmer who was being carried out to sea, everyone may say later that if he had stayed on the beach the other would
have drowned. In these and many other cases we see and express the
importance of a free act by comparing its actual results with what
would have happened if it had not been performed. Thus statements
about things that would have happened are not always idle speculation about unrealities, but may contain important truths about actual events.
It is, however, utterly impossible to say with certainty what any
particular person would do in a hypothetical situation, or what anyone would have done if he had been in a particular situation which
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
67
never arose.15 Whom would the cardinals have elected pope if John
Paul II had died after being shot? That is unknowable, and the statement that they would have elected this or that person (except as a
statement of probability) is neither true nor false. What would I have
done with my life if I had not become a Jesuit? No one knows, nor
can anyone know.
foreKnoWLeDge in soMe fiLMs
The impossibility of the prediction of free acts is shown by the fact
that when science-fiction or gothic novels and films are based on the
postulate that such predictions are possible, the writers have to resort
to artificial contrivance in order to make people’s actions credible.
For instance, they give knowledge of the future to someone who is
powerless to influence events and whom no one will believe until it
is too late. Alternatively, they limit the foreknowledge in some way
that renders it useless: for instance, they write that a man learns that
he is going to be killed, but not where or by whom, and that when
he barricades himself in what he thinks is a safe place he unwittingly
delivers himself to an enemy, who kills him; or they write that in a
vision a person sees a murder being committed at some future time
but does not see the victim’s face and so does not know whom to
warn (after the murder has been committed he says, “So that’s whom
I saw being killed!”). Here are some examples.
(1) Time After Time (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer,
United States, 1979).
In this thriller, H. G. Wells travels forward in his time machine
from 1893 to 1979 and makes friends with a woman, Amy. With
her he travels three days into the future and they see a newspaper in
which her murder is reported. Stupidly, as it seemed to me when I
saw the film, they return to where they had been in time and try to
prevent the murder from taking place, though the newspaper which
they had seen showed them (or seemed to show them) that they were
not going to succeed. In fact a different woman is mutilated and
murdered in Amy’s apartment. The police assume that the body is
Amy’s, and the newspaper, which earlier in the film they had been
15 I here deny that the “free futurible” is a valid concept, and hence I implicitly deny the Molinist explanation of the working of divine providence,
which will be discussed later, pp. 107-18.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
shown seeing, appears with the report of Amy’s murder. This is cheating because the “foreknowledge”, though it was obtained in the future and brought back to the present, turns out to be mistaken.
(2) It Happened Tomorrow (directed by René Clair in the United
States, 1943) uses the same trick. In this comedy, every morning
a mysterious man gives the hero a copy of tomorrow’s newspaper,
which has today’s racing results. With the list of the winners in his
hand he bets at the races and, of course, wins a fortune. The same
thing happens on the following day and he becomes a celebrity,
whose amazing success as a punter is reported in the newspaper, copies of which he sees on the day before they appear. Then one day he
reads that his body was found yesterday (i.e. for him and us, will be
found today) at a certain place. He naturally tries to keep away from
that place, though he and we are convinced that he will not succeed.
In the end somebody else dies in the place, the body is mistakenly
identified as his and so, though the paper which he had seen appears,
he survives.
(3) The Terminator (written and directed by James Cameron, United States, 1984).
This thriller begins in the year 2029. Watching it, we quickly learn
that at some time in the past, but not as early as 1985, computers, using machines, set out to destroy all human beings. In pursuit
of this goal they caused a nuclear war which destroyed most of the
world’s human population, and they are now pursuing its remnants.
These are led by John Connor, who was born in 1985 and is the hope
of humanity.
The computers know that John Connor’s mother was Sarah Connor of Los Angeles and in a crafty move they send a machine, called
a terminator, back in time to 1984 to kill her and so prevent John
Connor’s birth. To stop it, the human beings send Kyle Rees, a friend
of John Connor, back to 1984 to find Sarah Connor and save her
from the terminator.
Most of the film consists of the terminator almost killing Sarah
Connor and Kyle Rees just managing to save her life, in one encounter after another. During this Sarah Connor and Kyle Rees fall in
love, and one night they make love. At last, in a big fight Kyle Rees
and Sarah Connor destroy the terminator, and Kyle Rees is himself
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
69
killed. Sarah Connor later finds that she is going to have a child –
who of course will grow up to be John Connor, the hope of humanity in 2029, when he will be 44. Since Kyle Rees has told her that
there will be a nuclear war and that she will die in it, she tape-records
a message to her unborn child in which she says: “Will I tell you who
your father was? If I do, will it affect your decision to send him back
to save me from the terminator? Should I tell you?” She tells him.
All of this is not merely technologically difficult: it is inherently
absurd. Why should John Connor, in 2029, send someone back in
time to save from the death before his birth of the woman who was
going to be his mother, when the fact that he exists shows that the
terminator failed to achieve its mission? Why does Kyle Rees risk his
life to save Sarah Connor when he knows, because he has seen her
son, that she is going to survive and have a son? And if Kyle Rees dies
in 1984, what is he doing alive in 2029, available for the mission on
which he is sent?
(4) Back to the Future (written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale,
directed by Zemeckis, United States, 1985).
In this comedy we begin in 1985. Marty is seventeen and has a
spineless father who has not done well in life and is tyrannised by
a bigger man whose name is Biff. Marty has often heard that his
parents met when his father, then a teenager, fell out of a tree in
front of his mother’s father’s car. He has an inventor friend who after perfecting a time-travel vehicle is shot by terrorists, from whom
Marty escapes by driving the vehicle to 1955. Wandering around his
town as it was then, he sees his father, a teenager, being bullied by
Biff. But instead of his father falling in front of his mother’s father’s
car, Marty himself falls in front of it and she (a young girl) falls in
love with him, not knowing that he is her son. He then contrives to
ensure that his mother and father meet and fall in love, so that he
will exist, and in the course of events which he arranges his father
knocks Biff out. Marty visits the inventor, tells him (and only him)
who he is, and tells him that he (the inventor) will succeed in inventing a time-travel vehicle and that in thirty years time he will be shot
by terrorists. Then Marty returns to 1985, to a point in time a little
before the time at which he left, and finds a different situation from
the one which he had left. His father is strong and successful, and
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
Biff is utterly subservient to him. Marty rushes to the scene of the
shooting, sees the inventor shot and himself disappear in the vehicle.
Then he sees the inventor stand up unharmed because, thanks to the
information which he had been given thirty years earlier, he is wearing a bullet-proof vest.
Here the postulate is that a person can go back into the past and
change it – the boy from 1985 changes his father’s 1955 behaviour
and so changes his father’s whole life from 1955 to 1985. Thus the
boy who in 1955 seems to know the future, because he has seen it,
knows not what will happen, full stop, but what will happen if he
does not intervene. Thus in order to make action possible, knowledge
of the future has been eliminated, or at any rate made conditional.
The writers presumably realised that without this the boy from 1985
would, in 1955, have been both able to influence events, because he
was there, and unable to influence them, because they were definitely
going to happen as he, from 1985, knew.
(5) Minority Report (written by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen from a
short story by Philip K. Dick, directed by Steven Spielberg, United
States, 2001).
In this film, set in Washington D.C. in the year 2054, certain persons have dreams in which they see murders being committed, before they are committed. The police keep these persons connected to
machines which transfer their dreams to screens, they watch these
screens and if they see a murder being committed on a screen they
identify the place, go to it and prevent the murder; they then imprison the would-be murderer for the murder which he was going to
commit. This, which has been going on for six years, has reduced the
murder rate in Washington to almost zero.
Clearly, the postulate here is not that people see future events occurring. A character says, “That you know the future means that
you can change it; you have a choice”, but if when the time comes
you change what you saw, it was not the future. When the person
dreamed, the dream showed what at that time someone intended to
do: it showed a present, not a future, reality.
2
In making these remarks it is not my intention to damn these films
as entertainment, which is all that they are meant to be. The thrillers
5 1 The Outer Face of Free Will: Unpredictability
71
are thrilling and in their different ways the comedies are funny. They
do, however, serve to show that knowledge of the future involves
contradictions and absurdities.
I conclude by quoting from J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire. In the wizards’ school Professor Trelawney taught a
course in divination, or telling the future, and after thinking about it
Harry came to the conclusion that the professor’s “brand of fortunetelling was really no more than lucky guesswork and a spooky manner”. “Hermione was right,” he said to himself, the professor “really
was an old fraud”.16
neWCoMb’s ParaDox17
Here is a story in which the foreknowledge of a free act is assumed
to be possible.
A woman is shown two boxes, box 1 and box 2. She is told that
box 1 has $10 in it and box 2 might have $100 in it, and that she may
take and keep the contents either of box 2 only or of both boxes.
In normal circumstances the woman takes both boxes: she thus
certainly obtains the $10 which she has been told are in box 1, and she
may obtain another $100 from box 2. She will get either $10 or $110.
But the circumstances are not normal. The people who are in
charge of all this have found a man who knows, before the woman
makes her choice, what she is going to do, and they have handed
$100 to him with these instructions: “If you know that the woman is
going to choose both boxes, leave box 2 empty; if you know that she
is going to choose box 2 only, put this $100 in it”. This means that
if the woman takes both boxes she will obtain $10, if she takes only
box 2 she will obtain $100; in no circumstances will she obtain $110.
The woman is told that this man knows what she is going to do,
though she has not yet made her decision, and she is told about
the instructions which have been given to him. She says to herself
(please excuse this repetition): “If I choose both boxes I will get $10,
if I choose only box 2 I will get $100”, and she takes box 2 only.
That is, a woman is told that box 1 definitely has $10 in it, that
box 2 may have $100 in it, that she may take either box 2 only or
16 Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, p. 177.
17 This was published by Nozick in 1969. It is discussed in Craig, The
Only Wise God (1987), pp. 105-116, and in Fisher, The Metaphysics of Free
Will (1994), pp. 98-109.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
both boxes, and she chooses to take box 2 only! This is the “paradox” or seeming absurdity.
If I am right, the story contains an intrinsic impossibility. (1) The
man’s knowledge is that of a spectator or observer, which presupposes
its object; in other words, he knows what the woman is going to do
because she is going to do it. Therefore the woman’s choice is causally
prior to the man’s knowledge of it. (2) The woman makes her choice
not knowing what the man knows but knowing that he knows. As
she stands in front of the boxes she knows that if she takes both boxes
he will have known that she was going to do that and will have put
no money in box 2, so that she will get $10, whereas if she takes box
2 only he will have known that she was going to do that and will have
put $100 in box 2. Thus the man’s knowledge is causally prior to the
woman’s choice, or presupposed by it. (3) This is impossible because
A cannot be causally prior to or presupposed by B while B is causally
prior to or presupposed by A.
To put the matter in another way: the woman’s choice determines
the man’s knowledge of it, his knowledge of her choice determines
his action, and his action determines her choice (she chooses box 2
because he has put $100 in it, which he would not have put there
if she had been going to choose both boxes); such a causal circle is
impossible.
If we set out to deduce what would happen in a hypothetical situation the description of which contains mutually exclusive elements,
we should not be surprised if we find ourselves being led into absurdity. This is what happens here.
CHaPter 6
CHanCe
This is a book about free will, not chance, which could be the
subject of a whole book, especially if God’s involvement in events is
discussed, but I will say a little about chance here, if only to make it
clear that there is a great difference between free will and chance.
CHanCe
atoMiC PartiCLes
Classical physicists assumed that absolutely all events are determined. In 1925-1926, however, indeterminacy was affirmed and a
revolution in physics occurred. For a time, it was said that while
these things are fixed in themselves we are unable to find at the same
time the exact position of a particle and its velocity; this meant that
there is unavoidable indeterminacy in human knowledge, not in
things themselves. This, I believe, has changed and it is now understood that there is chance in things. For instance, a particular radium
atom emits an alpha particle at a random moment.
Life
First, most of the movements of living beings are not “lawful”.
While their movements in general may be determined by their natures – they eat when they are hungry and so on – many of their
particular movements at least seem to be random.
Second, there appears to be randomness in the reproduction of
living beings. Nature seems to work more like a machine-gunner,
who fires many bullets in the direction of a target, hoping that one
of them will hit it, rather than like a sniper, who aims and fires one
shot. For instance, pine trees produce seeds which have what one
might call wings on them; these are released and carried by winds;
they land all over the place and a few of them take root and grow,
which was nature’s plan. Bees carry pollen from plant to plant in a
random way. In the sexual intercourse of animals and human beings,
millions of spermatazoa are released, all with different genes; a tiny
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
74
proportion fertilise ova and in each case a new living being is eventually born, with genes which are not the result of anyone’s choice.
To sum up, Polkinghorne says that predictability at the individual
level is “very untypical of dynamic behaviour”1 [I think he means
life] and Jacques Monod says:
Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable
hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only
one compatible with observed and tested fact.2
soMe inaniMate beings
There is some regularity in oceans and the weather, in as much as
there are tides and seasons, but there is also much randomness. If one
stands on a beach watching the waves come in, one after another, it
seems unlikely that each wave could have been predicted in detail
many years ago. Also, while it will be cold in Alaska in January 2008,
it is not certain that rain will start to fall in central Sydney at 11.05
a.m. on 21 May 2008, or that that will not happen. Astronomers can
predict eclipses with accuracy and certainty, but most metereological
predictions are approximate and probable. Moreover, there seems to
be a certain randomness in the movements of tectonic plates deep
in the earth, from which come earthquakes and tsunamis. Finally,
as mountains have their present shapes because of the movements of
these plates and the effects of weather, it seems that it is by chance
that they have their shapes.
CHanCe in HuMan Life
Since human beings are affected by the weather and at times by
events like earthquakes, we are involuntarily subject to chance. Also,
free choices often combine with chance so that many events are doubly indeterminate.
People often “let chance decide” what happens. When people draw
straws, buy tickets in raffles or play cards, they freely choose to “let
chance decide”. More seriously, if people make love in the hope of
having a child, they do so freely but they know that whether con1 Polkinghorne, Science and Providence, p. 28.
2 Monod, Chance and Necessity, p. 110.
6 1 Chance
75
ception will occur and, if it does, what genes the child will have are
matters of chance.
People often make random choices. For instance, if someone in
a restaurant is shown a wine list, and the names of the wines on it
mean nothing to him, he may pick one at random. If I am asked to
name a number between one and ten, my choice of a number will
be random.3
Unforeseen results of free acts are usually random events because,
since the free act does not have to occur, these results do not have
to be produced, and no one decides that they will be brought about.
If, for example, someone drives a car which, unknown to him, has
a brake from which fluid has been leaking, and if he has a crash in
which someone is hurt, that is his or her bad luck.
If several persons make free decisions which without their knowledge combine to produce some effect, which neither of them intends, it is a chance occurrence. If during a war a gunner fires blindly
into enemy territory and kills a particular person, the event is caused
by the gunner’s free decision to fire and by the victim’s free decision
to be at a particular place at a particular time, and hence it is not a
predetermined event. But the gunner does not decide to hit a particular person, and the person certainly does not decide to be hit,
so that it is a random occurrence. Similarly, if two people, far apart
from each other and acting independently, decide to go to the same
place and and meet each other there, their meeting is not a predetermined event and neither is it something which anyone decided to
bring about: it, too, happens by chance.4
3 We shall see that Freud maintained that all seemingly random human
acts are in fact subconsciously determined. See below, p. 157. It is true that
the apostles chose a successor to Judas by first narrowing the choice down
to two, then casting lots to decide between them, but they did not feel that
they were leaving the choice to chance. Instead, they supposed that God
would determine who was chosen. They seem not to have used this method
again, nor are popes now selected in this way.
4 Monod says that randomness is the “quality of an event that results from
the intersection of two totally independent chains of events” (Chance and
Necessity, pp. 121-122). If the two chains of events are both determined, so
is their intersection and whatever results from it, which is why I have argued
above from free acts.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
Finally, at times a certain pronunciation or spelling of a word, a
new word or a fashion catches on and comes to be accepted – when
I was a boy, “It’s me” was unacceptable but now “It’s I” is pedantic. This involves the free choices of thousands or even millions of
people, but they do not consult one another and it is largely a matter
of chance.
tHat CHanCe eVents Cannot be PreDiCteD
WitH Certainty
but Can soMetiMes be PreDiCteD
WitH ProbabiLity
As I said earlier, if an event follows necessarily from its antecedents,
then from the antecedents it is possible, prior to the event, to predict it with certainty. In the case of a particular random event, however, this is intrinsically impossible, so that, like a free act, a random
event cannot be predicted with certainty. Sometimes, however, there
is unequal probability and prediction with probability is possible.
For instance, if one card taken is taken at random from a pack, it is
twelve times more likely to be a card from two to king than an ace.
At times a future event may be said to have a probability of 5% or
95%, and one may say of a book that it will probably have, or not
have, many readers. Sometimes the probability of an event is so high
that we may regard the prediction of its occurrence as almost certain
and, for practical purposes, proceed on the assumption that it is going to happen.
statistiCaL neCessity anD ProbabiLity
Often, when particular events are a matter of chance there is necessity in great numbers of them. For instance, whether any particular
child is male or female is a matter of chance, but it is not by chance
that the numbers of male and female babies who are born in a big
country in a given year are approximately equal. It is not by chance
that if a card is drawn from a pack thirteen thousand times, it will
be an ace about a thousand times. Also, if 23 people are in room it is
51% probable that two of them will have the same birthday; if there
are more people, the probability is higher. Applied to large numbers,
the laws of probability express a certain necessity in nature, so that,
if on hundreds of occasions when there are 23 or more people in a
6 1 Chance
77
room and you bet that at least two of them have the same birthday,
you are sure to make money. Moreover, looking back, we may say
that once the petrol engine had been invented it was certain that
sooner or later someone (one would be unable to say who) would invent a flying machine of some kind (previous engines were too heavy
for this to have been possible); it was, however, not certain that this
would be achieved by the Wright brothers on a certain date with a
machine that had a particular shape.
What is impossible is the prediction of future events with certainty.
Don Charlwood says that during World War II men in the Royal Air
Force who flew on bombing raids into Germany sometimes believed
that they were going to come through: a girl in stores told one such
man that he was going to survive the war and return to Australia and
he (at that moment, anyway) believed her. Speaking after the war,
another man said that he had had the same conviction.5 They were
implicitly assuming that it is in principle possible to know the future
with certainty and, if I am right, this is impossible.
5 Charlwood, No Moon Tonight, p. 107.
Part tWo
free WiLL: tHe tHeoLogiCaL ProbLeMs
Reflection on God and the relationship between God and human
beings inevitably comes, sooner or later, to the question of whether
or not human beings have free will. This is perhaps most discussed
in books and articles about the problem of evil, about which I have
written a separate book, because of which I shall deal only briefly
with this problem here.
In these chapters I shall, first, present an outline history of biblical
and Christian thought about free will. In a somewhat misleading
way I shall for the most part not go into related questions, such as
what is original sin, and I shall often greatly simplify what people
have said. I shall then briefly comment on various positions which
have been held, and present a position which I would wish to defend. Any reader who is interested only in philosophy should skip
to chapter 12.
CHaPter 7
HuMan free WiLL in tHe bibLe
anD in tHe fatHers
tHe oLD testaMent
The early chapters of Genesis contain, among other things, a solution to the problem of evil. Someone saw the miseries of human life
– death, that men strain to make a living, that women labour painfully to give birth, that men kill each other and that human beings
speak different languages – and asked, “Did God make the world
like this?” He answered, “No, the world God made must have been
in perfect order”. He then asked, “What went wrong?” He surmised
that human beings disobeyed God and that God punished them by
introducing troubles into their existence, and so was formed the story
which we have in those chapters. In it, the fact that Adam disobeyed
God shows that before he acted he was able to do that; the fact that
he was blamed for it shows that he was also able to obey God: that
is, it is assumed that he had free will, and these chapters contain a
version of what is now called the Free Will Defence, which is one of
the classic solutions to the problem of evil.
Moreover, all the commandments, exhortations and reprimands
which come from God in the Old Testament suppose that human
beings are capable of doing good (for otherwise it would be futile
to command them to do it) and that they are also capable of doing
evil (since there is no point in commanding or exhorting people to
do what they cannot help doing). Furthermore, Moses addresses the
people as follows:
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and
adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God
that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God,
walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees,
and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and
the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
80
to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but
are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare
to you today that you shall perish. (Deut 30:15-18.)
In a passage quoted earlier, Isaiah says:
If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land;
But if you refuse and rebel,
you shall be devoured by the sword (Isa 1:19-20).
Ecclesiasticus says:
He himself [the Lord] made human beings in the beginning,
and then left them free to make their own decisions.
If you choose, you will keep the commandments
and so be faithful to his will.
He has set fire and water before you;
put out your hand to whichever you prefer.
A human being has life or death before him;
whichever he prefers will be given him. (Sir 15:14-17. NJB)
In these passages it is assumed that people can choose the route of
obedience, which leads to life, increase, prosperity, the good things
of the earth and the blessings of God; they are also able to choose the
route of rebellion, which leads to death. That is, they have free will.
Some Old Testament thinkers, however, pursued a different line
of thought. When they saw how human beings had done bad things
which had later had good consequences which the original agents
had not intended, they said to themselves: “God must have made
those people do those seemingly bad things, in order to obtain the
good consequences”. For instance, when they saw how Joseph’s being
sold into slavery by his brothers had led to the saving of many lives
years later, they judged that God must have made it happen. They
even drew the logical conclusion that the brothers were not at all to
blame, and put this into the narrative: when Joseph reveals himself
to his brothers, he says,
Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold
me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. ... God sent
me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep
7 1 Free Will in the Bible & in Christianity during the Patristic Period
81
alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here,
but God. (Gen 45:5-8.)
Moreover, it looks as though some thinkers had such a strong sense of
justice that they felt that if a villain repents and so escapes divine retribution, justice is somehow flouted, whereas if he refuses to repent
and goes on sinning, he receives even more punishment in the end,
justice is done, and therefore this is preferable. When, then, they saw
scoundrels refusing to repent, they attributed their refusal to God,
who, they thought, out of a sense of justice, was making sure that
he would not have to spare them but, instead, would give them their
just deserts. For instance, we read that when old Eli appealed to his
villainous sons “they would not listen to the voice of their father, for
it was the will of the Lord to kill them” (1 Sam 2:25). These passages,
especially Joseph’s words to his brothers, would be easy to explain if
human beings do not have free will and necessarily do whatever God
makes them do. It is, however, more reasonable to suppose that they
are about exceptional divine interventions, since free will is taken for
granted almost all the rest of the time.
free WiLL in tHe neW testaMent
tHe synoPtiC gosPeLs anD aCts
Most of the time, the synoptic gospels reflect a simple view of Jesus’
life and death: that God intended the Jewish people as a whole to accept him as the Messiah and to let themselves be interiorly renewed
by him; that God did not force people to do this, but left them free
to accept him or not, as they might choose. Some accepted him and
others refused, not because he wanted the former and not the latter
to act as they did but because that was what they chose. Indeed, the
people as a whole did not accept Jesus and the leaders went much
further and had him put to death, against God’s will.
This view is reflected in many parables. In the parable of the sower
and the seed Jesus compares himself not to a sower who carefully digs
little holes and plants seeds in them but to a sower who hurls seeds all
over the place – whether they take root or not is determined not by
him but by the places where the seeds land. In another parable a king
invites people to a wedding-feast, they not only refuse to come but
kill the messengers and he is angry – that is not what he had intended
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at all. In another parable, a landowner leases a vineyard to tenants
and later sends slaves to collect his produce for him; the tenants mistreat the slaves, whereupon he sends his son, saying, “Perhaps they
will respect him” (Luke 20:13); they kill the son, but the owner’s
words show that that was not what he intended to happen.
In the parable of the prodigal son Jesus compares God to a father
who neither makes his son stay at home nor makes him leave, but
lets him leave when the boy chooses to go; and who later does not
bring his son home but receives him affectionately when, of his own
choice, he repents and comes home. It is not part of the story that
from the first the father wanted his son to leave home, because he
wanted to be able to exercise forgiveness when he came back. Moreover, the message of Matthew is: “God wants you to accept Jesus, but
it is up to you to choose to do it; if you choose him you will inherit
the kingdom, if you refuse him you will be damned – so choose
him”. Finally, Jesus does not say of the Pharisees or the merchants in
the temple: “They are doing exactly what the Father intends them to
be doing, so we must accept them and their deeds”. What he says and
does reflects the simple view that these men were, of their own free
will, opposing the will of God.
It looks as though some thinkers in the early Christian community
said, in effect, that this simple view could not be right. Probably feeling that they were seeing deeply into the mind of God, they judged
that what had happened, both while Jesus was alive and after his
ascension, must have been what God had all along intended. They
saw correspondences between Jesus’ passion and various passages in
the Old Testament, they read these passages as showing not only that
God had known all along what was going to happen to Jesus but
that it had been “ordained” (Lk 24:24 NJB) or “destined” (Lk 24:44
NJB). By a process of reasoning they arrived at the conclusion that
God had never meant the people as a whole to accept Jesus and it occurred to them that Jesus had spoken in parables because he did not
want everyone to understand him. It was said that Peter even went so
far as to say to the people in Jerusalem:
I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this
way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets,
that his Messiah would suffer (Acts 3:17-18),
7 1 Free Will in the Bible & in Christianity during the Patristic Period
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and the community prayed to God as follows:
“In this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy
servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and
your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28).
They also thought that God later wanted not all but only certain
persons to accept Jesus, so that in Acts we read: “Day by day the
Lord added to their community those destined to be saved” (Acts
2:47 NJB).1
Between these two views there is an obvious conflict. The simple
view stresses human free will and human independence; the more
complex view stresses divine control and plays down human responsibility.
PauL
The Pharisees of Jesus’ and Paul’s time defined a good (or, in the
language of our Bible, a just) man as one who exactly observed all
the Jewish rules of behaviour, many of which concerned the sabbath
while others concerned diet and hygiene. Consonant with this, they
believed that a man made himself good by observing all these rules,
and hence that an observant man was entitled to ask God and other
people to admire him for being so good. The Pharisee in the parable
of the Pharisee and the publican, who tells God how good he is,
saying, “I fast twice a week, I give a tenth of all my income” (Luke
18:12), is an example of this mentality. It seems that when some
observant Jews became Christians, they carried this with them and
believed that by their earlier exact observance of the law they had
earned the faith in Christ which they had received, and the right
to set themselves above other Christians who had previously been
pagans. Paul detested this mentality. If he had had it before his conversion, he subsequently got it completely out of his system and he
wanted to stamp it out among Christians.
His own conversion was the result of a brilliant illumination which
Christ gave him one day on a road. Similar illuminations were not
given to others and Paul must have asked himself, “Why me?” He
1 The NRSV translation is: “And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved”, which omits the idea of destiny but keeps
the idea of the Lord making the choice.
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replied: “Absolutely not because I had earned it” – God, he said,
had chosen him while he was still in his mother’s womb (Gal 1:15),
before he had done anything at all to earn God’s favour, and he said
that “God’s choice is free, since it depends on the one who calls, not
on human merit” (Rom 9:11-12 JB). He told others that their conversions were as much unearned gifts of God as his own had been:
By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your
own doing, it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that
no one may boast. For we are what he has made us. (Eph 2:810.)
Concerning observance of the Jewish rules, he said that this does not
make anyone a good person in God’s eyes (“No one is justified before
God by the law” [Gal 3:11]). Morality was another matter entirely,
and Paul insisted that being a good person includes behaving in accord with moral laws. He went on, however, to say that people ought
not to think of themselves as being morally good through their own
efforts and hence earning credit in that way. He told people: “It is
God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work
for his good pleasure” (Phil 2:13), and when he talked of what he
himself had done he corrected himself like this: “I worked harder
than any of them – though it was not I, but the grace of God that is
with me” (1Cor 15:10).
Naturally, the question arose: “What about people who do not
accept Christ? Are we to conclude that this is because God has not
chosen them and given them the gift of faith?” Yes, said Paul in a
passage in Romans, unflinchingly accepting the logical implications
of his position, “he has mercy upon whomsoever he chooses, and
he hardens the heart of whomsoever he chooses” (Rom 9:18). That
is, God chooses to give his grace to some, as a result of which they
believe and are saved; he leaves others to themselves and they inevitably sin, or he even “hardens their hearts” and they sin furiously.
Paul foresees the obvious objection to this: “Does it follow,” he asks,
“that God is unjust?”, and he answers: “Of course not”, giving as his
reason not that we have free will but that God is entitled to do as he
chooses with human beings. He then says: “You will ask me, ‘In that
case, how can God ever blame anyone, since no one can oppose his
will?’” He does not reply by modifying his position, saying that we
7 1 Free Will in the Bible & in Christianity during the Patristic Period
85
have free will and can oppose God’s will. Instead, he takes an extreme
position and says that God is like a potter and we are like pots which
he makes. He says:
Who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will
what is moulded say to the one who moulds it, “Why did you
make me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make
out of the same lump one object for special use and another for
ordinary use? (Rom 9:20-21.)
There is no free will in a pot, and Paul seems to be saying here that
God takes indeterminate human substance and makes some lumps
of it into good people, other lumps of it into wicked people, as he
chooses.
In other passages, including passages in Romans, Paul takes an entirely different line. Writing in Romans 1 of the godless and immoral
pagans, he does not explain their behaviour by saying that God had
not chosen them; on the contrary, he says that they were quite capable of knowing and honouring God, that they refused to do this,
and that “therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to
impurity. ... This is the reason God gave them up to degrading passions” (Rom 1:24,26), and “since they did not see fit to acknowledge
God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should
not be done” (Rom 1:28), insistently putting the human decision
before the divine one. In 2 Thessalonians he says: “God sends them
a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false, so that all
who have not believed the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness will be condemned” (2 Thess 2:11-12). The causal order seems
to be: (1) they refuse to believe in the truth and choose unrighteousness; (2) for this reason God sends a power to delude them and make
them believe what is untrue; (3) they are deluded and have false beliefs. Again, a human choice is the first cause of moral evil.
Moreover, in much of his writing Paul exhorts people to think of
God’s mercy, begs them to copy him, tells them that they must not
leave their unbelieving spouses, orders them to work and condemns
them for immoral behaviour. Here, when he is writing about what
people are doing at the time, or about what he wants them to do in
the immediate future, he works on the simple view that while God
wants people to act well, human beings independently choose their
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
86
own forms of behaviour, and while they sometimes do as God wants,
at other times they do precisely what God wants them not to do.
That is, much – perhaps most – of the time Paul assumes that people
have free will and are not controlled by God.
Reading Paul later, some Christians felt that in Romans 9 he expressed his deepest insight into God’s influence on human actions,
and they evolved predestinationist systems in which human free will
was either denied outright or very much played down. It is, however,
more reasonable to suppose that in that passage and a few others
Paul, moved by his detestation of the Pharisaic idea of what constitutes goodness and by his horror at seeing it appear in the Christian
community, overstated his objections to it and said things which,
taken literally and in isolation, do not exactly express his position.2
joHn
Some passages in John seem to mean that if many people do not
believe in Christ it is because God has not given them faith. For
instance, Jesus says: “Everyone whom the Father gives me will come
to me” (John 6:37 NJB), which might be taken to imply that those
who do not come to Jesus have not been chosen by the Father to be
given to him. To his enemies Jesus says: “You do not believe, because
you do not belong to my sheep” (John 10:26), not: “Because you do
not believe, you do not belong to my sheep”. And it is said of some
people who saw Jesus that
they could not believe, because Isaiah also said, “He has blinded
their eyes and hardened their heart, so that they might not look
with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn – and I
would heal them” (John 12:39-40).
These and other passages have been used in the past as evidence in
this literature for the view that God chooses some people, opens their
eyes and gives them to Christ, whereas he does not choose others and
leaves them in the dark that exists apart from Christ; and that God’s
choice is entirely independent of what people do.
tHe greeK fatHers
The Greek Fathers of the Church heard people saying that Fate or
Destiny controls all human actions. They did not reply, “No, God
2 See Brendan Byrne, Reckoning with Romans, p. 192.
7 1 Free Will in the Bible & in Christianity during the Patristic Period
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does”, but answered that God made every human being free (eleutheros) and self-governing (autexousios). Justin said: “It is not by destiny’s
law that what man does or what happens to him occurs; each freely
does good or evil. ... God made men and angels masters of themselves”.3 Theophilus of Antioch said that “God made man free and
autonomous”, and that “man chose the way of death and so became
the cause of his own death”.4 Irenaeus said that “man has been created rational, and in that way like God; he has been created free
in his decisions and autonomous”.5 Methodius of Olympia wrote a
Dialogue on Free Will (De autexousio), and in another work he said:
“We have received an autonomous reason subject to no necessity, so
that we would choose by our own determination what we please, far
from being slaves of Destiny and the vicissitudes of chance.”6 Finally,
John of Damascus, in his summary of Christian doctrine called The
Orthodox Faith, said that we ought to be filled with wonder when we
see the works of divine providence, and added that by “works of divine providence” he meant things which are not the work of human
beings, for “those things that are in our power are not providential,
but belong to our free will”.7
In general, the Greek Fathers unambiguously and with great emphasis affirmed human free will and independence – the above quotations are not isolated examples untypical of their thought. However, because not many people in Western Europe were able to read
Greek (for instance, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas could not read
it) and only some of their works were translated into Latin, they
did not have as much influence on later Western theology as they
deserved to have.
3 Justin, Apologia secunda, # 7, PG, 6,456.
4 Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum, II,27; PG, 6,1096.
5 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, IV iv 3; PG, 7,984.
6 Methodius of Olympia, Convivium Decem Virginum, VIII,13; PG,
18,162.
7 John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa, II,29; PG, 94,964.
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PeLagianisM
In the later part of the fourth century a controversy began which
involved the free will question. It was about how much divine help
human beings need in order to live good lives.
Pelagius was born around 354 AD, probably in Britain, and
around 380 he went to Rome. He was not a priest, but for nearly
thirty years he was a respected spiritual director there. He seems to
have been principally concerned with morality and asceticism and
in these matters he had high standards which, he believed, everyone
could reach. Pelagius understood that in order to be able to decide
to do something, a person has to believe that it is possible, which is
why, if you want to persuade someone to give up smoking, you may
need first to convince him that he can do it.8 Pelagius, then, when
he set out to persuade people to be perfect, began by telling them,
“You can do it”, or as he said:
Whenever I have to speak of laying down rules for behaviour and
the conduct of a holy life, I always point out, first of all, the power
and functioning of human nature, and show what it is capable of
doing ... lest I should seem to be wasting my time, by calling on
people to embark on a course which they consider impossible to
achieve.9
He also told men that they should think of themselves not as infants
but as mature human beings, who were sons of God indeed, but
sons who had come of age and attained independence (emancipatus a
Deo). He seems to have taught the following set of ideas: (1) Adam’s
sin was purely personal and had no consequences for anyone else
(for instance, death is natural, not a consequence of Adam’s sin);
(2) all human beings are born quite sinless, which implies that all
infants go to heaven if they die, so that infant baptism is useless; (3)
the human will is not inclined to evil as a result of Adam’s sin, but
is equally inclined to good and evil; (4) we need no special help or
grace to choose what is good, but Christ has given us good example
and his grace makes it easier for us to do what is, without it, perfectly
possible; (5) God makes no choice of persons prior to the decisions
which human beings make. Clearly, in this vision of Christian life
8 See above, p. 22 and below, p. 223.
9 Pelagius, Ad Demetriadem, 2; PL, 30,16.
7 1 Free Will in the Bible & in Christianity during the Patristic Period
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there is almost no drama of sin and redemption, and our debt to
Christ is not very great.
It seems that Pelagius presented these ideas quietly to people for
almost thirty years in Rome without arousing any significant opposition, and then he went to live in Palestine. Whereupon, around
410 AD, his disciple Coelestinus began to promote his ideas more
publicly and a theological battle began which went on for about
eight years. On one side were Pelagius, Coelestinus and many others (including bishops in Palestine who questioned Pelagius in 415),
who thought that the ideas were acceptable. On the other side were,
mainly, the African bishops, including Augustine, who agitated to
have the Pelagians condemned. In 418 Pope Zosimus excommunicated Pelagius, who was expelled from Palestine and disappeared.
The pope also sent around a letter against Pelagianism which all bishops had to sign; those who refused to sign where deposed, excommunicated and banished. Pelagianism thus became officially a heretical
set of ideas – which does not mean that every single one of Pelagius’
ideas was heretical.
augustine (354-430 aD)
Augustine’s mother Monica was a Christian but his father was not
and neither, as a young man, was Augustine. When he was about
seventeen, in Carthage in Africa, he started an affair with a woman
whose name we do not know. She was of too inferior a family to be
acceptable as his wife, but for fifteen years they openly lived together,
they were faithful to each other and they had a son who was born
around 373. When Augustine went to Milan at the age of thirty, in
383, she and the boy went with him. Two years later, Monica arrived in Milan and at once arranged for her son to marry a socially
acceptable girl. The companion of fifteen years and mother of his
son was sent back to Africa. Augustine said later that he was heartbroken – “My heart, which had held her very dear, was broken and
wounded and shed blood”.10 The woman, whatever her name was,
was not happy about it, either, and swore never to have another man.
Augustine’s fiancee was not only of a richer family than his partner
had been, but much younger. Indeed, she was two years below the
legal age for marriage. While waiting for her to grow up, Augustine
10 Augustine, Confessiones, VI,15; PL, 32,732.
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found that he could not deny his sexual desires and “took another
woman, not of course as a wife”. This was his situation when, in 386,
he became intellectually converted to Christianity. He could not be
baptised unless he separated from his mistress, which for a time he
felt unable to do. In the following year, however, at the age of thirtythree, he made the break and was baptised. He never married the
heiress: instead, he went on to be ordained a priest in 391, and in
395 he became a bishop in Africa.
After his conversion, there were three phases in Augustine’s thought
about free will.11 As a young man, he had been associated with the
Manichees, who denied free will, but he reacted against them and
between his conversion and his ordination that is, in the first phase,
which lasted about five years, he wrote Book I of De libero arbitrio
(Free Will) and De vera religione, in which works he said that nothing
can compel the human will to choose one way or another, so that (for
instance) if a human being chooses evil, that is his or her free choice,
not God’s. In his second phase, which began at his ordination in 391
and also lasted about five years, he said that human beings are at first
able to choose good or evil, but if a person sins he can be so gripped
by “the pernicious sweetness and pleasure” of sin that he can acquire
a habit (or, as we would say, become addicted) and be thereafter unable to choose good.12 When, however, he became a bishop in 395 he
abandoned the idea that, at least in the beginning, a person is able to
choose either good or evil. So began his third phase, which lasted for
the rest of his life, and in it he in effect denied the capacity of human
beings to do good or evil, as they choose.
Augustine’s rejection of free will can perhaps be explained by the
following reasons. First, he had experienced the force of sexual desire and found it to be, in his case, irresistible. After his intellectual
conversion he had found that, while he knew what he ought to do,
he was unable to will to do it. If he had gone from Milan to Rome
to consult Pelagius, who was giving spiritual direction down there at
the time, Pelagius would probably have said: “Of course you can do
11 I have taken this from Ganssle, “The Development of Augustine’s View
of the Freedom of the Will (ad 86-397)” (1996).
12 John Prendiville wrote about this in “The Development of the Idea of
Habit in the Thought of Saint Augustine”.
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91
it, just use your will power”, and Augustine would have replied: “But
that is the whole trouble, I cannot”. He believed that his eventual reform was a sheer gift of God. He extended this to everyone and said
that, as a result of original sin and personal sins, we are compulsive
sinners unless or until God rescues us. Second, Augustine wanted to
exalt or glorify God and he felt that to do this he had to deny that
human beings are to any extent independent of God; he also felt that
to praise or give credit to human beings for anything they have done
is to give something to creatures which should be given to God alone.
Talking about Paul, he said: “Do you not see that the sole purpose of
the apostle is that man may be humbled, and God alone exalted?”13
and he constantly said that human beings can boast of nothing good
as if it were their own doing: our salvation, he said, depends uniquely
on whether God chooses us or not, and what we do in no way influences his choice – otherwise it would not be a gift. Third, it seems
that after Augustine became a bishop his experience with people gave
him a low opinion of their ability to exercise responsibility. Whereas
Pelagius was dealing with an elite and told people to think of themselves as adults, Augustine kept telling people that they were babies.
Naturally, he was what we would call paternalistic towards them and
he favoured what were regarded even then as coercive measures to
bring people into the true Church.14 Finally, as an African bishop he
was active from around 411 to 418 in the campaign against Pelagius
and Coelestinus, and in the opinion of virtually all commentators
he went too far in the opposite direction, as people involved in such
campaigns often do.
Augustine had a theory of salvation in which human free will had
virtually no place. Reduced to bare essentials, it was that as a result of
the Fall all human beings, whether or not they commit personal sins,
go to hell unless they are saved by Christ through baptism. Hence,
unlike Pelagius, Augustine believed that babies who die unbaptised
go to hell. Augustine also held that as a result of the Fall all human
beings are inclined to evil and, if they reach the age of reason and are
left to themselves by God, they cannot help sinning and in the end
they go to hell for personal sins. He went on to say that God leaves
13 Augustine, De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, V,9; PL, 44,967.
14 See Brown, Augustine of Hippo, pp. 235-236.
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many people to themselves; in them fallen nature takes its course,
they sin and ultimately they go to hell. But, he said, God picks out
others and mercifully makes a good life irresistibly attractive for them,
with the result that they lead good lives and in the end go to heaven.
God, he said, never loses anyone whom he has chosen: “When God
grants mercy to someone, he never does so in vain; he calls a person
on whom he has mercy in the way that he knows is right for that
person, so that the person will not resist God who is calling him”.15
He vehemently insisted that in making his choice of whom to save
God takes no account of what people have done, would do or will
do: our works in no way affect God’s choice. This means that if we
are leading good lives, no credit is due to us; if we go to heaven when
we die, it will be uniquely thanks to God’s having chosen us. But,
one asks, is this just to those who are not chosen? Perfectly just, said
Augustine, since no sinner has a right to mercy. Yes, one asks, but if
God gives mercy to some why does he not give it to all? God gives
grace to some because he is merciful, said Augustine, but not to all
because he is just; by saving some while letting the rest go to hell God
is able to be both merciful and just.
I said above that the early Greek Fathers, surrounded by pagans
who said that Fate controls all human actions, did not reply: “Not
Fate, but God”. Instead, they said that human beings control their
own actions. Augustine took the opposite course. In The City of God
he discussed the pagan idea of Fate and said that if it is taken in its
usual sense of the stars it is false to say that Fate controls us; he then
went on to say that if Fate is taken to mean the connection of causes
dependent on God, the idea is sound.16 Towards the end of his life,
in a book called Retractationes (426-427 AD), he said: “I had previously tried to uphold the freedom of choice of the human will; but
the grace of God had the upper hand”.17
15 Augustine, De Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, I ii 13; PL,
40,119.
16 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, V,8; PL, 41,148.
17 Augustine, Retractationes, II,1; PL, 32,629.
7 1 Free Will in the Bible & in Christianity during the Patristic Period
93
Though, as I said, Augustine had a great influence on Western theology, not all his ideas were accepted. Indeed, shortly after his death
the Church deliberately abstained from endorsing some of them.18
tHe seMi-PeLagians
anD More about augustine
John Cassian (ca. 360 – ca. 435 AD, that is, he was a contemporary of Augustine) was born in what is now Romania. This was
a Latin-speaking area but it was well to the East and Cassian spent
much time in Palestine and Egypt, where he had some experience
of monastic life. He was ordained a deacon in Constantinople by
St John Chrysostom and later became a priest. Around 415 AD,
when Pelagius was living in Palestine and the conflict about his ideas
was going on, Cassian went to Marseilles, where he subsequently
founded two Latin-speaking monasteries, one for men and one for
women. He wrote a series of essays which, collected, became the first
comprehensive book of asceticism or spirituality, as distinct from
theology, in the West.19 Cassian accepted the condemnation of Pelagius in 418, but he had spent many years in the East, and as we
have seen the Greek Christian writers emphasised free will. Moreover, it is impossible to think about Christian living without attaching great importance to free will. He therefore could not agree with
Augustine’s ideas about grace and (to use a modern word) human
responsibility. He felt that God must will all people to be saved, and
that whether we are saved or not must depend on choices which we
make. He said that without grace a human being is incapable of leading a good and meritorious life (in this he was anti-Pelagian); but, he
said, a human being can make a little motion in that direction (this
motion was called the initium fidei) or not; if he makes it, God gives
him the grace which is necessary for a full Christian life and he can
live such a life and be saved, whereas if of his own free will he does
not make it, God does not give him the grace, he leads a bad life and
is damned.20 Cassian also said that once established in the right way
18 See Farrelly, Predestination, p. 105.
19 See below, p. 96.
20 Cassian said: “When he [God] has seen in us a certain beginning of
good will, he immediately illuminates it and strengthens and stirs it up to
salvation, giving an increase to that which either he planted or he sees has
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a person does not need special help to persevere in it to the end of his
life. This theory came to be seen as a modified form of Pelagianism
and is called Semi-Pelagianism.
When word of this reached Augustine, who by this time was seventy-four, he responded by writing De Praedestinatione Sanctorum
and De Dono Perseverantiae (both 428 AD), in which he took a fairly
extreme “predestinationist” position. Cassian and others in his part
of the world were not convinced and their ideas continued to circulate there. Discussion seems to have gone on intermittently for a
century, until in 523 Caesarius of Arles called the second council of
Orange, which declared that man in any state needs grace to perform
a salvific act and that the beginning of a good life is the gift of God.21
It thus condemned Cassian’s theory. Two years later Pope Boniface
approved the decrees of this council, which gave it more authority
than a provincial council has on its own, though hardly the ecumenical authority which has sometimes been attributed to it.
tHe foLLoWing Centuries
In 524 Boethius, who was awaiting execution at the time, wrote
a short book, On the Consolation of Philosophy, at the end of which
he wrestled with the problem of divine providence and human free
will. His few pages on the subject read like an article by a twentiethcentury philosopher: for instance, he asked whether God foresees
human actions because they are going to happen or they happen
because he foresees them. He solved the problem by saying that God
is eternal (his definition of eternity became the standard one) and as
such “outside time”.22 This book, written in Latin, became a popular
classic which was translated into English by, among others, Alfred
the Great, Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I.
There was not a great deal of theological speculation for some centuries after this. However, Augustine and Boethius were read and in
France in the ninth century a certain Gottschalk studied Augustine
been merited by our effort” (Collationes, 13,8 [PL, 49,912-913], quoted in
Farrelly, Predestination, p. 98).
21 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, # 375.
22 Boethius said that the divine eternity is interminabilis vitae tota simul
et perfecta possessio (De Consolatione Philosophiae, book 5, prose 6). I shall
discuss this later.
7 1 Free Will in the Bible & in Christianity during the Patristic Period
95
and declared that God does not want all to be saved but predestines
some to heaven and others to hell; Christ, he said, died only for those
who have been predestined to heaven. A series of local councils condemned this teaching: for instance, the council of Quiercy-sur-Oise
(853 AD) taught that God wills all without exception to be saved23
and it said that while God predestines those who are saved, he does
not predestine others to damnation.24 The Council of Valence (855
AD) denied that any people are predestined to evil.25 Then and during the rest of this time the Church held firm to its belief in free will
and when in 1053 Pope Leo IX wrote a creed he included this statement: “I believe and profess that God’s grace anticipates and follows
man, but in professing this I do not deny that rational creatures have
free will”.26 He said that God “predestined only good”.27
In the great debate about grace and free will in Augustine’s time
and just afterwards, a formula was found to avoid what is called double predestination, which is the idea that God wants some persons
to be saved and the rest to be damned: it was said that God predestines or pre-wills the good acts and salvation of those whom he
chooses, but only foreknows the bad acts and damnation of the rest.
For instance, the Hypomnesticon, an important anti-Pelagian work
written in Rome, said: “Sinners have only been known in their sins
by foreknowledge before they came into the world and have not been
predestined”.28 This formula was often repeated.
tHeory anD PraCtiCe:
tHeoLogy anD sPirituaLity
In many fields a difference can be seen between pure theory on
the one hand, and practice on the other, and between what I might
23 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, # 623. The council,
and other sources which I quote, also affirmed that God foreknows who will
be saved and who will be damned.
24 ibid., # 621.
25 ibid., # 629, 626.
26 ibid., # 685.
27 ibid..
28 Hypomnesticon, 6 6 8; PL, 45,1662; quoted in Farrelly, Predestination,
p. 99.
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call theoreticians and practitioners or clinicians. Theoreticians tend
to stand back from particular people and events, and to be interested
in general principles or theories – the Copernican theory is a classic
example of a theory – whereas practitioners deal with particular cases.
Some theoreticians deny free will, while others do not actually deny
it but they treat it as an anomaly and play down its importance. For
practitioners, on the other hand, it is of fundamental importance
and they insist on its importance. For example, as we shall see, many
theoretical psychologists deny free will, while clinicians assume that
their clients have made, or have to make, free choices.
In the field of the Christian religion, the theoreticians are the theologians, who seek to understand the truths which have been revealed to
us, while the practitioners are involved in what is called spirituality,
which is about how a Christian should live. In recent years, in a typical Catholic seminary or house of studies theologians gave lectures in
classrooms and it was all general and somewhat impersonal, whereas
other priests, whose business was spirituality and whom I will call
“spirituals”, gave talks in the chapel and had personal counselling
sessions with individual students. Often there were two libraries, an
academic library and a “spiritual” library. Each of these streams has a
long history and a vast literature.
Theologians tended to work out grand speculative visions of God,
human beings and the universe. As they did so they sometimes felt
that to see reality truly one should see that there is God and almost
nothing else; they were inclined to see us, when included in the same
vision as God, as wispy mites, tenuously existing and powerless; they
felt that we could not possibly be determining the course of the history of God’s creation and that God cannot be waiting to see what
we decide to do; and so they affirmed that God is in total control
of all that happens. In Catholic theological institutions, they could
not deny free-will, but they tended to play it down and to reduce
human responsibility. In direct contrast, spirituals generally had and
have the person with his or her free will in the centre of their field
of vision, and they emphasise him or her. For example, Pelagius,
Coelestinus and Cassian were spirituals, whereas their opponents
were theologians.
CHaPter 8
tHe MiDDLe ages
anD Later sCHoLastiCisM
Around the year 1100, after the Dark Ages, people began again
to discuss religious problems in what we would call a rational way,
which included defining their terms and arguing logically. The Middle Ages had begun. The theological and philosophical thought of
that time is called “scholasticism”, since it began in certain schools.
The modern equivalent of this name would probably be “academicism”. It reached a high point in the thirteenth century, after which it
went into a decline, came to be despised by many intelligent people,
and eventually almost disappeared. There was a revival, called Second
Scholasticism, between about 1500 and 1650. There was another
revival between about 1880 and 1960: this was the time of NeoScholasticism. In discussing this thought I shall sometimes quote
neo-scholastic authors.1
tHe sCHoLastiC iDea of goD anD
tHe iDea tHat goD Has suPreMe DoMinion oVer
tHe uniVerse or Prior ControL of aLL eVents
In their speculations, in which they searched for an understanding
of their beliefs, the scholastics did not have, in the forefront of their
minds, the idea of God which emerges from the Bible but rather a
philosophical idea of the Supreme Being, who differs from creatures
in many ways: he is necessary whereas we are contingent; he is infinite in all perfections whereas we are finite; he is omnipotent and
omniscient whereas our power and our knowledge are limited; he is
eternal whereas we exist in time; in Aristotelian language, he is pure
act whereas we are composites of act and potency, so that there is no
passivity or receptivity in him whereas we are both active and passive;
he is the primary cause of all activity, whereas we are never more than
1 I give a short history of scholasticism in Personalism and Scholasticism, pp.
27-46.
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secondary causes; and he is infinitely and purely happy whereas we
have both joy and sorrow in our lives.
Understandably, this led scholastics to maintain that God has
complete control over the universe, or that everything that happens
in it is in his design and was specifically willed by him prior to its actual occurrence. For instance, Thomas Aquinas asked whether God’s
will is always done, and replied yes, necessarily it is always done and
nothing can prevent its being done.2 A Thomist, Sertillanges (18631948), said:
In order to have a right idea of Providence, we must know whether
God’s will is always obeyed. We give an affirmative answer to this
question, because God is the cause of universal being, and all being must obey his law. A cause infallibly attains its effect unless
impeded by something which is not subject to it. Since God is the
cause of all things, nothing can escape his causality, and therefore
nothing can impede the complete realisation of his effects.
His idea was that if I aim and fire an arrow which a gust of wind
causes to miss the target, this is because while I have control of the
bow and arrow I do not have control of the air; but God controls
everything and so never misses. This was taken to mean that he controls all events. Sertillanges put that in these terms:
Since nothing can be contrary to, or impede, God, his action always attains its end. Everything which he created is according to
his pre-established plan, which includes even contingencies [seemingly chance events] and free acts.3
Since I defined a random event as one which does not happen by a
natural necessity and which no one decides, Sertillanges means that
there is no chance in the universe and that if two people toss a coin
to decide something, God decides how it comes down.
It was believed that God is omnipotent, or that there is no limit
to what he can bring about. It was, however, also believed that God’s
power is “limited” to what is intrinsically possible. He could not
cause a square circle to appear on a piece of paper, and he could not
2 “Necesse est voluntatem Dei semper impleri” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Thelogica, 1 19 6).
3 Sertillanges, Foundations of Thomistic Philosophy, p. 148.
8 1 The Middle Age & Later Scholasticism
99
make the impossible house about which I talked earlier.4 This is not
a real limitation, any more than the architect’s inability to make the
house was a limitation in him.
tHat goD WiLLs eVerytHing at onCe
or is “outsiDe tiMe”
The Biblical authors seem to have assumed that, like us, God is
“in time”, so that what for human beings had happened in the past
was a past event for him; what for human beings was happening in
the present was also happening in the present for him; and what for
human beings had not happened yet but was going to happen was
in the future for him, too. In this scheme of things, God did certain
things last year, is doing things now, and will do other things next
year. Their idea of God’s eternity was that he always was, is now, and
always will be. The medievals maintained that God does not work in
that way. He does not, for instance, decide in January what is going
to happen in February and then in February decide what is going to
happen in March, and so on. Instead, in a single act he decrees all the
events that happen in the universe, from its first moment to its last,
gathering them together into one object of his decision to create.
What this means can be explained by means of an analogy. Suppose that the head of a theatre company decides that next year the
company will put on a certain play which has been written by a playwright who is a member of the company. He knows that the production will involve many activities, which will go on for months,
and that in the play itself events will follow on in time from one to
another, but when he makes the single decision, “We’ll do Harold’s
new play next year”, he is outside the time-frame of the play. The
events in it, which are past, present or future with respect to each
other, are not past or future for him. As I said, Boethius said that God
is “outside time”,5 meaning the time-frame of the universe.
tHe ProbLeM of eViL: goD anD tHe Past
For thinkers who say that everything that happens in the universe
is previously willed by God, evil is obviously a problem, to which
many of them have found a solution in the thought that God wills
4 See above, p. 21.
5 See above, p. 94.
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the universe with its entire history as a whole. They say that if we
find a particular event offensive, this is because we have not seen, or
have lost sight of, the universe as a whole. If a man looks for a moment into a room where his student children are watching a video
of Othello and next morning says to them: “What was that dreadful
racist show you were watching last night, which showed a black man
strangling a white woman on a bed?”, they can answer: “It wasn’t racist and it wasn’t dreadful, it was one of the world’s greatest tragedies,
as you would know if you had seen it all”; and if we are offended by
anything we see, we are like that man. Dante is said to have shown
that “all temporal events, however haphazard they may seem and
however tragic they may be, are vital links in the golden chain of
history stretching from the creation to the Last Judgement”.6 In early seventeenth-century Spain Alphonsus Rodriguez (not the saint)
published a “Treatise on Conformity to the Will of God” which became a classic of spirituality and was read by thousands of novices
in religious orders (one of whom was me); he said that of everything
that happens we should say, “It is God’s will” and accept it. In the
twentieth century Sertillanges, whom I quoted above, said that the
more all-embracing our view of reality is, the less evil we see,7 implying that if our view were utterly all-embracing we would see no evil
at all, and Garrigou-Lagrange said that nothing happens which does
not contribute to the end which God purposed in creating.8
Therefore we do not ask God to cause the Crucifixion, World War
II or the Holocaust not to have happened, and if someone had an
unhappy childhood, he or she does not ask God to cause it to have
been different. This is because the fact that these things happened
shows us that they were elements of the universe which, prior to the
existence of any creatures, God decided to create, and it would not
make sense to ask him to change his mind about it.
free WiLL affirMeD
Medieval thinkers and later scholastics maintained that God necessarily exists and has the divine attributes, so that he cannot cease
6 Patrides, The Grand Design of God, II,50.
7 Sertillanges, Le problème du mal, II,50.
8 Garrigou-Lagrange, Providence, pp. 216-217.
8 1 The Middle Age & Later Scholasticism
101
to exist or change his nature. At one point Thomas seems to have
said that God loves himself both freely and necessarily. There has
been discussion of this but it best to disregard it, as it was an aberration.9 They also maintained that creatures do not necessarily exist,
that God could have chosen not to create and hence that God’s decision to create was free. They also maintained that it would have been
impossible for God to act towards creatures in a way that would have
been unnatural for him, but this left him with many possibilities and
his various actions regarding creatures were or are free.
They also maintained that human beings have free will. Thomas
Aquinas, for instance, said that wherever there is intellect, there is
free will,10 that man has free will11 and that we can will or not will,
act or not act, will this or that.12 Thomas and later scholastics did
say that we necessarily will happiness and are able to choose only
between what they called “particular goods”.
9 Thomas Aquinas said that the freedom of the will is opposed to violence
and force (“Libertas enim voluntatis violentiae vel coactioni opponitur”),
and that because God is not forced to love himself he does so freely, though
necessarily (“Sic autem et Deus sua voluntate libere amat seipsum, licet de
necessitate amet seipsum”). He also said that the human will desires happiness both freely and necessarily (“Unde voluntas libere appetit felicitatem,
licet necessario appetit illum”). These quotations are from De Potentia, 10
2 ad 5. This seems to have been been an anticipation of compatibilism: see
below, p. 165.
10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1 59 3 c.
11 ibid., 1 83 1.
12 ibid., 1-2 13 6.
CHaPter 9
During anD after tHe reforMation
Protestants
froM LutHer to tHe nineteentH Century
The Reformers believed that far too much was being made of
works – of penitential works by which people obtained remission of
punishment, of almsgiving by which people obtained merit or a right
to reward, and other actions – and they set out to emphasise as Paul
had done that salvation is a gift of God. They generally maintained
that human beings had had free will before the Fall and that Adam’s
sin had brought just punishment on him and his descendants. Milton (1608-1674), who was a Puritan, expressed orthodox Protestant
teaching when in Paradise Lost the angel tells Adam that God had
made him good, but “mutable”, that is, not fixed in goodness, and
that Adam had had free will:
God made thee perfect, not immutable,
And good he made thee, but to persevere
He left it in thy power; ordained thy will
By nature free, not over-ruled by fate
Inextricable, or strict necessity.1
However, Luther (1483-1546) maintained that fallen man is incapable of doing good. This was one of the theses which he nailed
to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in 1517. Erasmus
(1466-1526), a Catholic, wrote a book defending free will, which he
defined as “the power of the human will by virtue of which a man
can apply himself to those things which lead to his eternal salvation,
or turn away from them”.2 Luther replied to Erasmus in De Servo
1 Milton, Paradise Lost, 5, lines 524-528.
2 “Liberum arbitrium hoc loco sentimus vim humanae voluntatis, qua se
possit homo applicare ad ea quae perducunt ad aeternam salutem, aut ab
iisdem avertere” (Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio, I,10).
9 1 During & after the Reformation
103
Arbitrio or The Bondage of the Will (1525), in which he used an argument from divine foreknowledge which, if it is valid, proves that
human beings never have free will in any circumstances.
Luther’s disciples did not follow him in his denial of free will.
When Melanchthon composed a statement of Lutheran beliefs, he
omitted any mention of predestination and he omitted the denial
of free will: this became the Confession of Augsburg (1530, that is,
only five years after the publication of Luther’s The Bondage of the
Will), the primary statement of Lutheran beliefs. Fifty years later, after Lutherans had become divided, they were reunited and agreed on
another statement of beliefs, The Formula of Concord (1577), which
was intended to be an explanation of the Confession of Augsburg.
In effect, it affirmed free will and said that if men are damned it
is through their own fault. This teaching became part of Lutheran
orthodoxy. Lutheranism became the chief form of Protestantism in
Germany and Scandanavia, and in those parts of the world that were
settled by German and Scandanavian Lutherans; this section of the
Protestant world believed in free will, in spite of the thesis which
Luther nailed to the door.
The other great Reformer, Calvin (1509-1564), denied free will
and so did his followers. He severely criticised the Greek Fathers
who, he said, had got the false idea of free will from pagan philosophy, and made it part of their theological vision.3 He took the
theory further than Luther had done, and the doctrine which was
taught in his name was antecedent unconditional selective predestination, or that God predestines some to do good, gives them irresistible grace under the influence of which they do it and go to heaven,
while he predestines others to do evil and go to hell, and in making
this choice he takes no account of what people have done, are going
to do, or would do. Robert Burns wrote a poem about a man who
believes this and prays:
O Thou, who in the heavens dost dwell,
Who, as it pleases best Thysel’,
3 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 2, chaps 2, 5. It has been
said that Calvin was a practical man rather than a scholar; as such, he tended to adopt oversimplified or extreme positions, which could be stated in a
few words (see Compier, John Calvin’s Rhetorical Doctrine of Sin).
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
104
Sends one to heaven and ten to hell
All for Thy glory,
And not for any good or ill
They’ve done before Thee!4
The denial of free will became an integral part of Calvinism. Understandably, there were doubters, and for centuries Calvinist homes
resounded to arguments between, on one side, orthodox believers
and, on the other side, backsliders who found predestination hard to
swallow or who drew from it the conclusion that there is no point in
making any effort to be good since our salvation depends uniquely
on whether God selects us, and we cannot influence his choice. The
arguments were so complex and interminable that Milton, who evidently had heard more of them than he could stand, made engaging
in them one of the pains of hell, where the devils
reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.5
The Calvinist or anti-free-will churches are (or were) the Huguenots
in France, the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland, South Africa
and parts of America, and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland,
Northern Ireland and other English-speaking countries.
In Holland, Jacob Harmensz (1560-1609), who took the Latin
name Arminius and was a Calvinist professor of theology at Leyden,
maintained that individuals are not predestined in a Calvinist sense,
and that they are able to accept or to reject divine grace. That is, he
affirmed free will. In 1610, the year after his death, a group of his
followers publicly affirmed free will in a Great Remonstrance. The
Dutch Reformed Church was committed to strict Calvinism and in
1619 the Synod of Dort condemned this teaching and in Calvinist
churches from then on belief in free will was a heresy which had a
name, Arminianism.
In England, after the Reformation the Church of England had
within it both Catholic or high church, and Protestant or evangeli4 Robert Burns, “Holy Willie’s Prayer” in modern spelling.
5 Milton, Paradise Lost, 2, lines 558-561.
9 1 During & after the Reformation
105
cal, elements, as it has now. High-church Anglicans emphasised sacraments and ritual; the evangelicals emphasised reading the Bible and
preaching. Some evangelicals, influenced by Calvin, separated from
the main body of the church and formed non-conformist churches
or groups, such as the Puritans; these had a minimum of ritual and
a maximum of preaching. Others remained in the Church of England, though they had more in common with the non-conformists
than with the “high church” wing of their own church. They did
away with most vestments and ritual and, like the non-conformists,
they put the pulpit in the centre of the church. When, in the time
of Charles I, the “high church” Archbishop of Canterbury, William
Laud (1573-1645), endeavoured to impose “high church” practices
on all England and Scotland (he made the wearing of the surplice
obligatory and ordered that the communion table, not the pulpit,
be in the centre), the Puritans in England and the Presbyterians in
Scotland were furious and in the end it cost him his life – in general,
during the civil war “high churchmen” supported the king whereas
Puritans sided with Parliament, so that Laud was seen as an enemy
by Parliament, which impeached, tried and executed him. Laud’s
personal creed included not only a belief in the value of ritual but a
belief in free will – in books on the subject he is said to have been an
Arminian – and in general the “high church” wing of the Church believes in free will. John Wesley (1701-91), the Anglican who founded
what became the Methodist Church, believed in free will and so,
generally speaking, did his followers.
In what is now the United States, the early Dutch immigrants
were Calvinists, and the church which they established in Chicago
and elsewhere was and has remained Calvinist. The first English settlers were Puritans who believed in divine election, not free will, but
later English colonists, who had come via Holland, were Arminians
and enjoyed the harmony between their belief in free will and their
delight in the freedom of the New World. Other English colonists
were Methodists, whose belief in free will was one of the reasons
why Methodism quickly became a major American denomination.
The German immigrants were either Lutherans or Catholics and the
Scandanavians were Lutherans: all of these believed in free will. In
the course of the nineteenth century various “evangelical” preachers
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
told people that the end of the world was near, that they should read
the Bible and that they should not drink or gamble; their followers formed churches or quasi-churches which today have millions of
members. They believe very strongly in free will and tell anyone who
will listen that he or she must freely accept the Lord Jesus as Saviour.
The fact seems to be that in the course of the nineteenth century
belief in free will became almost universal in American Protestantism.6
Post-reforMation CatHoLiCs
to tHe seVenteetH Century
tHe affirMation of free WiLL
When Luther nailed his theses to the door in 1517, the Catholic
Church reacted and in 1520 Pope Leo X condemned forty-one “errors” of Luther, one of which was his denial of free will.7 As I said, a
few years later, Erasmus wrote De Libero Arbitrio and other Catholics
wrote defences of free will. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), who was a
“spiritual” rather than a theologian and who wrote “Rules for Thinking with the Church” shortly after this, while he did not exactly deny
predestination, said that “we ought not to emphasise the doctrine
that would destroy free will” (that shows what he thought of it). If
we cannot avoid talking about predestination, he said, we should
proceed cautiously, because if people get the idea that their salvation
or damnation has already been determined they may neglect good
works.8 Naturally, his followers emphasised free will, as I am doing
in this book.
The Council of Trent (1545-1563) took a stand for free will, covering all possible cases. It said that the Fall did not result in a loss of free
6 In a book about evangelicals in the United States in 1989, Randall Balmer
says that what he calls Arminian or Wesleyan belief in free will, in salvation
depending on a person’s choice, caught on among evangelicals in the nineteenth century and long ago eclipsed Calvinism in American Protestantism
(Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, pp. 201-203).
7 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion, # 1486.
8 Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, ## 366-369.
9 1 During & after the Reformation
107
will,9 that free will was not “extinct” in the Old Testament Jews,10
and that divine grace is not irresistible:11 that is, both without grace
and with it we have free will. It thus became heretical for a Catholic to deny free will, as it was heretical for a member of a Calvinist
church to affirm it.
At the same time, Catholic theologians held that God chooses
those who are saved and that besides giving to all the capacity to act
well he gives actual good acts to some. They held that while to some
people God gives merely sufficient grace, to others he gives efficacious grace. They ruled out the idea that God gives the same grace
to all, that some co-operate with it so that the graces which they
receive turn out to be efficacious, whereas others do not co-operate
so that their graces, though sufficient, turn out to be ineffective or
inefficacious. No, they said, to people who perform good acts God
gives grace which is antecedently efficacious (in actu primo efficax): that
is, these two kinds of grace are different before persons make their
choices. It was, of course, very difficult to square these ideas with free
will, and most people did not try. They thought and talked about the
mystery of God’s choice, and about how we owe everything to God,
when it seemed appropriate to do so; they thought and talked about
free will and human responsibility when it seemed appropriate to do
that; they supposed that these ideas must somehow be reconciliable
because (they believed) both are true; and they left it at that.
One man who tackled the problem was Michel de Bay, who said
that if a person does something with his will, it is an exercise of free
will, even if he wills and does it necessarily. The Church did not accept this and in 1567 Pius V declared that de Bay’s statement, “What
is done voluntarily, even if it is done necessarily, is done freely”, is
wrong.12
9 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion, # 1555.
10 ibid., # 1521.
11 ibid., # 1154.
12 ibid. # 1939. This seems to have been an anticipation of compatibilism: see below, p. 165.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
108
bañez anD MoLina
In Spain, the Dominican Domingo Bañez (1528-1604), who was
the confessor and a supporter of Teresa of Avila, proposed a theory
which, he believed, solved the problem and was in accord with the
teaching of Thomas Aquinas. He maintained that no one in any state
can make any act of the will without first receiving an impulse from
God. When a person considers alternatives, Bañez went on, he does
not receive an indeterminate impulse which would enable him to
do any of them; on the contrary, he receives an impulse which is
directed towards only one of them, and on receiving this impulse
he “infallibly” chooses that alternative. And, said Bañez, who held
that God cannot receive information, God knows the decisions of
his creatures because he knows the impulses which he decides to give
to them. Clearly, according to this theory a person who has received
the required impulse and is on the point of making his choice does
not face alternatives all of which are possible for him as he is at that
moment. How, then, can he be said to have free will? Some of Bañez’
followers replied that God creates not only acts but the manner in
which they are performed, and they said that God makes human
beings do particular things freely. Others replied by denying what I
have been saying all along, that free will requires multiple possibility
before a decision is made; they said that it consists in this, that while
a person is acting he could by virtue of his nature be doing something
else instead. Referring to Molinism, to which we will come in a moment, Aelred Whitacre wrote in 1928:
For the Thomist the whole essence of free will consists precisely in
this that while willing this, I have the power to will that; whereas
for the Molinist the essence of free will consists in the power to
act or not to act, to do this or that, etc., before the act, not during
the act. Neither Molina nor any of his followers, apparently, can
see that the perfection of free will is the state of the will in act and
not before it is in act.13
Another theory was proposed by the Jesuit Luis Molina (15351600) in Concordia and it came to be called Molinism.14 I said earlier
13 Whitacre, “Grace and Free Will”, pp. 544-545. Concerning his use of
the word “Thomist”, see below, p. 112.
14 Molinism is named after Molina, not Molinos (about whom see above,
9 1 During & after the Reformation
109
that scholastic philosopher-theologians affirmed that prior to God’s
decision about creation there is in him the knowledge of all possible
finite beings, as possible, and with the decision comes the knowledge
of all actually existing beings, as actual. Molina added a third phase,
affirming that prior to his decree of creation God knows, first, what
every possible human being would be able to choose in every situation
he or she could possibly be in; that is, he knows every possible choice
of every possible human being. He knows, second, which of these
possible actions any human being, if he or she were to be given actual existence, would choose. In the light of this knowledge he decides
to create a particular universe and so knows, third, all that human
beings actually choose. He called the second kind of knowledge scientia media, because it comes between knowledge of possibles and
knowledge of actuals; he called its object the “futurible”, which lies
between a possible act and an actual act.15 To understand Molina it
is necessary to hold back the objections which one wants to make at
this point and to let Molina continue. If I may talk in this way for
the sake of clarity, Molina said that God knew that if he were to create a universe with certain people in a certain initial situation, they
would do this or that, a new situation would arise from their actions,
the people in it would do whatever they would do, producing another situation, and so on until the end of time; whereas if he were
to create a universe with different initial people or a different initial
situation they would do other things, different subsequent situations
would arise, and so on until the end of time; and so on for a million
universes, each with its own history.16 He also knew that if in any of
p. 37).
15 It is sometimes said that the object of scientia media is what free beings
would do in situations which have not arisen and will not arise: for instance,
it is knowledge of what I would have decided to buy if a month ago someone had given me fifty dollars, saying, “Buy yourself a present with this”.
When the fact that this did not happen is included, it is not the object of
scientia media, which is prior to the decree of creation so that in it there is
no distinction between the futuribles which will become actuals and those
which will not.
16 Lonergan says that “quite apart from any divine decision, God knows
exactly what every free being would choose in each successive set of circumstances contained in each possible world order” (Insight, p. 662).
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
these universes he were to intervene in this or that way, people would
do this or that instead of what they would otherwise have done,
and the history of that universe would take a different course; and
he knew what that course would be. Then God chose a particular
universe with its whole history from beginning to end, including his
own interventions, and said: Let it exist. In making that decision he
came to know our universe and its entire history as actual, and he
came to know that none of the other possible universes would ever
be actual.
In 1974, in The Nature of Necessity, Alvin Plantinga maintained
that, prior to the decree of creation, God knows what every human
being would do in every possible situation. This, of course, was Molina’s theory of scientia media, as was pointed out to him, and “middle
knowledge” became the subject of a controversy of a kind which
some philosophers enjoy. In the course of it, Molina’s Concordia was
republished.
Let me return to an example which I gave earlier, of an author
and actors at the rehearsal of a play. The Banezian God is like a playwright who, if he wants a girl’s father to have a change of heart in
Act III and consent to her marriage with an Asian, simply writes that
the father gives his consent and when the play is performed that happens. Actors performing a play written in this manner are likely to
feel at critical moments that their actions do not flow naturally from
themselves as the characters they are playing but were decreed by
the author for reasons of plot. The Molinist God is like a playwright
who, writing a similar play and wanting that ending, pictures the
father in his mind and watches him to see what he would do. If he
finds that, as the play is now, the father would not change his mind,
he considers the actor’s suggestion that the father was helped by an
Asian doctor in Act I. In his mind’s eye he sees the father remembering that incident and consenting to the marriage, he puts the
incident in and so the play goes. In this play, the actors feel that their
actions flow from them, and miraculously fit together to make a plot.
According to Molina, God gives a person not a prior but a simultaneous impulse, or a prior impulse which is indeterminate: either
way, they said that when a human being is considering a decision,
God does not push him or her towards either of the alternatives be-
9 1 During & after the Reformation
111
fore him or her. But, they said, the human being makes the decision
which God knew would be made if he were to create this universe:
hence when he decided to make this universe, before this act actually
occurs, God willed it. The Molinists also said that when God gives
to people the graces which they need to perform meritorious acts,
his graces are ontologically the same in all cases and they make good
acts possible, but not necessary; however, they said, God gives some
graces knowing that they will be refused, and hence the giving of a
grace is psychologically different for him depending on whether the
person co-operates or not – and it is psychologically different prior
to the person’s actual acceptance or refusal. In this way the Molinists
claimed to believe in antecedently efficacious grace.
I will later state my objections to this theory but I will say now
that it was clever. William Hasker says of it: “Any element of uncertainty or risk in God’s decision to create is eliminated entirely” and
“this theory attributes to God the maximum degree of providential
control which is possible short of strict theological determinism”,17
which of course is precisely what its purpose was.
In 1582, before Molina’s book appeared, a tremendous and disgracefully conducted theological fight broke out in Spain between
Jesuits and Dominicans, who called each other heretics and used
the pulpits of their churches for tirades against each other. When
Molina’s book appeared in 1588, the fighting became more intense.
In 1594 the Holy See forbade further discussion of the issue. For a
long time committees met in Rome but nothing was decided, then
in 1598 the word spread that Concordia was going to be condemned,
whereupon the Jesuits persuaded some monarchs to write saying that
this must not happen, and it didn’t. In 1599 the pope, who was more
inclined to condemn Molina than Bañez, decided to invite theologians from both sides to debate the issue in the presence of the Cardinal Prefect of the Inquisition. Between 1602 and 1605 a Congregatio
de auxiliis, or committee to discuss grace, met sixty-eight times but
reached no decision. In 1605 the pope died. In 1607, by which time
Bañez and Molina were both dead, Pope Paul V declared that neither
of the opposing views was heretical, which meant that Jesuits and
Dominicans had to stop calling each other heretics in public. That is,
17 Hasker, “A Refutation of Middle Knowledge”, p. 546.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
the pope opted for what would now be called theological pluralism
within the Catholic Church.18
jansenisM
Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) was a Catholic bishop whose book
Augustinus, published after his death, became the basic book of a
group of Catholics who came to be known as Jansenists. Like Thomas Aquinas at one stage and like Michel de Bay, Jansen said that
the word “free” applied to a human act means “performed without
coercion”. His theory of the working of grace was that the human
will necessarily (and, because no coercion is involved, freely) opts
for whatever seems to offer it the most delight. To human beings
without grace, he said, vice seems to offer more delight than virtue,
and so without grace people necessarily sin – but their acts are free
and they can be punished. Grace, however, makes virtue seem to
promise more delight than sin, and hence a person with grace necessarily (and freely) opts for goodness. The Church rejected the basis
of this theory.
CatHoLiC tHougHt
in tHe nineteentH anD tWentietH Centuries
In the revival of scholastic philosophy and theology in the nineteenth century, Dominican scholars, influenced by John of St Thomas
and other Second Scholastics, proposed the theory of Bañez, which
they said was an integral element of Thomism. Jesuit neo-scholastics
proposed Molinism and, refusing to accept the view that it had been
the view of Thomas Aquinas, they insisted on calling the Dominican
theory “Banezianism”. For the most part the Dominicans and the Jesuits went their separate ways in their separate colleges, all affirming
that human beings have free will and also that God has control over
all that happens (whether their theories were consistent within themselves is another question). Vatican I reaffirmed the teaching of Trent
that even with grace we have free will,19 and just as earlier Catholic
scholars had defended free will when it was denied by Protestants, so
18 For a detailed history of this dispute see Brodrick, Robert Bellarmine,
chap. 1; Pastor, The History of the Popes, vol. 24, chap. 9, pp. 281-366; and
Farrelly, Predestination.
19 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion, # 3010.
9 1 During & after the Reformation
113
nineteenth and twentieth-century Catholics defended it vigorously
when it was denied by scientists and scientifically-minded philosophers. At the same time, and without inconsistency,20 the Catholic
Church opposed civic freedom of religion and other civil liberties
and put considerable restrictions on clerics and religious.
I feel I should say that in the Catholic Church there has been a
great change with respect to freedom. Vatican II said: “It is one of the
major tenets of Catholic doctrine that man’s response to God in faith
must be free”,21 and it concluded that there should be civic freedom
of religion. In the same document it said, stating a general principle,
that “God has regard for the dignity of the human person whom he
himself created; man is to be guided by his own judgement and he
is to enjoy freedom”.22 The Catholic Church has become a defender
of civil liberties and far more insistent than it used to be that people
must be free to marry whom they choose, to become priests or religious or not as they choose, and to have scope for the exercise of
personal responsibility.
Later Protestants
I am reliably informed that churches in the Calvinist tradition
made statements of belief, and official interpretations of these, which,
while they did not include forthright assertions of free will, allowed
their members to believe in it. As I said earlier, in the nineteenth
century belief in human free will became almost universal among
Protestants in the United States, and as almost everywhere there was
increasing stress on freedom of countries, and of individuals within
countries, this development was not limited to the United States.
Karl Barth, for instance, at least implicitly affirmed free will. It is no
longer a matter on which Catholics and Calvinistic Protestants are
clearly opposed to one another, as they used to be.
20 See above, p. 41.
21 Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae, # 9.
22 ibid., # 11.
CHaPter 10
CritiCisM of Positions
tHe outrigHt DeniaL, by CHristians,
of HuMan free WiLL
Some authors (including one whom I have just quoted) talk of
theological determinism, as though determinism has two forms, one
theological and the other scientific. However, determinists argue
from reason or science and completely deny free will, whereas predestinationists argue on theological grounds and deny only human
free will (they affirm that God has free will), so that it is misleading
to talk as if predestinationism and scientific determinism were two
forms of the one system. Therefore, avoiding the term “theological
determinism”, I shall deal with predestinationism here, and with determinism in Part Three.
Predestinationists adopt uncomplicated views of God’s supreme
dominion, predestination, divine choice and foreknowledge. They
must, however, face the philosophical objections which I shall make
against determinism, and there are also theological difficulties which
I shall state here.
First, if I do not have free will, with respect to past deeds I can
claim no credit for any good I have done and must say that all the
credit belongs to God; but, also, I need accept no blame for past
misdeeds and hence should feel no personal guilt or need of repentance. With respect to the future, if I have no free will I can in no way
choose or affect my own behaviour: if God so wills, I shall act well;
if God wills otherwise, I shall act badly. Can I, by prayer, influence
God’s decision? I am not free to pray or not pray: I shall pray if God
decides that I am to pray, and not pray if he decides otherwise. What
I am going to do, then, does not depend on me at all. It is surely
impossible to live and act on this basis, and Christians who deny free
will either strive mightily to avoid these logical conclusions or else
conveniently put their disbelief in free will aside whenever they think
10 1 Criticism of Positions
115
about their own actions and whenever they are exhorting others to
act well.
Second, morality and love suppose free will. As Daniel Day Williams says,
If love means willing the freedom of the other, then the possibility
of combining love with predestination or absolute determinism is
swept away. If God wills to love, and, above all, if he wills to be
loved he cannot determine the love of the other, even though it be
the determination of the creature by the creator.1
Third, if human beings do not have free will and are totally controlled by God, God is solely responsible for all the horrible crimes
which have ever been committed and for the hurts which are being
inflicted now. Some authors appeal to a Principle of Plenitude to
explain this. To be complete, they say, the universe needs to have all
kinds of human actions in it, and hence God provides crimes as well
as good deeds. Paul seems to argue along these lines when he says
that God is like a potter who makes ordinary pots as well as special
ones (Rom 9:21).2 This principle explains why it is in order for there
to be deeds with different degrees of goodness, but it does not justify
the existence of bad deeds: to use Paul’s analogy, it is reasonable for
a potter to make many ordinary (but good) pots and a few special
ones, but it would not be reasonable for him deliberately to make
some bad pots so that his output would have plenitude.
Fourth, there is the problem of persons in hell. Augustine’s idea at
one stage was that as a result of original sin people cannot help sinning and they all go to hell unless God gives them grace; and God
gives grace to some, he said, all of whom turn to him and are saved,
while he lets others continue on their way to hell. There is no injustice in this, he said, since God has no obligation to save mankind
from the consequences of its own wrongdoing. Well, first, even if we
grant that this is reasonable on the supposition that before the Fall
mankind had free will and could exercise it independently, it is not
reasonable if with Calvin it is maintained that “God not only foresaw
the fall of the first man, and thereby the ruin of all his posterity, but
1 Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love, pp. 126-127.
2 See above, p. 85.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
he also willed it”.3 Second, it sounds reasonable if one talks about
“mankind” and “its” sin; but it means that particular persons go to
hell through no fault of their own, or through sins which they could
not stop themselves from committing, which is intolerable. Some
authors have actually said that as creation exists in order to manifest
God’s attributes, and without souls in hell there would be no manifestation of his justice, therefore there have to be souls in hell and
God wills this. This is profoundly shocking. In the light of all this
it is understandable that contemporary thinkers who deny or play
down free will tend to believe in universal salvation, but this has its
own problems: it is hardly in accord with the Bible and Christian
tradition to say that it is absolutely certain that all human beings will
be saved; and if in the end no one can refuse God, the option for him
is not an exercise of free will, for that requires multiple possibility,
but it is a Christian truth that the option for God is free.
tHe iDea tHat eVerytHing tHat HaPPens
Must HaVe been
sPeCifiCaLLy anD PreViousLy WiLLeD by goD:
tHat is, tHat goD Has CoMPLete Prior ControL
of HuMan beings
The medieval scholastics affirmed free will, the Second Scholastics
affirmed it against Luther and Calvin, and the Neo-Scholastics affirmed it against determinists. Also, the Catholic and other churches
maintained and maintain that human beings have free will. They
strove mightily to reconcile this with belief in divine total control,
but (I maintain) they succeeded in so far as they considered only the
indeterminacy of free will. Let me put it in this way: the author of a
realistic novel cannot write that someone flew from London to Sydney in three hours in 1995, because that was not possible; but if he
writes about a man whose son was arrested in 1995 and sent to gaol,
he can write either that the man gave what support he could to his
son during the trial and the time in prison or that he refused to have
anything to do with him, because both these actions were possible
for a father in that situation at that time. Whatever the author decides, anyone reading the story reads that the father makes the deci3 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chap. 23, # 7.
10 1 Criticism of Positions
117
sion, but actually it was made by the author. That the fictitious father
has free will means that his decisions are not predetermined; it does
not mean that decisions originate with him. In the Thomist scheme,
God is like an author and the fact that we have free will means that
in certain situations he can move a human being to move in either of
two ways without introducing into the universe anything contrary to
its laws. What is missing from this picture is responsibility. If what I
did, am doing and will do was decided by God prior to my existence,
then ultimately he is responsible for it, but the scholastics did not
sufficiently consider that. I will say again that the word “responsibility” was not in their vocabulary: it was coined in the seventeenth
century and its present sense is more recent still.4
I have said that in the “total prior control” theory God is analogous
to the writer of a play, who decides in advance what his characters do.
The fault in this analogy is that the characters in a play are not actual
persons, who can make decisions. Maritain said: “The divine plan
is not a scenario prepared in advance, in which free subjects would
play parts and act as performers. We must purge ourselves of any idea
of a play written in advance”. He went on to say: “On the contrary,
everything is improvised”.5
Also, it is true that if a good engineer designs and makes a machine,
everything that happens in it should have been specifically and previously intended by him, but dominion over persons is not like control
of things and even a perfect ruler does not have that kind of control
of the people under him. If some people disobey him, this does not
of itself mean that he is weak or ineffectual. It only means that his
subjects have free will. Consequently, it does not follow that because
God has perfect dominion over his creatures, his will is always done.
Moreover, someone who has perfect dominion over persons does not
plan all their actions in advance – for instance, an ideal headmaster
does not, even in his own mind, plan every lesson which is to be
given by every teacher in his school. He does not even plan the lessons to be given in what used to be his own subject. He expects the
teachers to plan the courses themselves. This is the kind of dominion
which ought to be attributed to God.
4 See above, p. 47.
5 Maritain, Existence and the Existent, pp. 122-123.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
Moreover, if the prior-control theory is true, whenever I do something I can be sure, after I have done it, that it was precisely what
God wanted to happen, and he knows I did it only because he decided that I would do it. I can know that my action, whatever it was,
was an element of the universe which God wills as a whole and in
all its details. I can take this into consideration before I make my
choice and proceed on the supposition that whatever I do it will be
the right thing. If I have a difficult decision to make, I can spare myself the strain of pondering, consulting and agonising over possible
consequences; I can decide at random, or according to the mood of
the moment, and be sure that whatever I do I will be able to say to
myself, once I have done it, that I have done God’s will. If I am a
bishop who has to appoint a parish priest, I can pick a name out of a
hat and go and play golf, knowing that God’s will was done, including by me when I took the name out of the hat and went to play golf.
A theory according to which I can do absolutely anything, and know
it was right, cannot be sound.
Furthermore, it is irrational to make a prayer of petition knowing
that what we are praying for is already determined. That is why we
never pray for the non-occurrence of past events.6 Now according
to the prior-control theory the past and the future were determined
by God at the same moment, prior to the existence of any creature
and hence prior to our prayers, and the future is as determined and
unalterable as the past. Therefore according to this theory prayers of
petition concerning the future are as irrational as prayers concerning
the past would be. Someone may say that we should ask for things
because, if we do, that will mean that before he created the universe
God saw our prayers, and his answers to them, in a possible universe
and was influenced by our prayers when he decided to create it. But
according to this theory God did not “see” us praying and was not
moved by us; he decided that we would say those prayers so that if
anyone influenced him, it was himself.
6 I have said that God cannot change the past (above, p. 100). If we pray
about things which have already been determined, but about which we do
not have information – for instance, if after a disaster in which people we
know might have died we pray that they may be among the survivors – surely we are telling God that we hope they have survived. We do not mean: “If
they have died, make it not have happened.”
10 1 Criticism of Positions
119
Finally, while there are in the Bible some passages which seem to
assume that God has total control of all events, this idea does not
emerge from the Bible when it is taken as a whole. He is constantly
issuing commands, and he is at times offended and angry when these
are disobeyed: this implies that he deals with us as with beings whose
behaviour he does not control.
tWo “reVerentiaL” iDeas
tHe iDea tHat goD CHooses tHose WHo are finaLLy
saVeD
If one is shown some bottles of wine, one does not make a choice if
one takes all of them, but only if one takes one or some of them and
leaves the rest; more generally, the object of a choice is always “some,
not all”. It follows that if whatever happens was meant by God to
happen, and if some of us are going to be saved while others are not,
then God means some of us, not all, to be saved and we can say that
he has chosen some human beings for salvation, and they should say:
“We are saved, and others are not, ultimately because God chose us
and not them”.
However, first, as I said, the clear meaning of various parables in
the synoptic gospels is that God does not select certain persons and
want only them to be saved, and he does not want only a limited
number or a certain proportion of human beings to be saved: he
wants all to be saved. Second, Paul said that God “desires everyone to
be saved” (1 Tim 2:4). Third, it seems to me to be impossible to live
in peace of mind with the idea that God may not have chosen other
people whom we love; and if we care about all human beings how
could we love a God who had decided not to choose some of them,
in consequence of which they would not be saved? Whatever may
be said in books about “the mystery of the divine predilection”, no
sensible Christian actually lives on the supposition that there is any
such thing. Finally, when people believe that their salvation depends
on whether or not God has chosen them, and not at all on their own
actions, some of them logically conclude that they have in the end
nothing to gain by being good and nothing to lose by being bad, and
so act as if it does not matter what they do. Others lead good lives in
order to be entitled to believe that they are among the chosen, thus
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
in practice making human behaviour the determining factor while
professing the doctrine that it is not.
However radical it may seem, then, let us entirely stop talking
about God “choosing” people for salvation and about the saved being those whom God has “chosen”. I hope that a further revision of
the Catholic liturgy will cut out petitions like this: “Save us from
final damnation and count us among those you have chosen”.
tHe iDea tHat CreDit Must be giVen to goD aLone
Thinkers who saw people proudly claiming credit for their virtuous deeds sometimes embraced the idea that all depends on God, so
that good people can claim no credit for anything they do. This implies that we should not only not claim any credit for ourselves, but
not give credit to other human beings, either, or ever thank them.
Need I say that this is unacceptable and that some credit is due to
human beings?
Also, if all credit belongs to God, so does blame. Theologians who
deny all credit to human beings have struggled mightily to avoid this
conclusion, but surely no one can say: “I have sinned because at the
time God did not give me the grace which was necessary to save me
from sin; because he gave me merely sufficient grace, not efficacious
grace; or because while he gave me the power to perform good acts
he did not give me actual good acts”. Nor can anyone say: “I do not
have faith because God has not given me the gift of faith”.
reVerenCe
Many intelligent and deeply religious persons have a strong feeling
of reverence which makes them predisposed to believe any doctrine
which puts God high and us low, and this reverence is the emotional
source of many of the ideas which I have just rejected. It is reverence which leads some people to find it unthinkable that human
beings should be able to stop God from getting his way, and hence
they say that when at a superficial level human beings seem to do
things against God’s will, at a deeper level they do exactly what God
planned and wants. Finally, reverence makes some persons feel that
God should not be asked to share credit with anyone else, and hence
a theory which deprives human beings of absolutely all credit for any
good they do seems right to them. In presenting their views, these
10 1 Criticism of Positions
121
persons argue from philosophical principles and a certain intellectual concept of God, but they are also emotionally attached to their
position and attacks on it seem to them to be not only intellectually
mistaken but also irreverent, or offensive to a religious sensibility.
It is perhaps futile to argue against a feeling. Reverence, however,
can be overdone. St Bernard (1090-1153) “broke through the traditional reverentia, the over-emphasis on the divine ‘self-sufficiency’,
which stood in the way of recognition and acceptance of a real mutuality in love between God and man”.7 John of the Cross said
that “the soul is made equal with God through love” and that “for
God to love the soul is for him to set it, after a certain manner, in
himself, making it equal to himself ”.8 Also, when reverence leads
to an extreme depreciation of human beings its soundness as a feeling is doubtful. It can spring from a lack of self-love, which causes
people to feel powerless and undeserving, and as it were gloatingly to
emphasise their own littleness; or it can be rooted in an excessive fear
of God, which makes a person want to set as great a gulf as possible
between God and creatures.
soMe isMs
9
PeLagianisM
In denying original sin entirely, in eliminating the drama of sin and
redemption, in saying that we have no deep need of Christ but that
his example is useful, and in seeing Christian life almost entirely in
moral and ascetical terms, Pelagius was a heretic. Moreover, he seems
to have underestimated the difficulty which many people often have,
and all people sometimes have, in making morally good choices, not
to speak of ascetically perfect ones. However, on many points he was
much closer than Augustine to what we now believe. For instance,
he said that infants who die without baptism go to heaven whereas
Augustine said that they go to hell, and he said that God treats us as
adults whereas Augustine compared Christians to babies. I believe
7 Burnaby, Amor Dei, p. 263.
8 John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, stanza 15, ## 4,5. Fearful of the
Inquisition, someone watered this down in the 1630 edition, which says “as
it were equal” instead of simply “equal”.
9 See above, p. 87.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
that he was also right in insisting on free will and in saying that God
makes no choice of persons prior to the decisions which human beings make. Let us not imagine that because Pelagius was a heretic
he was wrong on every point, or that anyone who agrees with him
about anything is a heretic. If Pelagianism is wrong, so is Ultra-antiPelagianism, which cannot be reconciled with free will and forces us
to choose between denying that God wills that all persons be saved
and affirming that everyone is necessarily saved.
seMiPeLagianisM10
Let me recall that whereas Pelagius said that we can do everything
without grace, and Augustine said that without grace we cannot do
anything right, the Semipelagians said that without grace we can
do a little something or not, as we choose, but no more. If we do it,
they said, God gives us the grace to do the rest and lead good lives;
if we do not do it, God does not give us his grace. Therefore whether
we are saved or not depends initially on us; but we cannot be saved
without God’s grace. They were wrong in saying that without God’s
grace we can do something towards attaining salvation, but I believe
that theirs was not the most distorted view of salvation which was
circulating at that time. Moreover, anyone who today talks of actions
and works ought not at once to be called a Semipelagian.
tHeoLogisM
In this matter of God and free will, at one extreme there is an
excessive “humanism”, which attributes too much to human beings
and either denies God’s existence, disregards him or attributes very
little to him. There exists, however, something which has been called
“theologism”, which is the opposite extreme and which attributes too
little to human beings and, indeed, too much to God. If Pelagianism
was a form of “humanism”, those who go to extremes in their opposition to it, or who instantaneously reject anything which seems
to them to smack of Pelagianism, propose a theologistic Ultra-antiPelagianism.
banezianisM (or tHoMisM) anD MoLinisM
The holders of Bañez’ theory multiplied subtle distinctions to answer objections that were made to it, but the main trouble was that
10 See above, p. 93.
10 1 Criticism of Positions
123
while they held the indeterminateness or “indifference” of human
nature which is one aspect of free will, they in effect denied human
responsibility which is its other and more important aspect. In this
system, every actual choice is made by God, so that the responsibility is his rather than the human being’s. In the end the free will and
responsibility are God’s, not ours.
The Molinists maintained in effect that God observes possible human beings in various situations and so knows what they would do
if he were to place them in those situations. The Banezians objected
to this that God cannot be an observer, passively receiving data, at
any stage. I do not regard this as a difficulty. The telling objection
to Molinism is that to be able to make decisions we have to be actually existing persons – possibles cannot make choices. Like categorical
statements about what free beings will do, statements about what
they would do if they were to be in this or that situation are neither
true nor false, so that there is no truth about such an event for God
to know in scientia media or “middle knowledge”.11
Also, if I am in a certain situation, about to make an important
decision, if it is true, and known to God, that if I were to be in
this situation (which I now am) I would (that is, I will) choose in a
particular way, it cannot be possible for me to choose the other alternative, since to do that would cause what was true and known to
God to have been false. Thus Molinism is incompatible with belief
in free will.
The Banezians and the Molinists all assumed complete divine control of events. It is impossible to reconcile this with belief in human
free will.
11 See above, p. 66.
CHaPter 11
tHe DiVine KnoWLeDge
anD My tHeory
tHe affirMation of foreKnoWLeDge
foreKnoWLeDge in tHe oLD testaMent
Thinking that the future can be known, the Old Testament writers
naturally believed that God knows it. Isaiah contrasted God, who
knows the future and reveals it accurately, with astrologers, who got
it wrong, and he said contemptuously:
Let those who study the heavens stand up and save you,
those who gaze at the stars, and at each new moon
predict what shall befall you (Isa 47:13).
In Isaiah, God says:
I am God, and there is no one like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done (Isa 46:9-10).
I declared them to you from long ago,
before they came to pass I announced them to you (Isa 48:5).
The Psalmist says:
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed (Ps 139:16).
The Book of Wisdom says that wisdom “knows the past, she forecasts the future”, and that “she has foreknowledge of signs and wonders” (Wis 8:8 NJB). In the Book of Daniel, Susanna cries: “Eternal
God, you know all secrets and everything before it happens” (Dan
13:42 NJB).
Besides these general statements there are actual cases of prediction. A certain Hazael, an official of the king of Aram, goes to the
prophet Elisha and on seeing him Elisha weeps “because”, he says
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
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to Hazael, “ I know what harm you will do to the Israelites: you
will burn their fortresses, put their picked warriors to the sword,
dash their little ones to pieces, disembowel their pregnant women”
(2 Kings 8:7-13). How does Elisha know this? He says to Hazael: “I
have seen you king of Aram” – and presumably the atrocities as well.
The book goes on to say that Hazael did in fact become king and
oppress the Israelites. In the Book of Daniel, Daniel sees in a vision
that the king of the north will consider conquering the king of the
south’s territory but will make a treaty with him and take away many
of the coastlands instead. However, a commander will put a stop to
him (Dan 11:17-18). This happens.
foreKnoWLeDge in tHe neW testaMent
I quoted earlier passages which show that it was believed that Jesus’
sufferings were ordained or destined, which meant that they were always going to happen and were predictable. Predictions were found,
especially in the psalms and in Isaiah, and in the story of the disciples
who went to Emmaus we read that “starting with Moses and going
through all the prophets, he [Jesus] explained to them the passages
that were about himself ” (Luke 24:27 NJB.) Later that day Jesus appeared to all the apostles and said: “It is written that the Christ would
suffer and on the third day rise from the dead” (Lk 24:46 NJB). Also,
when they saw correspondances between passages in what we call the
Old Testament and things which had happened to Jesus, the early
Christians supposed that the passages contained predictions by God
of what was going to happen. For instance John says of the soldiers
who cast lots for Jesus’ seamless garment:
In this way the words of scripture were fulfilled: “They shared out
my clothing among them. They cast lots for my clothes”. That is
what the soldiers did. (John 19:24 JB, quoting Ps 21:19.)
After Jesus’ death and resurrection, the apostles, looking back,
judged that he had foreseen what was going to happen. Matthew
says that Jesus foretold his death and resurrection three times (Mt
16:21, 17:22 and 20:18-19) and he says that Jesus knew that Judas
was going to betray him (Mt 26:25). He also foretold Peter’s denial
of knowledge of him (Mt 26:34).
In short, foreknowledge and prediction are assumed to be not only
possible but to have actually happened.
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foreKnoWLeDge in tHe CHurCH Later
The Greek Fathers did not question the idea of divine foreknowledge and the prophecies which flowed from it. Naturally, the Old
and New Testament beliefs were restated. John had quoted “They
cast lots for my clothes” from Psalm 21 and later Christians quoted
“they have pierced my hands and my feet” from the same psalm (v.
17), seeing in it a prophecy of the crucifixion. Belief in foreknowledge was expressed clearly and forcibly by Augustine, who discussed
Cicero’s idea that the future cannot be known and that there is no
such knowledge either in God or in human beings, so that there is no
prediction of events, and he said that he would rather deny free will
than agree with it. His actual words were:
They are far more tolerable who assert the fatal influence of the
stars than they who deny the foreknowledge of future events. For,
to confess that God exists, and at the same time to deny that he
has foreknowledge of future things, is the most manifest folly.1
Later he said that “one who is not prescient of all future things is not
God”.2 One sees here the influence of high Greek philosophy.
When in the ninth century a certain Gottschalk said that God
predestines some to heaven and others to hell, a series of local councils condemned this teaching, but they also said that God foreknows
who are going to be saved.3 In 1053 Pope Leo IX wrote a profession of faith in which he said that God “predestined only good, but
foreknew both good and evil”.4
During the Reformation, there was no dispute about divine foreknowledge and when Banezians and Molinists had their ignoble
strife, they all believed in it. Later, Pascal (1623-1662) made notes
for what we might call a book of apologetics, and these notes have
been published as his Pensées. He said that the greatest proof of the
divinity of Christ was his prophecies, which were realised.5
1 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, V,9; PL, 41,149.
2 ibid., PL, 41,152.
3 This was said by the councils of Quiercy-sur-Oise ( 853 AD) and Valence
(855 AD).
4 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, # 685.
5 Pascal, Pensées, # 325. Pascal made a list of prophecies in the Old and
New Testaments: see ## 323-348 and 483-499.
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
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To jump over several centuries, Vatican I, quoting the Bible,
said: ”Everything is uncovered and open to his [God’s] eyes” [Heb
4:13], and it added: “including those things which will come to pass
through the free actions of creatures”.6
tHe tHeory tHat goD is outsiDe tiMe,
obserVing eVents
tHe tHeory
In almost all discussions of the problem of evil that I have heard,
in which use is made of the idea that God is outside time, it is implicitly assumed that God is an observer of human actions, whom we
must picture as looking at the universe and in one instant observing
all the events of its entire history. When we, who are on the earth’s
surface, talk about things being to the north or south, we mean that
they are north or south of where we are, and obviously everything on
earth is either north of me, on my latitude, or south of me. If I have
been looking at something which is to the north of me and want
to look at something which is to the south, I have to turn round.
If, however, we were on the moon looking at the earth, nothing on
the earth’s surface would be north or south of us, or on our latitude,
because we would not have a latitude. When looking towards the
north pole and then towards the south pole, we would not have to
turn round but would see everything in one “look”. Similarly, when
we, who are in the universe’s time, talk about events having occurred
in the past, or say that something is going to happen in the future,
we mean that they came before or will come after the moment at
which we are. When we talk about the past, we mentally look back;
if we go on to talk about the future we do not turn our heads but
we mentally look in the opposite direction. Obviously, every event
with a definite moment is for us either past, present or future, but if
we could be outside time looking at events occurring in time, more
or less as someone on the moon can look at the surface of the earth
from a point outside it and see places on it, no events would be past,
present or future for us. God, it is said, is like that. He is not situated
at any point of time rather than any other and he constantly sees the
events of our universe from its start to its finish. Whereas for us the
6 Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, # 3003.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
events of 1900 are past and we cannot see them happening, and we
shall have to wait until 2020 before seeing the events of that year,
no events are past or future for God and he is always seeing them all
happening. In this scheme of things, if we talk of God knowing the
future we mean that he knows events which for us are future; they are
not future for him and he sees them all in one “look”.
This means that God can tell people on Sunday something that
for them is going to happen next Friday: he sees it happening and
reports what he sees. According to this theory, God’s knowledge of
an event is not foreknowledge for him, but if he tells people about it
before it happens his action is, for them, a prediction and as a result
they foreknow what is going to happen.
CritiCisM of tHis tHeory
According to this theory, all the events of history are causally prior to
God’s knowledge of any of them. This means that his knowledge of free
acts is not causally prior to any events occurring in the universe, and
this means that God cannot use his knowledge to cause or prevent
any events in history. In a word, complete observer-knowledge is of
its nature useless.
Let me drive this point home in two ways. First, if you were to obtain certain knowledge of some future events, it would in many cases
be possible for you to make use of your knowledge: for instance,
if you were to be told for a fact that a certain horse was going to
win a race, you could bet on it and make money. Suppose, however,
that you were to be given certain knowledge of absolutely all future
events. If you were to act to prevent something from happening, that
would cause your knowledge of it to have been false; if you were to
cause some other events to occur, that would mean that your knowledge had not been complete; but by hypothesis your knowledge
was true and complete: therefore you would not be able to use your
knowledge in any practical way. In general, certain and complete observer-knowledge of all the events of any area and period cannot be
used to influence the events of that area and period; therefore God’s
observer-knowledge of all the events of the whole universe from beginning to end cannot be used to influence any events. Second, it
is agreed that even God cannot change the past, given that it has
happened. Then if for him there is no distinction between past and
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
129
future, he can no more change what for us is the future than he can
change what for us is the past. As David P. Hunt says, a God “with
total foreknowledge ... is equipped to make maximally informed decisions but there is nothing left to be decided”.7
Someone might think that God, seeing an aeroplane crashing in
November because of a pilot’s free decision, can prevent a particular woman from reserving a seat on it when she buys her ticket in
October. But according to this theory when God sees the aeroplane
crashing, he in the same instant sees that woman either in it or not. If
he sees her in it, he cannot prevent her from being in it because that
would cause his knowledge to be false, which is impossible because
it is knowledge of something seen as it actually happens. If he sees
that she is not in the plane, he cannot prevent her from being in it
because she is not going to be in it, anyway. Hence, either way, he
cannot use his knowledge to influence events.
tHe tHeory tHat goD foreKnoWs aLL eVents
beCause He DeCiDes tHeM
tWo KinDs of KnoWLeDge
A distinction is often made between what I might call spectator
knowledge and originator knowledge. If we see that a tree, which we
did not plant, is standing, we know of its existence because it is there;
if we observe a man doing something, we know what he is doing because he is doing it. Similarly, if we as observers know that something
is going to happen (for instance, that the sun will rise at a certain
time tomorrow morning), we know it is going to happen because it
is going to happen. These are examples of observer-knowledge. If, on
the other hand, we think of something to do and decide to do it, we
know about the event before it happens; this is originator-knowledge. The event happens because of the idea of it and the decision in
our minds. Even if in both cases there were no time-lag, there would
still be precedence: in the former case, the knowledge would be in
the mind because the event was occurring or was going to occur and
information about it had entered the mind, whereas in the second
case the event would occur because of the idea and decision in the
7 Hunt, “Divine Providence and Simple Foreknowledge”, p. 408; quoted
in Sanders, The God Who Risks, p. 201.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
mind. In the former case, the reality comes befores the knowledge; in
the second case, the idea in the mind comes before the reality.
The observer of an event is, in the first stage of learning about it,
receptive. For instance, light rays reflected from objects produce effects in our retinas, and psychologically we see them, passively allowing outside reality to determine our knowledge of it. Moreover, we
remain in a sense passive, so that if someone asks me why I think that
London is in the United Kingdom I may reply, “Ultimately, because
that is where it is”. If the person does not like that, I may say: “Don’t
blame me, I didn’t put it there, I’m merely an observer”.
tHe iDea tHat aLL goD’s KnoWLeDge of Creatures’ aCts
is originator-KnoWLeDge
It was maintained that God is the first mover and nothing can possibly take precedence over him in any transaction; therefore, it was
argued, he cannot at any stage be passive or receptive. This meant
that he cannot know events by receiving input from the world of
creatures. That is, he cannot be an observer of anything outside himself. This led to the idea that God knows every being and event only
by being conscious of his own creative decisions. Augustine said: “It
is not because things are what they are that God knows them” and
God does not know events because they happen; rather, “it is because
he knows them that they are what they are”.8 Rahner said: “In God
all knowledge is original, there is in him no receptive knowledge”.9
And Peter Geach said:
God’s knowledge of the world is to be compared not to our speculative [observer] knowledge but to our knowledge of our own
deeds before we do them; and all Truth is in him, in that his ideas,
like an artist’s designs, are the measure and cause of what happens
in the world: not because his thoughts reflect what happens.10
stages in tHe DiVine KnoWLeDge
Whenever we make a free choice we know that there are two or
more possible decisions which we are able to make, and our decision
8 Augustine, De Trinitate, XV,13; PL, 42,1076.
9 Rahner, The Trinity, p. 107n.
10 Geach, Providence and Evil, p. 81. The classical Latin formula which
expressed this idea was Scientia Dei est causa rerum.
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
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is the choice of one of them. For our decision to be an intelligent
one, the knowledge of possibilities must in some sense precede it.
The scholastics affirmed that in deciding to create the universe God
knew what he was doing, so that prior to his decision we must place
knowledge of possible courses of action: the decision not to create
at all was possible, so was the decision to create, and (they thought)
there were many possible universes each with its own history. When
God chose to create, and to create this universe which we are in, in
being conscious of his own decision he knew it as actual. We must
therefore affirm a knowledge which is prior to the decree of creation,
and which this presupposes: this is the knowledge of possibles, as
such. We also affirm a knowledge which is consequent on or simultaneous with the decree of creation: this is the knowledge of actuals.
They were called, in Latin, scientia simplicis intelligentiae and scientia
visionis.
tHat tHere is one singLe DeCision anD “LooK”
Foreknowledge would not fit in well with the idea that God decides in January what will happen in February, in February what will
happen in March, and so on, since he would not know in January
what he was going to decide in February, but it fits in with the idea
that, prior to his decision to create, God willed the universe with all
its history from start to finish. This is what was usually believed. According to this view, we must not imagine that God put Adam and
Eve in the garden, and knew that they were there because he knew
that he had put them there; then he observed that they had sinned,
whereupon he expelled them from the garden. On the contrary, according to this view, when they sinned, that is what he had decided
would happen, and he knew about it not by observing them but
only by being aware of his own decision. It is maintained that God
willed all the events in the entire history of the universe, prior to the
occurrence of any of them. His own actions were included in this: if
someone has complete control of a dinner, he can plan beforehand
that someone will speak for ten minutes and then he, who arranged
the proceedings, will interrupt him; somewhat similarly, God can
include his own interventions in the history of the universe which he
wills into being. Of everything that happens, then, we can say that it
was what from all eternity God willed, or as Garrigou-Lagrange said,
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
“God knows the free acts of the future in the divine decree [decision]
by which they are made present to him from all eternity”11 and he
can include his own interventions, which can be prophecies of what
is going to happen.
CritiCisM of tHis tHeory
First, I have rejected the idea that God controls all events, including
exercises of free will. I have therefore already rejected this theory.
I have also shown that belief in free will implies that a statement
about a free act, before it is made, is neither true nor false.12 To
repeat what I said there, if God has revealed that tomorrow a human being will do something, for him or her not to do it would be
to cause God to have uttered a falsehood, which is impossible; but
for the act to be free it must be possible for the person not to do it;
therefore it is must be impossible, even for God, to say with certainty
what a free being is going to do.
ProbabLe KnoWLeDge
In discussing unpredictability earlier, I said that we often know
what people are probably going to do, and often what we ourselves
will probably do, and that sometimes our judgements can be nearly
certain. What I have denied has been certitude about future free acts.
It may be objected that God’s knowledge, being perfect, must always
be certain, never probable. When, however, a free being is going to
make a decision, if we say that he or she will “probably” do this or
that, there is nothing imperfect about our knowledge and therefore
in certain cases God can know what human beings are probably going to do. If God knows that a person will probably do one thing and
in fact he or she does the other, this will not cause God to have been
wrong; it will only mean that the improbable happened.13
goD KnoWs tHings as tHey HaPPen:
We DeterMine His KnoWLeDge of soMe eVents
If what I have been saying is right, then God knows free acts as actual, not in any way prior to this. It means that when God is involved
11 Garrigou-Lagrange, God, His Existence and His Nature, II,73.
12 See above, p. 61.
13 See above, p. 65.
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
133
with human activity at a particular moment, he can use knowledge of
the past, of the present, and of what will probably happen after that
moment. There are not two, or three, phases in the divine knowledge
of creatures: there are an infinity of “phases”. Richard Rice says that
God “comes to know events as they take place”.14 Keith Ward says in
effect that it is impossible to combine belief in the existence of free
creatures with the belief that God is outside time, and he goes on:
For the free acts of creatures will partially determine the initial
conditions of the next temporal segment of the world. Before he
creates that next segment, God must therefore know what choices
have been made. The creation is consequent upon God’s knowledge, which depends in turn upon free creaturely acts; so God
must be conceived as responding to free acts moment by moment
as they are decided. It is useless to say, with Boethius, that God
knows free acts non-temporally. For, given real freedom, God cannot complete his acts of creation until he knows all the differences
that the acts of creatures make to the initial conditions of the various time-segments.
He also says:
If this [the creation of free beings] is conceivable, then even God
cannot know in advance how they will choose, since the choice
is undetermined. When they have chosen, God will know something that he could not have known before, the choices they freely
make.15
W. Norris Clarke says: “One must resolutely affirm that God’s knowledge of our free actions is determined by us in some significant sense”,
for, he says, a free act is mine, determined by me, not by God.16 That
is, where our free acts are concerned, God is an observer.
goD HoPes anD WisHes
In my theory, the divine persons have not selected some human
beings, to the exclusion of others, and offered themselves to them,
not to all. The second divine person became a man for the sake of
all men and women, and the divine persons offer themselves to all,
inviting all to have with them relationships of mutual love compa14 Rice, The Openness of God (in bibliography under Openness), p. 16.
15 Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God, pp. 151-152.
16 Clarke, “A New Look at the Immutability of God” (1973), p. 68.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
rable to friendships or marriages, and wanting these invitations to
be accepted. This is a wish on their part: God, as Paul said, “desires
everyone to be saved” (1 Tim 2:4). Whether the wish is fulfilled or
not depends on us, not on them. Many of us say yes to the divine
persons and with the aid of grace perform good acts. It is possible
and indeed probable that others say no and damn themselves. How
many are there of each? We have no idea, but the number of saved
has not been set by God, nor has he set a proportion, and we can
surely maintain that, prior to our free acts, God has hopes and wishes
concerning them, not certain knowledge.
It may be objected that hopes and wishes represent weakness of a
kind that cannot be in God. It is sometimes thought that all willing
is concerned with action, and that a volition is efficacious if a successful action follows from it, inefficacious if no action follows or if the
action is unsuccessful. This is a grave mistake. A wish is often an attitude of the will the object of which is something which the person
cannot himself or herself bring about: it is, then, a kind of willing
which is not concerned with action and it is neither efficacious nor
inefficacious. For instance, during a drought a farmer wishes for rain.
If it comes, his wish did not bring it and so was not efficacious, and
if no rain comes his wish has not been inefficacious. Instead, wishes
are fulfilled or unfulfilled. Some wishes may be weak or frivolous
but many wishes are deep, strong and serious, and a person can keep
wishing for something with burning intensity for years. If a person
wishes for something which is impossible, the wish is irrational, but
a wish for something which is possible but which is not fulfilled can
be entirely rational and the non-fulfilment is not a sign of weakness in the person: if, for instance, a man wishes that his adult son
would stop smoking and if the son continues to smoke, this does
not represent weakness in the father. In attributing wishes to God,
then, including unfulfilled wishes, I am not affirming weakness in
the divine nature.
It may also be objected that I have implied that God changes. It is
true that, according to my theory, as time goes on, more and more
free decisions are made, God knows them as they are made and his
intentions and wishes change as situations change. However, the
changes in God’s intentions and wishes involve absolutely no indeci-
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
135
sion or inconstancy on his part, any more than we are indecisive or
inconstant if, when situations change, we alter our intentions and
wishes. Moreover, what I have said implies no entitative change in
God, any more than the existence in him of a non-necessary decision
to create implies entitative contingency in him.
Traditionally, theologians talked of antecedent and consequent
wills in God. Suppose that a family is living in a house and that
in an immoral act an enemy burns it down. Before the event, God
wills the family to go on living in the house: that is his “antecedent
will”. After the fire, God wills the family to find somewhere else to
live: that is the “consequent will”. Since people are constantly acting
against God’s will, then, to put the matter somewhat crudely, God
must be constantly abandoning antecedent wills and forming consequent wills. That is, this perfectly commonplace teaching implies an
infinity of logical stages in God’s volitions. But whereas theologians
generally say that these wills are antecedent to and consequent on
the foreseen event, I am saying that they are antecedent to and consequent on the actual event. That is the only difference between my
position and the commonly-held one.
soMe tHeoLogiCaL ProbLeMs
tHe DiVine oMnisCienCe
It may be objected that since God is omniscient, he must know the
future. However, just as his omnipotence is his ability to do everything which can be done, his omniscience is his knowledge of everything that can be known. Free acts cannot be known with certainty
prior to the making of the decisions, therefore God does not know
them. Paul Weiss puts the matter well:
What the future holds in store is beyond the power of God to
know, granted even that he be omniscient, for God cannot contradict himself, do evil for the sake of evil, make himself impotent,
ignorant or debased. His omnipotence is the power to do all that
can be done, and his omniscience is the power to know all that
can be known. He has not the power to do what cannot be done,
the power to know what cannot be known. He cannot now know
the future in its concreteness, for such a future is not, and thus is
not knowable. Even if he thoroughly grasped the nature of things
that now exist, their habits and the kind of power they exert, he
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
136
could not tell in advance just what in detail their effects would
be, for there are no such details before they actually occur. One
might conceive of effects to be, but these effects and every feature
of them would be general, abstract. The details of actual effects
cannot be known in advance, for there are no such details to be
known. Not even God can know just what will be.17
aCtiVity anD reCePtion
Aristotle said that the eternal being is completely self-contained
and others have said that God, the perfect being, is completely “immanent”, and they have maintained that God cannot be receptive in
any way. I freely admit that I reject this whole idea and attribute to
God a certain receptivity or passivity. Like the authors of The Openness of God, I believe that “God does not control everything that
happens. Rather, he is open to receiving input from his creatures”.18
I offer the following defence of this. Activeness and receptiveness are
in a sense opposites. Does it follow from this that the more active a
being is the less receptive it can be? If so, then if activeness is a perfection, receptiveness is an imperfection and God is infinitely active
and not at all receptive. It is, however, not so. The fact is that the
more active beings are, the more receptive they are. Low-grade beings like rocks have little activity, but also little receptivity; beasts are
far more active, and also far more receptive; human beings are still
more active, and we are active in higher ways, than beasts are, but
we are also more receptive, and receptive in higher ways; moreover,
the more developed human beings are, the more they accomplish by
their actions and also the more receptive they are. That is, activeness
and receptiveness are both perfections and, far from being mutually
exclusive, they increase and decrease together. Which justfies my attributing receptivity to God.
17 Weiss, Nature and Man (1947) p. 13. Craig discusses this idea, and dismisses it as untenable, in The Only Wise God (1987), pp. 55-60. However,
Lucas says: “Where it is not due to an incapacity of the person but is in the
nature of the case that something cannot be done or known, then it is no
derogation from God that He cannot do it or know it” (The Future [1989],
p. 226).
18 The Openness of God, p. 7.
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137
CHanCe
It used to be believed that where human beings are not involved,
all events are “lawful” and when we talk of chance we are only showing our ignorance. As God is not ignorant, it was believed that he
foreknows all such events, as we foreknow eclipses. Now scientists
believe in indeterminacy. John Houghton, an English scientist, has
said: “Because the scientific description of some event may involve
chance and probability it does not follow that a theological description of the same event in terms of God’s activity need also involve
chance”.19 However, first, if one denies divine foreknowledge of free
acts one must deny foreknowledge of those chance events which follow from free decisions. For instance, if two people, acting entirely
independently, make free decisions which lead to actions which combine to produce a significant consequence, this is a random event
which God, if he does not foreknow the free decisions, does not
foreknow. Also, if some people are playing cards, they do this of their
free will, and if someone shuffles and deals he or she freely decides
for how long to shuffle, and this, which determines the hands, is
not predictable, so that it is by chance that the players get particular
hands. If God does not foreknow the playing and the shuffling, then
also he does not foresee the hands which the players get. A player,
then, should not look at his or her cards and say to himself or herself: “These are the cards which, before time began, God knew that
I would get tonight, because he then decided on them for me now”.
Second, indeterminacy or randomness seem to be built into our universe and it seems to me improbable that a particular radium atom
emits an alpha particle at a moment chosen by God, who makes sure
that aggregates of radium atoms have predictable rates of emission.
If a human being is conceived, it seems to me improbable that God
decides whether the child will be male or female and precisely which
genes it will have. Richard W. Kropf says: “Surely there must be room
for another possibility of a God who can allow things to be caused
by chance”.20 Christopher Mooney says: “I want to suggest that the
best way to understand how God might be acting in the subatomic
realm is by analogy with the traditional theology of how divine ini19 Houghton, Does God Throw Dice?, p. 122.
20 Kropf, Evil and Evolution, p. 103.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
tiative relates to the indeterminacy of human freedom”.21 I would
not say tradional theology, but I would say that once we have reached
the theological conclusion that God does not predetermine or even
foreknow the free acts of persons we can can feel free to say that he
does not predetermine chance events, either, and consequently does
not foreknow them. This means that, as with free acts, God knows
chance events as they occur, which implies that not only did God not
will the tsunami of December 2004, he did not even foreknow it.
PreDiCtions in tHe sCriPture
The question arises: what about the predictions in the Bible? First,
there are indications in the Bible itself that these are not what Rahner calls “reportage” or eye-witness reports from the future.22 For
instance, David asks God whether Saul will come down and God
says that he will; David then asks whether the townsmen will hand
David and his men over to Saul, and again God says yes, they will;
whereupon David leaves and it does not happen (1 Sam 23:10-13).
Evidently God did not tell David about events which he, God, was
seeing happen, since they didn’t. In Ezechiel, it is predicted that Nebuchadnezzar will attack and destroy Tyre and that it will never be
rebuilt; but three chapters later Nebuchadnezzar fails to take Tyre
(Ezech 26:7-14; 29:17-20). Also, when some detail in Jesus’ life corresponds to something in the Old Testament, this need not have
been a prediction properly so called. Third, many predictions in the
scriptures can be interpreted as statements about what was probably
going to happen. For instance, instead of explaining Jesus’ prediction of his passion as an eye-witness report of future events, it is
surely reasonable for us to say that when Jesus saw how fixed the
Jewish authorities had become in their opposition to him he realised
that, while they were free beings to that it was possible that they
would relent, it was almost certainly only a matter of time before
they brought about his death.
Also, there are passages which say that God regrets a decision
which he has made. For instance, in Genesis we read that “the Lord
was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved
21 Mooney, Theology and Scientific Knowledge, p. 102.
22 Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions”, Theological
Investigations, 4, 332-337.
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
139
him to his heart” (Gen 6:6). In 1 Samuel it is said that “the words of
the Lord came to Samuel: ‘I regret that I made Saul king’” (1 Sam
15:11), and that “the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king
over Israel (1 Sam 15:35). This makes sense only if when he made
his decision God did not know what was going to come of it. Also,
in Exodus God tells Moses what to do “if they [the people] will not
believe you” (Ex 4:8), which implies that he does not know what the
people are going to do.
soMe autHors
In at least three important works, De Veritate, the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas said that a
“contingent event”, such as a free act, in the future cannot be known
with certainty by anyone; hence, he said, God does not know these
events as future.23 Jacques Maritain said that “the impossibility of being foreseen with absolute certainty” is a “property of the free act as
such”, and added: “whatever comprehension or supercomprehension
of causes one may have”,24 that is, even God cannot foresee free acts
with certainty. Journet said that God sees things “at the very instant
when they come into existence to co-exist with him. He does not
know in advance.”25 Later he says that God did not foresee Adam’s
sin.26 Anthony Kenny says that “if God is to have infallible knowledge of future human actions, then determinism must be true”,27
and the converse is also true: if we have free will, God cannot have
infallible knowledge of future human actions. J. R. Lucas observes
that God cannot foreknow our acts unless they are predetermined
and hence not free;28 I maintain that they are free, and hence I deny
foreknowledge. I quoted Paul Weiss earlier.
23 “Impossibile esset quod de contingentibus futuris scientiam haberet
Deus, si cognosceret ea ut futura sunt” (Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, 2 12);
“Contingens non subditur per certitudinem alicui cognitioni” (Thomas
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1 14 13).
24 Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, p. 16.
25 Journet, The Meaning of Evil, p. 177.
26 ibid., p. 231.
27 Kenny, The God of the Philosophers, p. 121. For “determinism must be
true” read “the free will doctrine cannot be true”.
28 Lucas, The Future, p. 34.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
140
In the twentieth century some “progressive” Catholic theologians
expressed doubts about the divine foreknowledge of human free acts.
In his encyclical of 1950 on “modern errors” Pius XII said: “Eternal
and infallible foreknowledge of the free acts of human beings is being denied”.29 In 1975 William J. Hill said: “Contemporary serious
thought is practically unanimous in denying to God an infallible
knowledge of the future, precisely because there is as yet no such
thing, either within the existing temporal order (obviously) or within
what has traditionally been known as the eternity of God”.30 In Protestant circles, too, the idea of divine foreknowledge has been questioned. In 1987 the evangelical theologian William Lane Craig said:
There is a disturbing new trend among some evangelical theologians to deny the biblical doctrine of foreknowledge and to explain
away biblical passages supporting this doctrine, simply because
the rational attack on it seems to them unanswerable.31
He also said:
To suggest that these last predictions were not founded on foreknowledge, but were inferences based on the character of the disciples and the context of events soon to occur, is to evacuate the
incidents of all theological significance whatever.32
I quote these authors as persons who reported that foreknowledge
was being denied, not as persons who denied it themselves.
soMe PartiCuLar DiVine DeCisions
If what I have been saying is right, when God decided to create,
he knew in general that the beginning would be very simple and
there would be gradual development, leading to human beings, who
would develop; eventually we who exist now would appear, and development would go on from there. He did not, however, know the
details of what was going to happen. He was similar to people now
who have a child: they know in a general way what a child is and
29 Pius XII, Humani Generis; Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion, #
3890.
30 Hill, “Does God Know the Future? Aquinas and Some Moderns”, p.
7.
31 Craig, The Only Wise God, p. 12; see also p. 15.
32 ibid., p. 36.
11 1 The Divine Knowledge & My Theory
141
how it will grow, but they do not know exactly what it is going to be
as a child or, later, as an adult. As Maritain said, God takes risks and
human beings sometimes surprise him.33
When human beings offended God (whether they were Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden or not), this was not what God had in
any way planned. He was not like Shakespeare seeing a performance
of Othello and, on the surface as it were, being appalled by Iago’s
behaviour while, deep down, being pleased to see that the play was
being performed just as he wrote it.
The Incarnation was another risk. The choice of Judas, like the
choices of the other apostles, was also a risk. Towards the end of his
public life Jesus saw that he had lost Judas, and looking back the
disciples thought that he had known that Judas would eventually
betray him, but, when he chose Judas, Jesus did not know that that
was going to happen. He picked him because he thought then that
he would make a good apostle. That is surely far more reasonable
than to suppose that Jesus intended to be betrayed, and picked Judas
because he knew that Judas would betray him and then kill himself
in despair, or that when Jesus said that it would have been better
for Judas if he had never been born he was thinking: “But it was
beneficial for the universe and for that reason it was what was meant
to happen”. That idea supposes in Jesus a ruthless willingness to use
Judas, and it cannot be right.
In the Middle Ages there was a dispute about Peter’s denial of Jesus.
In 1465, in Louvain, Peter de Rivo held a public discussion on the
question of whether, after Jesus had said that the apostle Peter was
going to deny him, it was possible for Peter not to deny Jesus, thus
causing Jesus to have been wrong. One sees the dilemma: either the
prediction was uncertain, or the apostle Peter was not free. In the discussion Peter de Rivo maintained that statements about future free
acts, including Jesus’ statement about Peter’s denial, are neither true
nor false but indeterminate. True statements about future events, he
said, can be made only about necessary events. A vigorous dispute ensued, into which people from other universities were drawn; it went
on until in 1474 a number of Peter’s doctrines were condemned in a
papal bull as scandalous and deviating from the path of the Catholic
33 Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, p. 85.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
faith; and in 1476 in Rome Peter signed a retraction of things he had
said.34 Which did not solve the problem. If I am right, Jesus’ statement (assuming that it was actually made) was at most a statement
about what would probably happen.
It is common for people to imagine that Catholics believe that
when Church authorities make decisions, the Holy Spirit is in control of them. In particular, they imagine that when a conclave of
cardinals elects a pope, the Holy Spirit “guides” them so that they
inevitably choose the man whom the Holy Spirit wants to be elected.
To anyone who has any knowledge of Church history, this is incredible. If I am right, the Holy Spirit as it were waits to see whom they
choose, or he may hope that a certain man will be chosen, and the
cardinals make the decision. The same applies to the decisions of
governments, and it applies to the decisions of individuals, so that
not only did God not plan and will my existence from all eternity,
but, because my existence depended on the free acts of human beings
and on chance events, he did not “from all eternity” or “from outside
time” even know that I was going to come into existence. Also, in his
dealings with me now he does not know how I am going to end: that
will depend on decisions which I have not yet made.
34 Two of the statements which were declared to be errors and which
Peter retracted were: “That for the truth of a proposition about the future it
is not sufficient that the thing will be, but it is required that it be impossible
to prevent it” and “That it is necessary to say one of these two things: either
that in credal statements about the future there is no present and actual
truth, or that what they say cannot be prevented even by a divine power”
(Denziger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, ## 629, 626).
Part tHree:
tHe PHiLosoPHiCaL ControVersy:
DeterMinisM Versus free WiLL
CHaPter 12
DeterMinisM
It would be possible to set out the determinist position with a
criticism of it, and then to present the arguments for it, replying to
each one before going on to the next. The trouble with this method is
that it does not let the determinist world-picture form in the reader’s
mind. I will therefore first propose determinism and the reasons for
it, without critical comments; after that I will offer my criticism and
my replies to the arguments. This method has the disadvantage that
it separates the arguments from my replies to them, but, believing
that both alternatives are possible, I have freely chosen to use it.
DeterMinisM stateD
Determinism is a philosophical position according to which all human actions are predetermined. According to it, a person in a given
situation may think that he is able to do this or that, but in every
case the stars, the laws of physics, his character, the conditioning he
has received or something else makes him unable to do any but one
thing. It is essential to note that determinists do not say that some
actions of some people are determined. Holders of the free will doctrine also say that. They say that all human acts are determined.
Determinists go on to say that all human actions are predictable.
They admit that it is in practice impossible to obtain complete information about any human being, including his or her genes and entire
past history, and to know absolutely everything about any situation
in which a human being is to make a decision; also, we do not yet
have a full understanding of the laws which (according to determinists) govern human behaviour; and, if we did have this information,
the decision would probably be made long before the calculations
could be carried out, so that it would in practice be impossible to
predict it. Hence they introduce a qualification into the statement at
the start of this paragraph and say that all human actions are in principle predictable. Ted Honderich, for instance, says: “If our theory of
determinism is true, then all of each person’s future is predictable”
12 1 Determinism
145
in the sense that “it is conceivable, however practically impossible,
for someone to have knowledge of me mentally and neurally now”
which, combined with other knowledge, “would enable her to foretell the rest of my life”.1 Brand Blanshard has written an article,
“The Case for Determinism”, which begins: “I am a determinist”. In
it he says:
By determinism, then, I mean the view that every event A is so
connected with a later event B that, given A, B must occur. By
indeterminism I mean the view that there is some event B that is
not so connected with any previous event A that, given A, it must
occur.
He later says:
[Henry] Sidgwick noted that, if at any moment we stop to think
about it, we always feel as if more than one course were open to us,
that we could speak or be silent, lift our hand or not lift it. If the
determinist is right, this must be an illusion, of course.2
fataLisM
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, Fate was a vaguely-defined
power which controls all beings, the gods as well as men and women;
it does not decide events from day to day, but long ago fixed everything that was and is going to happen. Fatalism has had a long life. It
makes a grand theme for sonorous poetry, like this, which was written in the nineteenth century:
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.3
It also pervades Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1954), where it is
said that “all things happen that are intended” (148), “everything
is necessary” (323), a man gets married “for no reason beyond an
awful inevitability” (280) and “he did these things because he had
to” (345). In this novel a man “no longer believed anything can be
effected by human intervention” (210), “whatever steps he had taken
were hardly determined by himself ” (248-249), and people see that
1 Honderich, How Free Are You?, p. 70.
2 Blanshard, “The Case for Determinism”, p. 20. Sidgwick lived 18381900 and is quoted below, p. 175.
3 The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward Fitzgerald.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
“even their failures were necessary” (447).4 With fatalism, White
seems to take us behind the appearance of choice and chance to the
hidden necessity which controls human life. Finally, fatalism sometimes takes a pseudo-scientific form in the belief that a person’s destiny was determined by the positions of the stars and planets when
he or she was born.
Sometimes if a small accident occurs people say, “Don’t worry, it
couldn’t be helped”, as if regret makes sense only when things could
have been otherwise. On the larger scale, some people find that fatalism gives them peace of mind even in major sorrows, since it implies
that things could not have been otherwise. Thinking along these
lines, the ancient Stoics advocated amor fati or love of fate, and Seneca said: “It is a great consolation to be swept along with the universe.
Whatever it is that has ordered us so to live, so to die, by the same
necessity it binds the gods as well”.5 Soldiers sometimes become fatalists and draw peace of mind (and a reckless disregard for their own
safety) from the thought that the moment and manner of the death
of each one has already been determined and neither he nor anyone
else can alter it. For others, fatalism is a philosophy of despair.
PLato anD aristotLe
It is said that the ancient Greeks had no clear concept of the will
and that they did not explicitly deal with the question of free will.
There are, however, some indications of their ideas about this. In
Plato’s Phaedo Socrates reports that some people maintain that human actions are caused by material factors only – that is, he states
materialistic determinism – and he dismisses this as absurd, saying
that he himself is in Athens “through the choice of what is best”.6 In
the Timaeus, Plato says that all souls are the same at their first birth,
and go up or down in successive lives according to whether they
live righteously or unrighteously:7 the point of this seems to be that
whether human beings are good or bad depends in the end on their
free choices. In the Laws, he says that the ruler of the universe sets
4
5
6
7
White, The Tree of Man. The references are to the Penguin edition.
Seneca, De Providentia, V 8.
Plato, Phaedo, 99 b.
Plato, Timaeus, 41 e and 42 b-c.
12 1 Determinism
147
different regions for virtuous and wicked souls, “but the causes of
formation of either type he left free to our individual volitions”.8
About Aristotle’s position there has been much discussion. Ross,
for instance, says that “on the whole we must say that he shared the
plain man’s belief in free will”,9 whereas D. J. Allan says that while
Aristotle says that we are responsible for our dispositions, “it does
not constitute him a defender of Free Will”.10 Aristotle seems to me
to show that he believes in free will when he says that in certain situations it is in our power to do a noble thing and it is also in our power
to do a base thing; if we do the noble thing we are virtuous, whereas
if we do the base thing we are vicious, so that “it is in our power to
be virtuous or vicious”. He says that factors outside us do not move
us to act in this or that way, and “the acts whose moving principles
are in us must themselves be in our power and voluntary”. Sometimes actions are influenced by a person’s disposition – for instance,
intoxication or a habit of self-indulgence or injustice – but then we
must hold the person responsible for being in that state: “he has the
power of not getting drunk”, “it is in their power not to be ignorant”
and “to the unjust and to self-indulgent men it was open at the beginning not to become men of this kind, and so they are unjust and
self-indulgent voluntarily”.11 The main ideas of the free will doctrine
are here: the choice between two courses, both of which are possible;
responsibility for the choice; and the determination by a person of
his or her own disposition or nature.
I pass over the next centuries, since I discussed them earlier, in Part
Two.
sHaKesPeare
It is not easy to know when Shakespeare agrees with what his characters say, but it is safe to say that he agrees with Cassius’s statement
of the free will doctrine in Julius Caesar:
8 Plato, Laws, book 10, 904 b-c.
9 Ross, Aristotle, p. 201.
10 Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle, p. 176.
11 All the quotations from Aristotle are from Nichomachean Ethics, book
3, chap. 5.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
148
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.12
(He means: “Our stars have not made us subjects of Caesar: we ourselves are responsible for it”.) In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena
says:
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope.13
In Othello, a character says:
Our bodies are our gardens; to the which our wills are gardeners;
so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, ... supply it with one
gender [kind] of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it
sterile with idleness or manured with industry, why, the power and
corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.14
In King Lear Edmund says:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick
in fortune – often the surfeit of our own behaviour – we make
guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars: as if we
were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves,
thieves and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars
and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetery influence;
and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on; an admirable
evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the
charge of a star!15
The characters in Shakespeare’s plays do not do or suffer whatever
they were doomed by the stars, Heaven or fate to do or suffer; they
make free choices and they reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of their own and other people’s choices.16
12 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1 2 138-140.
13 Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, 1 1 235-237 (near end of
scene).
14 Shakespeare, Othello, 1 3 ca 330.
15 Shakespeare, King Lear, 1 2.
16 See Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 287-289.
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Post-MeDieVaL PHiLosoPHy
I earlier made a distinction between theory and practice, or between what I called theoreticians and practitioners. Among philosophers, those who presented thought-out views of all reality were what
I call theoreticians and some of them denied free will. For instance,
Spinoza (1632-1677) said that all things are predetermined by God,
not in his free will but from his absolute nature; and he said: “There
is no absolute or free will, but the mind is determined to will this
or that by a cause, which was determined by another cause, and so
ad infinitum.”17 Leibniz (1646-1716) proved from the Principle of
Sufficient Reason that free will was impossible. In England, representatives of what is called British Empiricism denied free will. They
included Hobbes (1588-1679) and Locke (1632-1704), who talked
of “necessity”. Anthony Collins (1676-1729) wrote against free will
in A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1715) and
Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity (1729), and Joseph Priestley
(1733-1804), a materialist, wrote The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777). On the continent, Kant (1724-1804) wrote a
Critique of Pure Reason, by which he meant what I am calling a theory. In it, working as a theoretician, he denied free will and materialists like Cabanis and La Mettrie also denied it. Later, Nietzsche said
that when we look at a waterfall we think that in the motion of the
water we see freedom, but every movement is necessary and can be
predicted by calculation. It is the same, he says, with human behaviour: if we knew all things we would be able to work out beforehand
every human action and also to predict every advance in knowledge,
every error, including the error of free will, and every evil. Free will,
he said, is an illusion.18
On the other hand, as I said in Part II, Catholics and members of
some other Christian churches affirmed free will. Moreover, those
who were more interested in life than in theory generally affirmed it.
Notable among them was Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who said: “The
fact that God could create free beings vis-à-vis of himself is the cross
17 Spinoza, Ethics, part II, proposition 48.
18 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, # 106. As I will later say,
Nietzsche was not consistent in his determinism: see below, p. 150.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
which philosophy could not carry, but remained hanging from”.19
Kant is an interesting case. Besides his Critique of Pure Reason, in
which he denied free will, he wrote a Critique of Practical Reason, and
in another book said that although “the freedom attributed to the
will seems incompatible with the necessity of nature; and although
at this parting of the ways reason finds the road of natural necessity
much more beaten and serviceable than that of freedom for purposes
of speculation, yet for purposes of action the footpath of freedom
[free will] is the only one on which we can make use of reason in our
conduct”.20 One can put his idea in modern terms by saying that
the brain is like a computer which has two programs, to be used one
at a time. When you are doing pure or theoretical philosophy your
brain’s operations are governed by one of these programs. When,
however, you are dealing with a practical problem at home, you will
find that your brain has switched to the other program. The theoretical program includes a denial of free will, whereas in the practical
program it is affirmed. In effect, this means that if you are expounding a general world-view in a philosophical lecture, you deny free
will. When, however, you go home and have to deal with a practical
problem, you bring up your practical program, and you think in its
way. Thus Kant in his own way accepted the division which I made
between theoretical (he called it pure) reason and practical reason,
and denied free will in one, assumed it in the other.
I have quoted statements of determinism from Nietzsche, but in
Daybreak he wrote of men choosing goals of their own free will.21 In
many works he expressed the belief that some human beings can become “free spirits”22 and among notes which he wrote between 1883
and his breakdown in 1889 there is one in which he said: “‘Mechanical necessity’ is not a fact: it is we who first interpreted it into events.
... From the fact that I do a certain thing, it by no means follows that
19 Kierkegaard, The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, entry for 22 April 1838,
# 204.
20 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 116.
21 Nietzsche, Daybreak, # 108.
22 For instance, Human, All Too Human has the subtitle, A Book for Free
Spirits.
12 1 Determinism
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I am compelled to do it”.23 Nietzsche seems to have been using his
“practical reason” program when he wrote that.
In the twentieth century, Catholics were still affirming free will,
now against determinists, and Existentialists like Sartre, who wrote
about life, took it as a fundamental assumption. Moreover, many
non-existentialist philosophers have clearly explained free will and
argued for it. In the English-speaking world these include Paul
Weiss,24 Aurel Kolnai,25 and R. C. Skinner,26 to name three whose
writings have particularly impressed me.
tHe infLuenCe of sCienCe; DeterMinisM
sCienCe in generaL, esPeCiaLLy PHysiCs
With Galileo and more particularly with Newton began the period of classical or Newtonian physics. The science of mechanics was
greatly developed, and applied to astronomy it explained the motions of the planets: it showed, for example, why the square of the
time taken by a planet to go round the sun must be proportional to
the cube of its distance from the sun, as Kepler had observed but
not explained. It made precise predictions of mechanical movements
possible. Later, when it was discovered that the atom is made up of
particles, Niels-Bohr used mechanics to explain the behaviour of atoms. The explanation was brilliant and, to a certain type of mind, delightful. During this period, then, physics was hugely successful and
physicists enjoyed tremendous prestige. Physics was regarded as the
ideal science and the other sciences were ranked according to how
similar they were to it. Moreover, it was thought to be the ultimate
science: when, for example, astronomers and chemists wanted explanations of their data, they found them in physics, and people working in all other sciences were expected in the end to do the same.
Science in all its forms developed enormously in the seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries and largely because
of this it came to be believed by many that only scientific knowledge
23 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 552.
24 See Weiss, Nature and Man (1947) and Man’s Freedom (1950).
25 See Kolnai, “Agency and Freedom”.
26 See R. C. Skinner, not to confused with B. F. Skinner, “Freedom of
Choise”.
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is valid. This is scientism, which can be roughly defined as the belief
that science can explain everything and do everything and that nothing else can explain or do anything: it is the belief that science and
reason, or scientific and rational, are co-extensive terms. Here, in
Bertrand Russell’s words, is part of the scientistic creed: “Whatever
knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and
what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know”.27 Henry Adams said in 1909: “The future of Thought and therefore of History
lies in the hands of the physicist”. C. E. M. Joad’s Guide to Modern
Thought (1933) is almost entirely about scientific thought, as if there
is no other kind; Heinz Pagels said that “the universe is a book read
by scientists” and that “science is another name for knowledge”.28
Paul Davies says: “I have always wanted to believe that science can
explain everything, at least in principle”,29 and: “It is now possible to
conceive of a scientific explanation for all of creation”;30 and when
Time chose its man of the twentieth century it chose Einstein, a scientist.
Practical problems, whether at the personal or national level, are
often dealt with in unscientific ways, and it came to be believed that
this is irrational, unrealistic and doomed to failure. The believers in
scientism said that sooner or later all psychological, social, political and other problems would be solved scientifically. For instance,
when Great Britain was at war in 1941, and when her situation
looked desperate, C. H. Waddington wrote in The Scientific Attitude:
“Scientific thought has become the pattern for the creative activity of
our age, our only mode of transport through the rough seas in front
of us”.31 Scientific inventions such as radar had a great deal to do
with transporting the people of Britain through those seas and when
atomic bombs, produced by means of a tremendous scientific enterprise, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war, which
27 Russell, Religion and Science, p. 243 (end of chapter, “Science and Ethics”).
28 Pagels, The Cosmic Code, pp. 344, 348.
29 Davies, The Mind of God, p. 14.
30 Davies, God and the New Physics, p. viii.
31 Waddington, The Scientific Attitude, p. 53 or 61, quoted by Midgley in
Wisdom, Information and Wonder, p. 24.
12 1 Determinism
153
had looked as though it might take years and cost more millions of
lives, suddenly ended, it seemed that from science had come victory
and peace. It also seemed that the energy of the atom, revealed in
those terrific explosions, would be used for peaceful purposes and
that humanity would enter a glorious “atomic age”. If you were a
scientist at that time, you felt that you and your kind were the hope
of the world.
sCienCe anD DeterMinisM
From the beginning, post-medieval scientists assumed that all
physical events are determined by their antecedents and, first, they
endeavoured to find the necessary connections between antecedents
and events, or the laws of nature. Second, supposing that all the
laws of nature are always observed, scientists used them to explain
particular phenomena, which otherwise (they thought) would have
been inexplicable. The assumption that events are determined by
their antecedents is called the principle of causality, which according to William James is “the great scientific postulate that the world
must be one unbroken fact, and that prediction of all things must be
ideally, even if not actually, possible”.32 This principle was taken to
imply determinism.
The classical statement of this world-view was made by Pierre-Simon Laplace, who said in 1820:
We ought to consider the present state of the universe as the effect
of its previous state and as the cause of that which is to follow. An
intelligence that, at a given instant of time, could comprehend all
the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough
to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same
formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and
those of the lightest atoms. For such an intelligence nothing would
be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its
eyes. The human mind affords, in the perfection that it has been
able to give to astronomy, a feeble likeness of this intelligence.33
Applied to a particular human action this means that if, for instance,
I am at a meeting and am invited to raise my arm if I wish to vote
32 James, Principles of Psychology, II,573.
33 Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, p. 2.
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for a motion, and then a minute later am invited to raise my arm if I
wish to vote against it, and if I think that I can raise my arm at either
the first or the second call, I am mistaken: since the universe began,
the time at which my arm will go up has been predetermined by the
positions and velocities of particles and for me to raise it at any other
time would be impossible. Moreover, in as much as mental operations involve the motion of particles in the brain, they are likewise
predetermined.
Freud said that if anyone makes a breach in the determinism of
events at any point, “it means that he has thrown overboard the
whole Weltanschauung [world-view] of science”.34 Sir Arthur Eddington said: “I have not been able to form a satisfactory conception
of any kind of law or causal sequence which shall be other than deterministic”.35 Einstein said:
I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical
sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also
in accordance with inner necessity.36
Ernest Nagel said: “To abandon the deterministic principle is to
withdraw from the enterprise of science”.37 D. J. O’Connor said
that determinism should be affirmed because it “makes no unsightly
breaches in the general scientific picture of the world”.38 And Robert
Kane said: “Notions of free will requiring indeterminism are mysterious and have no place in the modern scientific picture of the
world”.39
34 Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Works, vol. 15, p. 28.
35 Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, p. 293.
36 Einstein, writing around 1930, Ideas and Opinions, p. 8. Einstein accepted neither indeterminacy nor free will. In 1950 he had three long conversations with Karl Popper, in which Popper endeavoured to talk him out
of his belief in determinism, without success (Popper, Objective Knowledge,
p. 228).
37 Nagel, The Structure of Science, p. 606.
38 O’Connor, Free Will, p. 47.
39 Kane, “Some Neglected Pathways in the Free Will Labyrinth”, p. 415.
This was published in 2002, when “the modern scientific picture of the
world” had included indeterminacy for almost eighty years.
12 1 Determinism
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No one in his right mind denies that we often think that it is possible for us to do any one of a number of things and that we make
choices, that is, that we think we have free will. However, everyone
at first thinks that the sun moves across the sky and this is wrong;
and many authors maintain that belief in free will is wrong, too.
Most of us tolerate people who talk about the sun rising and going
down, and we talk that way, ourselves. Also, many of us tolerate men
and women who on social occasions ask other people what are their
star signs. In a similar way, determinists tolerate people who seem to
believe in free will, and they may even themselves at times approach
practical decisions as if they believed in it. Some of them maintain,
however, that for serious purposes it is a mistake to leave the high
plane of physics; and the prevalence of determinism in certain sections of the intellectual world seems to them to mean that in some
academic circles a “higher stage of awareness has been reached”. That
is, they profess determinism as an element of scientism.
PHiLosoPHy, infLuenCeD by sCienCe
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when scientists were
enjoying high esteem in the intellectual community, many philosophers aimed, in the first place, to be accepted as scientists and, to win
this acceptance, they professed determinism. Among them must be
mentioned Auguste Comte, who proposed an elaborate all-inclusive
vision of reality in what he called Positivism (the word “positive” had
the sense which “scientific” has now). In England, around 1900 a
group of philosophers appeared, one of whom was Bertrand Russell,
whom I mentioned earlier, who wanted to produce a philosophy
which would be classed as a science rather than as a humanity, and in
1970 W. V. O. Quine, a philosophy professor at Harvard, said:
Philosophy, or what appeals to me under that head, is continuous
with science. It is a wing of science where aspects of method are
examined.40
The desire to be continuous with mathematics and science shows in
the way in which some of these philosophers write. One finds pages
covered with formal-logic equations and parentheses and passages
40 Quine, “Philosophical Progress in Language Theory”, Metaphilosophy,
9(1970)1; quoted in Midgley, Wisdom, p. 111. Quine studied with Carnap
in Prague.
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like this, which is a statement of what is called the Principle of the
Fixity of the Past:
(FP) For any action Y, agent S, and time t, if it is true that if S were
to do Y at t, some fact about the past relative to t would not have
been a fact, then S cannot at t do Y at t.
Many if not all of these philosophers imagine that determinism is
either a proven scientific fact or a supposition without which science
would be impossible; they feel, then, that for philosophy to be accepted as a science or (to use Quine’s term) as a discipline continuous
with science, they, the philosophers, must profess determinism. For
them, by the way, philosophy is a highly theoretical subject, and they
have contempt for what they call “save-the-world philosophy”, by
which they mean Existentialism and other thought about life.
sCientifiC PsyCHoLogy
tHeoretiCaL PsyCHoLogy
For centuries, psychology was a philosophical subject and it was
highly theoretical. Then in the nineteenth century some physiologists
began to study sensations, measuring them, and from this there came
into being a different kind of psychology, which was practised in laboratories, involved delicate measuring devices and was intended to
be, above all, a science, differing from other sciences like astronomy
and physics as they differ from one another, by virtue of its field, not
its style or principles. This kind of psychology developed rapidly, not
without opposition from practitioners of physics and other more established sciences, who in some universities prevented the establishment of psychology departments in science faculties, and the time
came when Allport could say: “Most psychologists desire above all
else to be considered scientists”,41 as opposed to arts-faculty people,
and R. S. Peters wrote:
The inspiration behind theorising in psychology has been, in the
main, the success of other sciences like physiology, chemistry, and
mechanics, and the idea that there could be an all-inclusive theory
of human behaviour if psychology were to adopt the postulates
and method of other sciences. A contributory factor, too, has been
41 Allport, “Psychology” in College Reading and Religion, p. 81.
12 1 Determinism
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the understandable determination of psychologists to make their
enquiries “scientific”.42
The scientific approach was taken to an extreme by the Behaviorists,
who, precisely because they were so insistent on being scientific, had
an enormous influence, not so much on clinical as on theoretical
psychology. Behaviorism began before World War I and developed
in various ways in the post-war years.43
Almost all these scientific theoretical psychologists believed that to
be a scientist it was necessary to be a determinist. As William James
said, a psychologist has “a great motive in favour of determinism. He
wants to build a Science”.44 Their long-range aim was to find the laws
which govern human behaviour so that eventually the actions of human beings would be as explicable and predictable as the movements
of the planets. Belief in free will, they thought, must go the way of
belief in a flat earth.
This can be seen in Freud, who was greatly influenced by a Positivist professor when he was at medical school in Vienna. Writing in
1901, he admitted that people are under the impression that their
inner and outer actions are not predetermined:
Many people, as is well known, contest the assumption of complete psychical determinism by appealing to a special feeling of
conviction that there is a free will. This feeling of conviction exists;
and it does not give way before a belief in determinism.
In big decisions, he went on, we feel that we could not have acted
otherwise, but if someone is asked to think of a number between
nought and ten and thinks of eight, he imagines that he could have
chosen any other number:
42 Peters, The Concept of Motivation, p. 2.
43 John B. Watson (1878-1958) developed his theory from around 1907;
in 1913 he issued, as a lecture and an article, what has been called the
manifesto of Behaviorism and in 1924 he published Behaviorism. The word
“Behaviorism” meant Watson’s system until in the nineteen-forties neobehaviorism appeared. The most notable Behaviorist of recent years has been
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), who clearly set out not merely to work as a
Behaviorist but to win converts everywhere. When his influence was at its
height, “Behaviorism” meant what he was promoting.
44 James, Psychology, p. 457.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
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It is precisely with regard to the unimportant, indifferent decisions that we would like to claim that we could just as well have
acted otherwise, that we have acted of our free – and unmotivated
– will.
But, said Freud, if a man thinks of eight it is because something has
made him think of it rather than any other number, he thinks he was
free only because the cause was subconscious, and so “determination
in the psychical sphere is still carried out without any gaps”.45 He
said:
You nourish the illusion of there being such a thing as psychical
freedom, and you will not give it up. I am sorry to say that I disagree with you categorically over this.46
A few lectures later he said:
I have already taken the liberty of pointing out to you that there
is within you a deep-rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice,
that this belief is quite unscientific, and that it must give ground
before the claims of a determinism which governs even mental
life.47
(“I have already taken the liberty” is an odd way of introducing an
affirmation of determinism.) In 1919 he referred to “our suppressed
acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of free will”:48 that
is, we mistakenly think we have free will because we suppress knowledge of the volitions which determine our actions. It is clear that
Freud was a determinist because he thought that to be a scientist he
had to deny free will.49
45 Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Works, vol. 6, pp. 253254.
46 Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Works, vol. 15, p. 49.
47 ibid., chap. 6. This is from the Standard Edition of Freud’s works, vol.
15, 1961. The 1963 edition, from the same publisher, has: “Once before I
ventured to tell you” (p. 106), but what Freud said was: “Ich habe mir schon
die Freiheit genommen”. Roubiczek discusses Freud on determinism, and
this passage, in Ethical Values in the Age of Science, pp. 34-44, and Gay discusses Freud’s determinism in “Freud and Freedom” in On Reading Freud,
pp. 74-94.
48 Freud, “The Uncanny”, Standard Edition of Works, vol. 17, p. 236.
49 When speaking as a therapist, Freud talked differently: see below, p.
193.
12 1 Determinism
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It can also be seen in the highly influential psychologist, B. F. Skinner (1904-90), who put many of his ideas into a sort of novel, Walden
Two, in which a character by the name of Frazier stands for Skinner
himself. At one point in the novel Frazier says: “I deny that freedom
[free will] exists at all”. Another character, Castle, says: “At least you’ll
grant that you feel free”. The conversation continues:
“The
‘feeling
of
freedom’
should
deceive
no
one,” said Frazier. “Give me a concrete case.”
“Well, right now," Castle said. He picked up a book
of matches. "I'm free to hold or drop these matches."
"You will, of course, do one or the other," said Frazier. "Linguistically or logically there seem to be two possibilities, but I submit
that there's only one in fact. The determining forces may be subtle
but they are inexorable. I suggest that as an orderly person you
will probably hold – ah! you drop them! Well, you see, that's all
part of your behaviour with respect to me. You couldn't resist the
temptation to prove me wrong. It was all lawful [i.e., governed by
laws]. You had no choice. The deciding factor entered rather late,
and naturally you couldn't foresee the result when you first held
them up. There was no strong likelihood that you would act in
either direction, and so you said you were free.50
In later works, Skinner distinguished between a pre-scientific view of
human behaviour and the scientific one, which is determinist:
In what we may call the pre-scientific view, ... a person’s behaviour is at least to some extent his own achievement. He is free to
deliberate, decide, and act, possibly in original ways, and he is to
be given credit for his successes and blamed for his failures. In the
scientific view ... a person’s behaviour is determined by a genetic
endowment traceable to the evolutionary history of the species
and by the environmental circumstances to which as an individual
he has been exposed.
He also said that neither the prescientific libertarian view nor the
scientific determinist view can be proved, and went on:
It is in the nature of scientific inquiry that the evidence should
shift in favour of the second. As we learn more about the effects
of the environment, we have less reason to attribute any part of
50 Skinner, Walden Two, pp. 257-258. Concerning the example, see above,
p. 29.
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human behaviour to an autonomous controlling agent [i.e., a free
self ].51
If there is a proof for determinism in this, it can be summed up as
follows: science presupposes determinism; psychology, the study of
human acts, is a science; therefore human acts are determined.
Whereas physicists explain determinism in terms of atomic particles, many psychologist-determinists explain it in terms of psychological forces. Some say that our decisions are determined by motives, which they think are analogous to physical forces. They say
that if, for instance, someone is going to build a house, the quality motive may be as it were trying to make him spend $100,000
on it and the economy-motive might be trying to make him spend
only $70,000; if the two motives are of equal strength, he necessarily spends $85,000 but if the quality-motive is twice as strong as the
economy-motive he spends $90,000. In more complex cases what a
person does can in principle be predicted by means of a polygon of
motives, just as when forces are acting on a body its movement can
be predicted by means of a polygon of forces. Others say that our
decisions are determined by subconscious needs and drives, such as
the need which a man might feel to prove to himself that he is still
young. Robert P. Knight writes:
Whatever human actions or decisions seem to indicate, the operation of free will, or a freedom of choice, can be shown, on closer
inspection and analysis, to be based on unconscious determinism.
The causal [i.e., determining] factors were there and operative, but
were simply not in the conscious awareness of the individual.52
The commitment to determinism is reflected in some psychological reference books. For instance, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology has eleven lines about free will, fifty about determinism, and
The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987) has a long entry under
“Determinism and Free Will” which is all about determinism; under
“Free Will” it says: “See ‘Determinism and Free Will’”.
51 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 101.
52 Knight, “Determinism, ‘Freedom’ and Psychotherapy”. Emphasis
mine.
12 1 Determinism
161
CLiniCaL PsyCHoLogy
For centuries, clinical psychology did not exist. For instance, when
Desdemona noticed that Othello was behaving strangely, no one advised her to consult a psychologist. If people wanted personal advice,
they went to a priest or a friend. Clincal or practical psychology appeared later and I imagine that now clinical psychologists outnumber theoretical psychologists.
We encountere here, once more, the difference between theoreticians and practitioners. When determinism was assumed as the
prevailing theory among psychologists in the United States, various
schools of psychology appeared and gained acceptance among clinicians, mainly because they assumed free will, as did the clinicians.
One such school was that of Humanistic Psychology, which was
launched around 1954 by Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and others. Another school was that of Existential Psychology, which began
in the United States around 1958 and in which Rollo May was a
leader. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, the originator
of Logotherapy, says: “The experiences of [concentration] camp life
show that man does have a choice of action”,53 and in a “Critique of
Pan-Determinism” he says:
Man is not fully conditioned and determined; he determined
himself whether to give in to conditions or stand up to them. In
other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not
simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what
he will become in the next moment.54
Speaking for Transactional Analysis, Thomas A. Harris says: “The
goal of Transactional Analysis is to enable a person to have freedom
of choice, the freedom to change at will, to change the responses to
recurring and new stimuli”.55
William James (1842-1910) is an interesting figure. On the one
hand, he wanted to be scientific, he wrote Essays in Radical Empiricism, and he felt that determinism was part of the scientific-empirical
system. He could not, however, believe it and in 1884 he declared
53 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 103.
54 ibid., p. 206.
55 Harris, I’m O.K. – You’re O.K., p. 58; see pp. 61-64.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
162
that he was for free will, even though he could not prove it. He
said:
I thus disclaim openly on the threshold [of the lecture] all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most
I can hope is to induce some of you to follow my example in assuming it is true, and acting as if it was true.56
Morality, he said in 1890, postulates free will. He said that there is no
possibility that biographies will ever be written deductively, or in advance of the events which they narrate. If this means that psychology
cannot be a science, he said, so be it. “Psychology will be psychology,
and Science Science”.57 He added that in that case Science must be
told that its order of uniform causation may be enveloped in a wider
order, the rest of which cannot be explained scientifically.
Karl Menninger is a more recent person of interest. He used to
deny free will, but subsequently he changed his mind. Writing in
1973, he proposed “the revival or reassertion of personal responsibility in all human acts, good and bad. Not total responsibility, but not
zero either”.58 “Most of us,” he said, “favour the ‘common-sense’
view that by taking thought we can control, modify, restrain some of
our behaviour some of the time”.59
soMe PartiCuLar fieLDs
CriMinoLogy
Determinism has radical implications for the science of criminology. This is such a big topic that I shall deal with it in a separate
chapter.
History as a sCienCe
In the nineteenth century some historians, too, wanted to be scientific and so thought that they had to profess determinism. H. T.
Buckle, in his History of Civilisation in England (1857), said:
Rejecting, then, the metaphysical doctrine of free will, ... we are
driven to the conclusion that the actions of men, being determined
56
57
58
59
James, “The Dilemma of Determinism”, p. 115.
James, Principles of Psychology, I,576.
Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin?, p. 178.
ibid., p. 185.
12 1 Determinism
163
solely by their antecedents, must have a character of uniformity,
that is to say, must under precisely the same circumstances, always
issue in precisely the same results.60
(“Metaphysical” is the opposite of “scientific” and is here used damningly.) He ended the work with the conviction that the course of human affairs is “permeated by one glorious principle of universal and
undeviating regularity”.61 Taine, who was an ardent determinist, said
in A History of English Literature (1863):
No matter if the facts be physical or moral, they all have causes;
there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is
for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat. Vice and
virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar,62
and, he clearly meant, they were determined by their causes. In the
United States, John Fiske in 1874 insisted that if events are not determined by laws, then chance rules; hence, he said, if you deny
determinism, history “becomes an unruly chaos, a Tohu-va-Bohu,
where event stumbles after event, and change jostles change, without
sequence and without law”, and where anything might have happened at any time (for example, “the French Revolution might have
happened in the reign of Louis XI”); and so he said that “to write
history on any method furnished by the free will doctrine would be
utterly impossible”.63 Finally, Tolstoy said: “If the will of every man
were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history
would be a series of disconnected incidents”, not governed by laws.
This seemed to him to be absurd. “Free will,” he said, “is for history only an expression of the unknown remainder of what we know
about the laws of human life”; and he said that just as it was hard for
people to abandon the idea of the earth’s fixity, but it had to be done,
so it will be hard for people to abandon the idea of free will, but “in
the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that
does not exist, and to recognise a [causal] dependence of which we
are not yet conscious”.64
60
61
62
63
64
Buckle, History of Civilisation in England, vol. 1, chap. 1, p. 11.
ibid., p. 902 (the end of the book).
Taine, History of English Literature, pp. 10-11, from the introduction.
Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, pp. 187-188.
Tolstoy, War and Peace, second epilogue, chaps., 8, 10, 12.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
According to Karl Popper (1902-1994), what he called “historicism” dominated the social sciences and history in the first half of
the twentieth century. He said, “I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach
to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is its
principal aim”,65 and he did not agree with it. This meant, of course,
that it would eventually become as possible to predict election results
as it is to predict eclipses, which is to say that determinism was assumed to be true.
Literature, infLuenCeD by sCienCe
In the nineteenth century, some novelists thought that determinism was an essential element of the modern (scientific) world-view,
and accepted it. These were the Naturalistic novelists, some of whom
believed that heredity determines a person’s nature, which determines
his or her actions. Perhaps the most notable of these novelists was
Zola (1840-1902), who wrote what would now be called documentary novels and who supposed that his characters did not have free
will: for example, because of her childhood Nana can only behave
as she does, and because of his inherited character Count Muffat
cannot resist her. Others, in America, were Oliver Wendell Holmes,
who is better known as a lawyer and a judge and whose ideas about
heredity also influenced his decisions as a member of the Supreme
Court, and Theodore Dreiser.66
65 Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, p. 3.
66 See Westbrook, Free Will and Determinism in American Literature.
CHaPter 13
CoMPatibiLisM
anD iMPLiCations of DeterMiMisM
CoMPatibiLisM
Some thinkers say that an action is free when it proceeds from an
agent who or which is subject to no outside force or influence of any
kind. Hobbes in the seventeenth century said that liberty is simply
“the absence of all the impediments to action that are not contained
in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent”.1 Brand Blanshard
said that when someone is doing logic and his mind is clear, the
impersonal laws of logic are so clear in his mind and he sees logical
connections so quickly that he is carried inexorably from each necessary step to the next until the conclusion is reached; and in this
he achieves freedom because he wants to be thinking like this. He
said also that composers, who were inspired, have had visions of the
works as wholes in their minds and these visions seemed to take over
their pens and complete themselves through them. “It determined
them,” he said, “but they were free, because to be determined by this
whole was ... their desire.” Similarly, he said, the moral man feels
most himself and most free when he is in the grip of a moral vision
and does what he has to do.2
In the twentieth century, many logical positivists and analytical
philosophers hoped by clear definition of terms to bring to an end
conflicts which had divided philosophers, they saw that if freedom
is understood in this way there is no conflict between it and determinism, and they professed what came to be called compatibilism,
1 Hobbes and the Anglican Bishop Bramhall of Derry had a conversation
about free will in Paris in 1646; afterwards, the bishop wrote to Hobbes to
explain his position further and Hobbes replied at length. Hobbes’s reply
was published in 1654 as Of Liberty and Necessity. His Questions Concerning
Liberty, Necessity and Chance appeared in 1656.
2 Blanshard, “The Case for Determinism”, pp. 29-30.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
an important statement of which seems to have been made by R. E.
Hobart in “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable
Without It” (1934). In 1967 Richard Taylor said of compatibilism:
The significance of these ideas is enormous, for they appear to
many to offer the means of once and for all reconciling the apparent opposition between determinism and freedom, thus dissolving
the whole problem of free will. Many philosophers are still convinced that this insight is entirely correct and that there really is
therefore no problem of free will.3
More recent books by compatibilists include Kevin Magill, Freedom
and Experience (1997) and Hilary Bok, Freedom and Responsibility
(1998). Bok says:
My aim in this book is to show that the fact that our actions and
choices can be explained mechanistically does not imply that we
are not free; and therefore that the claims that we are free and
morally responsible does not presuppose a libertarian account of
human agency.4
Thomas Aquinas professed something like compatibilism at one
stage, before the word was invented, and in the post-Reformation
period a few Catholics endeavoured to solve the problem of grace
and free will by these means.5
Compatibilists confuse freedom, which is the absence of external
force, and free will, which is the ability to choose between possible
alternatives. For instance, in the passage from the encyclopedia quoted above, Richard Taylor talks of “the apparent opposition between
determinism and freedom”, which is not where the opposition is at
all. To take Blanshard’s example, when a composer creates a work,
whether in his head, at a keyboard or on paper, he often writes bar after bar in a predetermined way but there are times when he can go in
different directions and he makes a choice: the work as a whole does
not determine all its details. This is incompatible with determinism.
Books and articles about free will by analytical philosophers contain
3 Taylor, “Determinism” in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, p.
365.
4 Bok, Freedom and Responsibility, p. 7. See above, p. 30 concerning this use
of the word “libertarian”.
5 See above, pp. 101, 107.
13 1 Compatibilism & Implications of Determimism
167
thousands of pages about compatibilism, many of which I have endeavoured to read and all of which I have found boring.
At one time it was thought that the conflict between the free will
doctrine and determinism could be resolved by making a radical distinction between the outer world of physical events and the inner
world of psychological acts and saying that determinism reigns in
the outer world while free will exists in consciousness. Then, it was
said, as the two doctrines are about different things, they are not
incompatible. When one first hears this it sounds plausible for about
ten seconds, then one realises that psychological acts and physical
events are not in two totally separate worlds and that if I have free
will in consciousness when I decide whether to speak or not, neither
my speaking nor my not-speaking is physically determined. Some
more recent authors have said that free will belongs to the agent’s
language, determinism to the spectator’s, and each is valid in its own
language. But the fact that agents and spectators talk to one another,
and the fact that a person can talk to himself or herself as both agent
and spectator of his or her own actions, show that there are not two
totally separate languages, and if something is said by the agent and
the opposite is said by the spectator they cannot both be right.6
Another compatibilist position is that when a human being is in
a particular situation there is only one thing he can possibly do, as
the determinists say; but if the state of his nerves were different, if his
previous experience had been different, or if some other factors were
present in the situation, it would be possible for him to do something else, and therefore he can be said to be free. However, first, for
a person to have free will more than one course of action must be
possible for him as he actually is. Second, if determinism is true, the
state of the agent’s nerves, being the result of determining causes,
could not possibly be different; therefore the hypotheses proposed
are inherently impossible, so that it is in fact impossible for it to be
possible for the agent to do anything except what he does. Third, this
compatibilist should say that if things were different the agent would
6 The two-languages idea is proposed by Strawson and Warnock in Pears
(ed.), Freedom and the Will, pp. 63-67. It is refuted by Lucas in The Freedom
of the Will, pp. 17-20.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
168
necessarily do something else. Once again it becomes clear that if you
accept determinism you cannot hold free will.
tHe trutH Lies in betWeen?
Sometimes the free will doctrine is imagined to be the view that all
human beings have free will all the time, or even that at every moment people are evenly balanced between equally attractive alternatives; and then it is said that the truth lies somewhere between the
two extremes of determinism and free will. But that simply is not the
free will doctrine as any of its defenders understand it. Determinism
is total: it is the belief that all acts are predetermined. The free will
doctrine, on the other hand, is partial. It recognises that some actions of some human beings are predetermined and confines itself to
saying that in general human beings have free will. Also, it says that
people face possible, not evenly balanced, alternatives.7 There is no
intermediate position between it and determinism.
iMPLiCations of DeterMinisM
PossibiLity
The word “possible” usually implies “not necessary”. For instance,
no one would say that next January will possibly have thirty-one
days. Objectively, then, if everything is necessary, nothing is possible.
Hence for a determinist, objectively speaking there are no possible
beings or events.
However, the word “possible” can be used to mean that subjective
ignorance exists about something. If, for example, I know that the
sun will rise at some time between half past six and seven tomorrow
and someone asks me whether the sun will be up at ten to seven, I
may answer, “Possibly”. A determinist can use the word in this way.
resPonsibiLity
As we have seen, if I am able to do either of two things and I freely
do one of them, I am responsible for it and I can be thanked, praised
or blamed for it. If, however, I do not do something because I am
unable to do it, or if I do something (for example, fall asleep when
exhausted) which I cannot help doing, I am not responsible and deserve neither thanks, praise nor blame. (It is true that if we find holes
7 See above, p. 22.
13 1 Compatibilism & Implications of Determimism
169
in a garden we may “blame the dog” for them and if a dog has done
something useful we may praise it, saying “Good dog!”, but there is
an element of make-believe in this.) Determinism, then, in saying
that it is always impossible for a human being to do any but one of
the things which appear to be possible for him, denies what Skinner
calls “the old notion of personal responsibility”.8 Honderich says that
“choices are fixed by heredity and environment” and that therefore
“there is no sense in which the person is responsible for any of the
bodily or neural events”, that is, for his or her actions or volitions.9
Richard Double, in The Non-Reality of Free Will, says: “In this book
I shall argue that there can be no such thing as free will and moral
responsibility”10 and in the first sentence of another book he says,
“There cannot be any such thing as freewill, and there cannot be any
such thing as moral responsibility either”.11 Einstein said:
A man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal,
so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an
inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes.12
Consequently, determinism implies that no one ever deserves anything, whether it be praise, thanks or blame, or owes an apology.
This conclusion was drawn by Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and by
Nietzsche, who said:
The complete unaccountability of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest draught the man of knowledge has to swallow
if he has been accustomed to seeing in accountability and duty
the patent of his humanity. All his evaluations, all his feelings of
respect and antipathy have merely become disvalued and false. ...
He may no longer praise, no longer censure, for it is absurd to
praise and censure nature and necessity.13
Finally, speaking for the people in Skinner’s imaginary commune,
8 Skinner, Walden Two, p. 174.
9 Honderich, How Free Are You?, pp. 31,33.
10 Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (1991), p. 5.
11 Double, Metaphilosophy and Free Will (1996), p. 3.
12 Einstein, writing around 1930, Ideas and Opinions, p. 39.
13 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, # 107. The word verantwortlich is usually translated as “responsible”; Hollingdale, whose translation I have used, translates it as “accountable”.
170
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
in which I for one would not choose to live, Frazier says that “the
deliberate expression of thanks is prohibited by the code”.14 This, by
the way, is odd since prohibitions suppose free will.
In saying that determinists deny responsibility, I have been talking mainly about “hard determinists”, who flatly deny free will and
are prepared to take the logical consequences. Compatibilists, who
are “soft determinists”, maintain that when we are not being forced
to act by some other agent we are responsible for our actions in the
sense that they happen because of the natures which we have. Some
soft determinists, indeed, maintain that responsibility makes sense
only in a determinist system. In 1969 Harry Frankfurt wrote “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility”, a highly influential
article in which he maintained that what I have called multiple possibility, which in the first paragraph of this book I said is essential to
free will, is not necessary for moral responsibility. If, however, Frankfurt’s sense of the word is accepted, we are responsible for breathing
out carbon dioxide and a person who steps over a cliff by accident is
responsible for falling; also, beasts in their natural state are responsible for their actions and indeed water is responsible for evaporating,
condensing and falling as rain. Surely the word cannot properly be
used in this way and determinists are not entitled to claim that they
believe in responsibility. William James said that compatibilism is “a
quagmire of evasion”.15
MoraLity
If it is true as I have said that morality presupposes free will,16
then determinism implies that there is no morality. Hard determinists accept this, but soft determinists maintain that a determinist can
make statements with the word “ought” in them and so can believe
in morality. It can be said of a carpet that it “ought to last ten years”,
meaning that if it is not defective and gets normal use it will, as a
matter of fact, last ten years (if it becomes worn-out after only six
years of normal use there was something wrong with it). Also, if
someone asks us how to get from London to Paris we may say, “You
14 Skinner, Walden Two, pp. 170-171; see p. 172.
15 James, “The Dilemma of Determinism”, p. 117.
16 See above, p. 29.
13 1 Compatibilism & Implications of Determimism
171
ought to take the train”. These ought-statements are compatible with
determinism, but of course they are not about moral obligations and
the fact remains that determinism and morality are incompatible.
One implication of this is that moral condemnation and moral
outrage are disallowed. J. E. MacDonald said in 1955 that free will
“would make a chaotic world in which scientific analysis would be
impossible”; and “the concepts of responsibility and punishment
popular in legal and psychiatric practice are theological and metaphysical anachronisms”. When someone has acted in an antisocial
way, he said, “questions of ‘mad’ or ‘bad’, with their value-judgements and emotional loadings, do not arise” and in such a case “we
are confronted with a person who has committed some action that is
abnormal, by its infrequency of occurrence, and that has brought its
doer into conflict with his fellows”.17
PoLitiCaL freeDoM
I said earlier that a person who believes in free will can, without
any inconsistency, maintain that human beings should be allowed
very little freedom.18 It is also possible for a person to be a determinist and maintain that because, generally speaking, human beings are
predetermined to act well they can and should be allowed a great
deal of freedom. In fact, Locke, Mill and other great determinists of
the past were strongly in favour of liberty, and probably today most
determinists in Western countries are in favour of civil liberties.
Lewis N. Feuer has proposed what he calls “the Principle of
Wings”, which is that a philosophical or scientific idea which is used
by one political extreme, which alters it, will one day be used by the
other extreme, which will alter it in another way. He maintains that
determinism was used first by conservatives, who were in favour of
sterilising low-class criminals, paupers and other people whom they
regarded as “unfit”; it was used later by liberals, to excuse inhabitants
of bad environments from blame for bad behaviour and to justify
public spending to remedy the defects of those environments.19
17 MacDonald, “The Concept of Responsibility”, pp. 712-716.
18 See above, p. 41.
19 Feuer, Ideology and the Ideologists, pp. 20-56.
CHaPter 14
for DeterMinisM
PHiLosoPHiCaL arguMents for DeterMinisM
eMPiriCisM
Extreme empiricists maintain that we can know only what we observe, which means that where events are concerned we can make
statements only about those that have happened. If it is said that before a person acts he or she is able to do either of two or more things,
this is not an observed fact; if after someone has acted it is said that
he or she could have done something else, this is not an observed
fact, either. Therefore we must reject free will.
CLarity
Richard Double, in The Non-Reality of Free Will, says that there
are six conditions which a theory must fulfil, the first of which is
“the conceptual clarity condition”, and that what he calls libertarian
theories fail in this respect.1 In an article on determinism Richard
Taylor says:
Both of these conceptions – that of an agent as distinct from the
states or events of his history, and that of performing as distinct
from being a sufficient condition – are certainly odd and hard to
conceive of clearly. Indeed, a philosopher could not be accused
of stubbornness if he preferred to give up moral responsibility to
embracing these two notions.2
In An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, a long book published
for beginners in 1968, John Hospers says if two people are inclined
to drink too much and one gets drunk while the other does not,
“Must we say simply that one decided to resist and the other to give
in, and that no more can be said because both decisions are selfcaused and self-originating?” He goes on: “Unless this strange con1 Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will, pp. 218, 221.
2 Taylor, “Determinism and the Theory of Agency”, p. 228.
14 1 For Determimism
173
cept can be further clarified, it would seem that this view is palatable but unintelligible”: that is, he dismisses free will as an unclear
idea.3 D. J. O’Connor says that determinism should be affirmed
because it is clear and the free will doctrine is not.4 More recently,
Galen Strawson in Freedom and Belief, Thomas Nagel in The View
from Nowhere (both 1986) and Richard Double in The Non-Reality of
Freewill (1991) dismiss free will as an incoherent concept. Writing in
1993, Ted Honderich does not go quite so far, since he says that the
free will doctrine “does seem to me sufficiently intellectually respectable to deserve consideration”,5 but he says that it is “less clear, less
consistent, less worked-out” than determinism.
tHe PrinCiPLe of suffiCient reason
It is a basic principle of philosophy that there is a sufficient reason
for everything, or that everything can be completely explained. By
explaining something some philosophers meant naming its cause and
stating the law according to which it followed from that cause: for instance, if the pressure of a quantity of gas doubled while the temperature did not change, the explanation would be that its volume was
halved and the pressure of a given mass of gas is inversely proportionate to the volume (this is Boyle’s law). Ted Honderich presents this
view and goes on to say: “In my life so far I have never known a single
event to lack an explanation in the fundamental sense, and no doubt
your life has been the same”.6 According to the free will doctrine, a
free act cannot be completely explained by pointing to its antecedents, which were the physical and psychological forces acting on the
agent, and stating the law according to which it necessarily followed
from them. Therefore, determinists say, the free will doctrine is in
conflict with a basic principle of philosophy, and hence is false.
3 Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, p. 345. Note that he
talks of the decision causing or originating itself, not of the person causing
it or being its origin.
4 O’Connor, Free Will, p. 47.
5 Honderich, How Free Are You?, p. 54.
6 Honderich, “Determinism as True”, p. 462.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
tHe DiLeMMa: if not DeterMineD, tHen ranDoM
Some authors maintain that an event must be either determined
or random, one or the other. If you reject determinism, then, you
implicitly affirm that human acts are random and when you claim to
be defending the dignity of man as a being endowed with free will,
you are in actual fact attributing to him the randomness of an alphaparticle.7 Lessing is reported to have said: “A fine privilege it would
be to be subject to a blind power that follows no rule! Would I be any
the less a plaything of chance because chance is situated inside me?”
Moreover, the determinists go on, if my actions are chance accidents,
I am not responsible for them;8 hence to assert free will is to deny
human dignity and responsibility.
Furthermore, determinists say, if human behaviour were random,
we would never be able to rely on anyone: just as a uranium atom
may at any moment emit an alpha-particle, so the most gentle man
may at any moment kill his wife, jump out a window or join the Foreign Legion, and a mother would be just as likely to strangle her baby
as to nurse it. Also, after a murder has been committed the detective
would have to regard everyone as equally suspect.9 Determinists
7 Ayers, who is not a determinist, formulates this argument well: “Let us
suppose that some human actions are not caused, that they are undetermined and so really could have been otherwise. This is simply to suppose
them accidental, random, unpredictable and unrelated to the agent’s personality. ... The indeterminist must face the complaint that he gives us nothing more than the freedom of a microparticle to move at random.” (The
Refutation of Determinism, p. 3.)
8 Ayer, not Ayers, whom I quoted above, writes: “Either it is an accident
that I choose to act as I do or it is not. If it is an accident, then it is merely a
matter of chance that I did not choose otherwise; and if it is merely a matter
of chance that I did not choose otherwise, it is surely irrational to hold me
morally responsible for choosing as I did. But if it is not an accident that I
choose to do one thing rather than another, then presumably there is some
causal explanation of my choice, and in that case we are led back to determinism.” (Philosophical Essays, p. 275.)
9 Fiske says that “if volitions arise without cause” we cannot work from
connections between deeds and antecedent attitudes. If a murder has been
committed, the victim’s friend might have been the murderer as easily as his
enemy. (Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part 2, chap. 17.)
14 1 For Determimism
175
go on to say that this is absurd and that therefore human actions are
determined.
tHe arguMent froM stateMents about tHe future
In chapter 5, I argued that, because we have free will, statements
about future free acts are neither true nor false.10 The determinist
argues that because statements are either true or false, we do not have
free will. Chrysippus (ca. 279-206 BC) used this argument to prove
that whatever happens was fated to happen.
HoW DeterMinists exPLain our
sense of free WiLL
As I said earlier, everyone in his right mind knows that all of us
often find ourselves in situations where it seems to us that there are
several possible courses open to us. We have what Blanshard calls
“the stubborn feeling of freedom, which seems to resist all dialectical
solvents”. If this is an illusion, how does it arise? If everything can be
explained by its antecedents, what antecedents explain this?
Some determinists say that the factors which determine our choices are so complex that we cannot see them working and so do not
realise that our choices are determined. It used to be said of chance
that it is just another name for our ignorance of determining causes,
and determinists say the same of free will. Blanshard quotes another
explanation from Henry Sidgwick, who said:
When we are making a choice our faces are always turned toward
the future, toward the consequences that one act or the other will
bring us, never toward the past with its possible sources of constraint. Hence these sources are not noticed. Hence we remain
unaware that we are under constraint at all. Hence we feel free
from such constraint.11
Sir Francis Galton, he says, for some time made a practice of looking
back, shortly after he had made a choice, on what had led up to it; he
always found constraining factors which had determined his choice,
and which he had not noticed at the moment of choosing because he
had then been looking in the opposite direction, towards the future;
and so he became a determinist.
10 See above, p. 61.
11 Blanshard, “The Case for Determinism”, p. 21.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
tHe eMotionaL aPPeaL of DeterMinisM
People do not become determinists on purely rational grounds,
and to understand determinism it is, I believe, useful to ask why
anyone would want to be a determinist.
First, determinism means that beneath the appearance of our
world, which seems so confused at times, there is total regularity,
order and the rule of scientific law. The free will doctrine, on the
other hand, means that some events are inherently lawless, unpredictable and inexplicable. The choice between the two systems can
seem to be a choice between order and chaos. Now all sane people are
disturbed by chaos and have an emotional need for order, sequence
and reason in the world around them. Therefore determinism has
not only a rational but also an emotional appeal.12 William James
saw this and said that “the principle of causality” is an expression
which covers a subjective and emotional demand “that the sequence
of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one
thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now
phenomenally appears”.13 Einstein said that determinists are “imbued with the ordered regularity of events”,14 that is, they love order
and regularity and want to believe that every event in the universe
is predetermined. One senses the emotion in these words. Finally,
when D. J. O’Connor says that “determinism makes no unsightly
breaches in the general scientific picture of the world”,15 the word
“unsightly” is emotional.
Second, some people dislike what they think are emotionallycharged discussions. At a dinner table they happily talk about differ12 John Glenn Gray says that many soldiers are fatalists out of a need for
order. “The professional soldier,” he says, “feels the need to reduce the capriciousness of his world as much as possible. He chooses to conceive an orderly universe with stable and traditional values, in which death must have
its rank and time like everything else.” He chooses to believe “that there is
nothing haphazard about the progress of events, whatever the outward appearance may be.” Professional military men want to inhabit a world which
is governed by iron laws, and in which “an individual fate is an insignificant
part of a universal determinism”. (The Warriors, p. 127.)
13 James, “The Dilemma of Determinism”, p. 116.
14 Einstein, Out of My Later Years, p. 28.
15 See above, p. 154.
14 1 For Determimism
177
ent makes of car, but if someone present begins to talk about his or
her daughter’s recent death, they fall silent. If they are philosophers,
they enjoy listening to determinists talking about how event A is
connected with event B or about someone deciding whether or not
to raise his arm (meaninglessly). They hate it when defenders of free
will analyse real-life cases and talk about responsibility, anguish and
ultimate options. If they attend a philosophy conference they happily go to lectures on subjects like “Every event A is so connected
with a later event B that, given A, B must occur” (Blanshard)16 and
they stay away from lectures on subjects like: “That is what abandonment implies, that we ourselves decide our being; and with this
abandonment goes anguish” (Sartre).17 That is, determinism appeals
to them, emotionally.
Third, determinism offers release from the burden of responsibility. If you hold the free will doctrine, and you have to decide whether
more nuclear power-stations should be built, you weigh the alternatives with great care and you know that you will be responsible for
the effects of your decision. If you are a determinist, you can tell
yourself that you will do whatever you have been programmed to
do and that anyone seeking later for what caused the effects of your
decision will work back through your decision to its antecedents,
absolving you of responsibility as he goes by.
Fourth, determinism can offer release from guilt, for, if determinism is true, just as no one should hold anyone else responsible for his
actions or morally condemn anyone else,18 guilt-feelings are as irrational as superstitious fear of the number thirteen and no one should
hold himself or herself responsible for anything he or she has done. If
a determinist takes the Myers-Briggs tests, is told that he is a “T” and
reads that a T “sometimes ignores and hurts other people’s feelings”,
he can say: “That’s me! I’ve often done that and now I know why. I
couldn’t help it, because I’m a T. It was never my fault”. (A believer
in free will, on the other hand, says: “I had and have a tendency to
do that, but it does not excuse me”.) Nietzsche says:
16 Blanshard, “The Case for Determinism”, p. 20.
17 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 39.
18 See above, p. 168.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
If a man is, finally, able to attain to the philosophical conviction
of the unconditional necessity of all actions and of their complete
unaccountability and to make it part of his flesh and blood, then
that remainder of the pang of conscience also disappears.19
Honderich, who is a determinist, says: “Determinism offers the compensation of an escape from a mordant kind of self-dislike and selfdisapproval”.20 Sartre, who was not a determinist, said that “psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first
an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of
excuse”.21 John Glenn Gray has written of the agonising guilt which
is experienced by many soldiers, not only because of what they themselves did but also because of what others on their side did, and they
knew about it and did nothing to stop them. He says that “the classic struggle between freedom [free will] and necessity often tears the
heart of one who has advanced a little in the consciousness of guilt”
and that “for the soldier in battle, the arguments for necessity [determinism] look very strong indeed”, because determinism can seem to
end his ache.22 Finally, the authors of Not In Our Genes say:
It is precisely because biological determinism is exculpatory that it
has such wide appeal. If men dominate women, it is because they
must. If employers exploit their workers, it is because evolution
has built into us the genes for entrepreneurial activity, xenophobia, tribalism and aggression.23
Finally, as we shall see, in the context of crime and punishment,
determinism now seems humane, since it implies that people ought
not to be held responsible for any crimes they may have committed
and that it is wrong to punish them.
19
20
21
22
23
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, # 133.
Honderich, How Free Are You?, p. 115.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 40.
Gray, The Warriors, p. 208.
Lewontin et al, Not in Our Genes, p. 237.
CHaPter 15
settLing tHe arguMent anD
rePLies to tHese arguMents
settLing tHe arguMent
Determinists and believers in free will tend to disagree about where
the onus of proof lies. Determinists situate themselves in the field of
scientific theory, declare that there the principle of causality is in
possession and so maintain that in the argument about free will the
onus of proof is on the person who affirms it. Thus Blanshard begins
his article by saying:
I am a determinist. None of the arguments offered on the other
side seem of much weight except one form of the moral argument,
and that itself is far from decisive. Perhaps the most useful thing I
can do in this paper is explain why the commoner arguments for
indeterminism do not, to my mind, carry conviction.1
He says in effect that human behaviour is predetermined until proved
free and he does not think it has been convincingly proved to be free,
therefore it is (or should be presumed to be) determined; and he calls
the free will doctrine “indeterminism” as though determinism were
the thesis and the free will doctrine the anti-thesis. Ernest Nagel,
quoted above,2 talks of “abandoning the deterministic principle”,
as though everyone starts life as a determinist and the believers in
free will have switched away from it. In the preface to Freedom and
Experience (1997), Kevin Magill says: “The truth of determinism is
assumed throughout the book and no attempt is made to argue the
case in favour of it”,3 as if it were in secure possession of the field.
Defenders of free will, on the other hand, situate themselves in real
life, declare that it is assumed there that people have free will and the
1 Blanshard, “The Case for Determinism”, p. 19.
2 Above, p. 154.
3 Magill, Freedom and Experience, p. x.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
responsibility that goes with it, and they insist that if anyone wishes
to deny this the onus is on him or her to disprove it.
How can either side prove its case? Not by experiments. If a number of people could be found who were exactly alike in all respects, so
that even their brains were exactly alike, and if they could be put, one
by one, into identical situations where they had to make important
choices, then if all made the same choice this would support determinism whereas if they made different choices this would prove free
will; but it is impossible to find such people. Also, it is impossible
to put the same person many times into the same situation and to
observe whether he always makes the same choice or not, because as
he considers his second choice he can remember the first and what
came of it, so that he and the situation are different from what they
were the first time; and when he faces the third choice, he and the
situation are different again. If either side is to prove its case, then, it
must be by argument. But it has proved extremely difficult for two
groups of thinkers with such different mentalities to argue with each
other, and hence debate has gone on and on and in these pages it
goes on some more.
The difference between determinists and believers in free will often
shows in their choice of examples. Sartre, who believed in free will,
discussed the case of a young man in occupied France who had to
decide whether to stay there or endeavour to go to England and join
the Free French Army,1 and I gave as examples five momentous
choices such as occur in real life.2 Determinists, as I said earlier,
tend to talk about choices between A and B or about utterly trivial
choices such as we usually make at random.3
rePLies to tHe arguMents
eMPiriCisM4
The rejection of free will by extreme empiricists sounds impressive
when it is stated in general terms. When it is applied to particular
cases, however, it is anything but impressive since it is unrealistic to
1
2
3
4
Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, pp. 35-36.
Above, p. 18.
See above, p. 29.
See above, p. 172.
15 1 Settling the Argument & Replies to These Arguments
181
say, of someone who is offered tea or coffee, that we cannot say that
he is able to take either because we can only know what we observe
and he has not yet done anything for us to observe; or that if he takes
the coffee we cannot say that he could have chosen tea because we
did not observe that.
CLarity5
Newtonian physics was clear, and by contrast the new physics
which replaced it was obscure; but those who because of this stuck to
the old physics were soon proved wrong: even in science, the truth
is not always, at first, clear and simple. Also, Mary Midgley remarks
that “determinism is, in fact, a much more obscure view, much harder to state, than people often suppose”6 and while Part I of this book,
which presents the free will doctrine, has defects, obscurity is not
one of them.
I also quoted Richard Taylor, who finds the idea of an agent and
the idea of performing an action “odd and hard to conceive of clearly” and gives this as a reason for not embracing free will and “moral
responsibility”. I said earlier that “person” is hard to define, but I also
said that everyone understands it and one needs to be a particular
kind of philosopher to find the idea of someone doing something
(which is what “an agent performing an action” means) “odd”. Joseph Donceel says:
A spiritualistic philosopher cannot help wondering why Professor
Taylor finds these two conceptions so odd and hard to conceive of
clearly. True, these notions “have long since been out of fashion”,
but only in some philosophical circles, not so in others. “They are
most difficult to comprehend clearly” if clear comprehension is
conceived in a rather narrow scientific way. Might not a doubt be
cast on the value of a philosophy which has no conceptual niche
for such important notions as human freedom and moral responsibility?7
5 Above, p. 172.
6 Midgley, Beast and Man, p. 65n.
7 Donceel, review of Hood (ed), Determinism and Freedom in the Age of
Modern Science, p. 529.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
tHe PrinCiPLe of CausaLity8
The principle of causality, which was stated above, is not a directly
observed fact. Vaihinger says that the free will doctrine “contradicts
observation which shows that everything obeys unalterable laws”,9
but, first, no one has observed everything, and, second, observation of human behaviour shows no such thing. Where on earth, one
wonders, was Vaihinger living that he could say a thing like that?
I also quoted Ted Honderich, who said: “In my life so far I have
never known a single event to lack an explanation in the fundamental sense, and no doubt your life has been the same”.10 Speaking for
myself, I’ll say that my life has not been the same as that.
Nor can the principle be demonstrated mathematically, in the way
that it can be proved that if 3x + 1 = 10, x equals 3. It has not been
proved in the way that certain cases have been proved in courts of
law, so conclusively that, even against one’s will, one has to assent to
the verdicts. Finally, it has not be proved in the way that scientific
hypotheses are generally proved, by predicting phenomena which are
subsequently observed, for after a century and a half of scientific psychology how many particular human actions have been predicted?
No more than is compatible with the free will doctrine. Determinists say that we are at present unable to make accurate predictions of
human behaviour because we cannot see all the details of a living human brain and even if we could the calculations would be of stupendous complexity, or because we cannot know absolutely everything
about anyone’s subconscious; but of course they cannot prove that
that is the only reason. The principle of causality applied to human
acts, then, or determinism, is an assumption, not a proven fact.
Moreover, there is a hidden contradiction between the two principles that everything is wholly explicable and that all things are explained by showing how they necessarily follow from their antecedents. If science explains something by its antecedents, its explanation
is incomplete until it has explained them, which it can do only by
means of their antecedents, and so on: going back in this way, science
either gives up and declares that nothing is wholly explicable, thus
8 Above, p. 152.
9 Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If, p. 43.
10 Honderich, “Determinism as True”, p. 461.
15 1 Settling the Argument & Replies to These Arguments
183
denying the first principle above, or else it makes a halt at something
which did not follow from antecedents and must simply be accepted as given, which denies the second principle. To save rationality
and explicability, then, anyone who takes this position must admit
that not everything is explained through its antecedents: something,
somewhere, must be intelligible in itself. Now according to the free
will doctrine when a person has to choose between alternatives there
are usually different reasons and motives for each of them, so that,
whichever he chooses, it will be possible to state his reasons for doing it; but, since he could have chosen something else and then we
would have stated the reasons for doing that, we do not have in
the antecedents the explanation of why he chooses this act with its
reasons over all the others with their reasons. We must simply accept that he so chose, as something intelligible in itself. The rational
scientist is in no position to object to this, since for him there must,
somewhere, be such a thing.
Determinists sometimes argue that science works on the assumption that the principle of causality is valid; but science has been successful; therefore the principle is valid. But, first, when people talk
about the success of science they usually have physics in mind. Well,
classical physicists, who held the principle of causality without qualification, believed in total order and the rule of law throughout the
universe.11 If it could have been shown then that some events were
not predetermined and predictable, they would have felt that their
world-order had been shattered and that chaos had come again. This
was eventually shown, not by Christians and philosophers who believed in free will but by modern physicists, not to mention biologists. I do not want to enter here into a discussion of the Indeterminacy Principle and chaos theory, but it can be said, without much
fear of contradiction, that until 1900 physics was deterministic but
after 1926 it was not.12
11 Above, p. 153.
12 It has been said that thermodynamics and Maxwell’s theory on light as
a wave were deterministic and they were among the last triumphs of classical physics. Planck’s work in 1900 was the beginning of quantum theory,
Heisenberg wrote his essay on indeterminacy in one day and a night in
July 1925, Schrödinger’s paper on wave mechanics was published in January 1926 and from then on, as I say above, classical physics was a thing of
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
Let me make it clear that I do not maintain that in adopting indeterminacy and “pure chance”, physics and biology have affirmed
free will, even implicitly. All I am saying is that they have destroyed
a classical argument for determinism. I will add that many, perhaps
most, physicists and other scientists believe in free will without giving the matter much thought, and Kai Nielsen says: “Historically
speaking, belief in determinism may have been an important stimulant to scientific inquiry, but we have no reason to believe that to
abandon determinism is to abandon the enterprise of science”.13 The
neurologist Sir John Eccles said: “There are thus no sound scientific
grounds for denying the freedom of the will, which virtually must be
assumed if we are to act as scientific investigators”.14
In conclusion, the idea that all human actions are predetermined
by physical causes and in principle predictable has entertaining implications. It means that the positions and velocities of particles determine how my tongue and lips move and hence what I say; it means,
as Popper remarks, that a deaf physicist with a diagram of Mozart’s
brain could in principle calculate the marks that Mozart made on
pieces of paper and so could produce what for him would be merely
spotty pieces of paper but what would in fact be Mozart’s operas and
concertos exactly as he wrote them. Indeed, this deaf physicist could
presumably calculate what marks Mozart would have made on pieces
of paper if he had not died at the age of thirty-five, and so give us
Mozart music which does not now exist.15
if not DeterMineD, tHen ranDoM16
I answered this argument before I presented it, when I explained
earlier that there are three different kinds of event, not two: there
the past. Einstein, who said that God does not play dice with the universe,
seems never to have accepted indeterminacy, and because of this he was not
a man of his time from 1926 until his death in 1955.
13 Nielsen, “Is to Abandon Determinism to Withdraw from the Enterprise of Science”, p. 21. This article is a reply to Ernest Nagel’s statement.
14 Eccles, The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind, p. 272.
15 Popper, “Of Clouds and Clocks” in Objective Knowledge, pp. 223224.
16 Above, p. 174.
15 1 Settling the Argument & Replies to These Arguments
185
are the determined event, the random event and the free act. Karl
Popper says:
Hume’s and Schlick’s ontological thesis that there cannot exist
anything intermediate between chance and determinism seems to
me not only highly dogmatic (not to say doctrinaire) but clearly
absurd.17
And C. A. Campbell says:
How often, for example, do we find the Determinist critic saying,
in effect, “Either the act follows necessarily upon precedent states,
or it is a mere matter of chance and accordingly of no moral significance.” The disjunction is invalid, for it does not exhaust the
possible alternatives. It seems to the critic to do so only because he
will limit himself to the standpoint which is proper, and indeed
alone possible, in dealing with the physical world, the standpoint
of the external observer. If only he would allow himself to assume
the standpoint which is not merely proper for, but necessary to,
the apprehension of subjective activity, the inner standpoint of the
practical consciousness in its actual functioning, he would find
himself obliged to recognise the falsity of his disjunction. Reflection upon the act of moral decision as apprehended from the inner standpoint would force him to recognise a third possibility,
as remote from chance as from necessity, that, namely, of creative
activity, in which ... nothing determines the act save the agent’s
doing of it.18
Also, as I said earlier, the free will doctrine does not imply that human beings are unreliable and erratic in their behaviour. It allows
judgements of probability to be made about what people will freely
do or have freely done.19 William James said:
A favourite argument against free will is that if it be true, a man’s
murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy,
a mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and
all of us be as ready to jump from fourth-storey windows as to go
out of front doors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be
excluded from debate till they learn what the real question is.20
17 Popper, Objective Knowledge, p. 228.
18 Campbell, “Has the Self Free Will?” in Of Selfhood and Godhood, pp.
177-178.
19 Above, p. 64.
20 James, “The Dilemma of Determinism”, p. 157.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
tHe arguMent froM stateMents about tHe future21
This argument assumes that all statements are either true or false,
and I agree that if this assumption is made, determinism follows and
there can be no free or random events. The assumption, however, is
neither self-evident nor demonstrable and my answer to the argument is simply to deny its supposition. This is how in ancient times
Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) and Cicero replied to the argument.22
tHe HuManeness of DeterMinisM
Determinism, I said earlier, when applied to the wrong that people
do, seems to lead to kind judgements and the humane treatment of
offenders.23 However, first, as we shall see, determinism has justified
and perhaps still justifies inhumane treatment of offenders.24 Second,
the free will doctrine is that people generally have free will, not that
they always have it. Therefore a believer in free will is ready to believe
that this or that person was not responsible for his or her criminal
actions, and even that a high proportion of the people in gaol were
not responsible for the actions for which they were put there. That
is, believers in free will can be humane in this way, too. Third, determinism may be plausible when it is applied to law-breakers who were
not loved when they were children, who belong to exploited and
powerless groups or who live in the midst of violence, but if it is valid
it must be applied to all lawbreakers without exception, and then it
is harder to believe. Fourth, as I shall say later, it is not truly humane
to absolve people of guilt for crimes by maintaining that they were
without free will and responsibility.25
This affects history, which is one of the humanities. Isaiah Berlin
says, “For historians determinism is not a serious issue”.26 Karl Popper polemicised against determinism in The Poverty of Historicism
(1945), The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), and The Open Uni21 Above, p. 175.
22 Cicero, De Fato, # 10. Cicero added that while Epicurus’ view had
problems, Chrysippus’ was intolerable.
23 Above, p. 178.
24 See below, p. 204.
25 See below, p. 214.
26 Berlin, Historical Inevitability, p. 34. See also p. 68.
15 1 Settling the Argument & Replies to These Arguments
187
verse: An Argument for Indeterminism (1982). Also, politicians and all
others who deal with people rather than with machines must reckon
with free will, and if they have any sense and any humanity they
regard it not as a nuisance but as that without which there would be
no moral goodness, dedication or love.
ConCLusion
Skinner admitted that determinism had not been proved, In Walden
Two, Frazier says: “Perhaps we can never prove that man isn’t free. It’s
as assumption”27 and Skinner says of Frazier that “he was working
on faith, and it bothered him”.28 Skinner also said that Freud was a
determinist “on faith, if not on the evidence”.29
27 Skinner, Walden Two, p. 257.
28 ibid., p. 110.
29 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 26.
CHaPter 16
against DeterMinisM
tHe refutation
Everyone recognises that not only rational factors such as evidence
and logical arguments but also non-rational factors such as character, mentality, emotions, wishes and subconscious needs influence
people when they make judgements and that when emotions dominate their thinking people make irrational judgements which may
not be true. If determinism is true, no one ever has any control over
these various factors and every judgement is caused in a completely
determined, in-principle-predictable way by whatever rational and
non-rational factors happen to be present, and by how strong they
happen to be, when it is made. If two members of a jury, then, who
had seen the same evidence and heard the same arguments, were
to make opposite judgements, a determinist’s comment would be:
“Different emotional factors were at work and each person made
the only judgement which he or she, with the emotional influences
at work in him or her, was able to make”. This sounds plausible,
but to be consistent determinists have to say exactly the same about
their own belief in determinism and my belief in free will. They have
to say that they and I have read some books, had some discussions
and considered some arguments, and then different factors, rational
and emotional, have caused us to make opposite judgements. They
should now say to themselves: “It is in principle possible that emotional factors made me opt for determinism. If I say that I am sure
that I made my judgement on purely rational grounds, it is possible
that I was compelled by emotional factors to make that second-order
judgement. Indeed, it is likely that if emotional factors compelled
me to judge that determinism is true, those same factors would compel me to judge that my judgement was rational. I can, therefore,
never be sure that any of my judgements, including the one I have
made about determinism, is rational.” In other words, to be con-
16 1 Against Determinism
189
sistent, determinists cannot believe that determinism is true; they
can only believe that they have been predetermined to believe that
it is true, whether it is or not, which of course they cannot do once
they become conscious of this. That is, determinism as an intellectual
position is self-negating. For instance, Honderich offers a cultural
explanation for the general non-acceptance of determinism,1 but his
acceptance of it might equally well be explained culturally, and how
could he know which was right? A believer in free will, on the other
hand, believes that we are able to resist emotional and other influences in ourselves and so make rational judgements; hence he or she
can say, without being inconsistent, “I believe that we have free will
and I believe that my belief is rational”.
In the above paragraph I have put in my words what others have
said. Epicurus said:
He who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticise
another who says that not all things happen of necessity. For he
has to admit that [if he is right] the assertion also happens of necessity.2
Roubiczek wrote:
Lack of freedom of choice would make any discussion meaningless: if we could only hold views which were determined by external or internal psychological factors, nobody could ever hope
to convince us by arguments, not even of determinism itself, for
the acceptance of any conviction, if it is to be significant at all,
must be based on a conscious attempt to choose between truth
and falsehood.3
Roger Trigg wrote:
Determinism and rationality are ultimately incompatible, in that
the former can never allow free rein to the latter. If everything,
including our beliefs, is causally explicable, the question must always be posed whether the causes at work, described neurophysiologically or in some other scientific language, are inclining us
towards the truth or away from it. The answer will itself be caused.
We are therefore in principle never able to assert anything as true
1 Honderich, “Determinism as True”, p. 775.
2 Epicurus, Aphorism 40 of the Vatican Collection, quoted in Popper and
Eccles, The Self and Its Brain, p. 75.
3 Roubiczek, Ethical Values in the Age of Science, p. 238.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
without recognising that we are caused to assert it. We can therefore never know whether we are judging correctly or whether we
are only caused to believe that we are. The issue is not that causes
always incline us to falsehood. It is that we can never be in a position to know when they do. When we are caused to have a belief,
we may be lucky and be correct, and we may not be. We have no
way of rationally discriminating between the two.4
Roger Trigg had said earlier: “It seems that rational arguments for
determinism should not in all consistency be offered”.5 And William H. Davis said: “The validity of human reasoning depends upon
the existence of freewill”.6
Determinists’ situation becomes worse if they not only judge in
their minds that determinism is true but argue for it in debates with
believers in free will. If they apply their determinism to the actual debates they have to say to themselves something like this: “Everything
I am going to say, the feelings I am going to experience, what my opponent is going to say, his feelings and the reactions of the audience
are all predetermined and in principle predictable. Some debates like
this have been won by determinists, others by the free will side, and
others have ended in a draw. Well, then, let us begin and find out not
which position is true but which pre-ordained ending this particular
debate is going to reach” – except that “let us begin” supposes that
there is a choice. In agreeing to have the debates in the first place
and in every sentence they utter in them, the determinists implicitly
show that they believe that their and their opponents’ actions are not
determined and that they are responsible for what they do.7
Moreover, according to determinism it is possible in principle for
persons, by studying the antecedents of their acts, to know what
4 Trigg, Rationality and Science, p. 83.
5 Trigg, Reality at Risk, p. 150. The argument is set out at length on pp.
143-152.
6 Davis, The Freewill Question, p. 74. Earlier versions of the above argument are in Weiss, Nature and Man, pp. 24-25 and in Rollo May, Love and
Will, p. 203. Patricia Smith Churchland endeavours to reply to it in “Is
Determinism Self-Refuting?”
7 This point is made by Croxton and Tropman in “The New Puritans?”
16 1 Against Determinism
191
their own decisions will be before they make them. I have already
shown that this is absurd.8
Finally, determinists become obviously inconsistent if, as many do,
they write about how society should be organised. In 1956 Skinner
said: “We cannot make wise decisions if we continue to pretend that
human nature is not controlled, or if we refuse to engage in control
when valuable results might be forthcoming”.9 He went on:
To use the facts and techniques of a science of man to the fullest
extent without making some monstrous mistake will be difficult
and obviously perilous. It is no time for self-deception, emotional
indulgence, or the assumption of attitudes which are no longer
useful. Man is facing a difficult test. He must keep his head now,
or he must start again – a long way back.10
In 1962 he said: “We do have faith in our power to change human
behaviour. We can make men adequate for group living – to the satisfaction of everybody.”11 To the objection that people might resent
being controlled, he replied: “By skilful planning, by a wise choice of
techniques we increase the feeling of freedom”.12 In 1973, on page
after page of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he denied free will and
talked of how society should be re-organised on that basis. Year after
year he assumed that our rulers are able to continue to pretend that
human nature is not controlled, in which case (he said) they will be
unable to make wise decisions, and they are able to stop making that
pretence and so become able to make wise decisions; and he urged
them to choose the latter course. He also assumed that we are able
to engage in control, and we are also able to “refuse to engage in
control”. A determinist can talk about decisions being useful or beneficial, but when he talks of “wise decisions” and “a wise choice” he
can only be talking of free decisions. That is, in the very act of urging
us to stop believing in free will Skinner showed that he believed that
at least our rulers have it. Ted Honderich concludes the book from
which I have quoted by saying: “The truth of determinism requires ...
8 Above, p. 60.
9 Skinner, “Freedom and the Control of Men”, pp. 56-57.
10 ibid., p. 57.
11 Skinner, Walden Two, p.196.
12 ibid., p. 263.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
that we change our social institutions and practices in so far as they
are owed to our image of origination”, that is, to our belief in free
will, and he asks: “Should one part of the response of the affirmation [of determinism] be a move to the Left in politics?”13 There is
no point in talking about how people should vote if their votes are
already determined.
The above argument resembles Aristotle’s refutation of the sceptics.
In each case, a position is refuted by showing that the act of proposing it implicitly denies it.14
tHe iMPraCtiCaLity of DeterMinisM
Many determinists find it frustrating that, in spite of the efforts
which empiricists have been making for centuries, individual persons and governments persist in assuming (as a rule, implicitly), for
practical purposes, that the free will doctrine, not determinism, is
true. What is even more frustrating for them is that they find that
they themselves cannot live their lives on the basis of determinism.
P. W. Bridgman says, “We disregard determinism when dealing with
ourselves – we have to disregard it, within reason, in our everyday
contacts with others”.15 H. W. Hintz says:
It is now widely recognised among moral philosophers that, no
matter how irrefutable the logic of absolute psychological or naturalistic determinism may be, sane and rational human beings, in
order to retain their sanity, their rationality, and their human purposefulness in living, still stubbornly insist on deciding, choosing
and acting as though they were autonomous, dignified and free
individuals.16
13 Honderich, How Free Are You?, p. 129.
14 Other self-refuting doctrines are (1) Logical Positivism, according to
which a statement which is not empirically verifiable is meaningless (that
statement is itself not empirically verifiable); (2) the belief that all beliefs
are socially determined (anyone who says that has to go on to say: “I only
believe that because of my social conditioning, which implies that if I believe
my original statement I have to believe that it may not be true, which means
not believing it”); and (3) the denial of values (those who deny values believe
that that is worth doing, that is, they believe in the value of something).
15 Bridgman, “Determinism and Punishment”, p. 156.
16 Hintz, “Some Further Reflections on Moral Responsibility”, pp. 178179.
16 1 Against Determinism
193
Richard M. Griffith tells of the experiment of deciding to act as if
all his acts were determined – making his last “illusory” choice so to
live. He found that he was constantly making what he could not help
regarding as free decisions. For instance, even if he acted on a sudden
urge or whim, he was conscious of the fact that he had freely decided
so to act. He concluded that “even as we utter words of determinism we go on living as we always have and we only can”.17 Moreover,
the hardest determinists at times feel responsible for good they have
done and expect praise or thanks, and at other times they feel that
they owe apologies for things they have done; I am sure, too, that
they at times thank, praise and complain about other people, assigning to them credit or blame.
We have seen that Freud was a determinist when he was explaining
human behaviour in general, but of clinical work he said: “Analysis
does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to
give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other”.18 The
expression “one way or the other” is significant: Freud does not say
“freedom to make the decision which he or she is by nature predisposed to make”. Skinner says: “Many Freudians [when working as
clinicians] have no hesitation in assuring their patients that they are
free to choose among different courses of action and are in the long
run the architects of their own destinies”.19 That is, Freud the theorist could be a determinist but in therapy he had to approach each
human being “as his own subject – as a participant in the constitution of his experiences”,20 which meant, in practice, as free.
A book which is mostly made up of essays by Behaviorists includes
an essay by two others who say:
Many times throughout the volume reference is made to the fact
that behaviour is controlled exclusively from external sources. Yet,
17 Griffith, “The Reality of an ‘Illusion’ – a Psychology of ‘As-If Free
Will’”, p. 234.
18 Freud, The Ego and the Id, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works,
Works, vol. 19, p. 50n. In “Freud and Freedom” in On Reading Freud, Peter
Gay uses compatibilism (see above, p. 165) to reconcile such statements
with Freud’s professed determinism.
19 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 26.
20 Abrahamson, Liberation and its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought
of Freud, pp. 114-115.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
the writers never seem to ask how their own behaviour might be
controlled and shaped; neither do they recognise the possibility
that their critics’ behaviour is controlled and shaped. They act as if
their critics were responsible for the criticisms.21
Also, in his autobiography B. F. Skinner talks of “my decision to
become a psychologist”,22 he says that he and his fiancee “decided
to postpone the wedding” and later “decided to be married right
away”23 and he says: “I could either give up psychology and spend
all my time on the Depression at home and Nazism abroad or give
all my time to my work, and I had decided on the second course”.24
If anyone had said to Skinner, before he died, “Doesn’t this imply
belief in free will?”, he would probably have answered, “Not at all.
An astronomer may talk of the sun rising without implying belief in
a still earth and a moving sun. All he means is that the sun seems to
rise. Similarly, I can talk of making decisions without implying belief
in multiple possibility. All I mean is that at various times in my life
several courses of action seemed to be possible.” But, whatever of
particular words like “decision”, it is obvious to anyone who reads
these books that Skinner, as he wrote them, thought of himself as
the origin of his own actions, not as someone who was made by the
conditioning which he had received to do everything he did, including professing Behaviorism.
The Marxists experienced this contradiction very sharply. Plekhanov (1856-1918; he founded the first Russian Marxist group in Geneva in 1883 and became an important Marxist thinker) is reported
to have observed that “those who believe most strongly in the iron
laws of the cosmos appear to have little difficulty in regarding themselves as free agents”25 and in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
wrote:
The Party denied the free will of the individual – and at the same
time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to
21 Croxton and Tropman, “The New Puritans?”, p. 333.
22 Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist (vol. 2 of Skinner’s three-volume
autobiography), p. 43.
23 ibid., pp. 192-193.
24 ibid., p. 230. These are not isolated examples.
25 Budd, Varieties of Unbelief, p. 157.
16 1 Against Determinism
195
choose between two alternatives – and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied
his power to distinguish good and evil – and at the same time
it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood
under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which
had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or
influenced – and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt
against the clockwork and change its course.26
tHe unreaLity of DeterMinisM
Some people seem to think that when they are being theoretical
they are working at a high intellectual level from which they can look
down on the general population going about its business. When one
reads a book like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or when one attends
scientific lectures on determinism in universities, one is at the highest point which humankind has no far reached. Compared with this,
engaging in politics or commerce, listening to music, enjoying food
and wine, marrying and having children – all these things are on a
lower level. The fact that it is at present impossible to go through life
acting consistently on a belief in determinism shows us that we still
have a long way to go. The day will come, however, when we will put
aside the Critique of Practical Reason and, in a purely scientific world,
enjoy the delights of Pure Reason.
An opposite view is that science, as understood by the above thinkers, simply does not take account of morality, generosity, love and
their opposites – immorality, meanness, hate – which are real. It
makes theoretical thought a sort of game which some people play,
apart from the real world. If they enjoy it, as they seem to do, they
have no right to think of themselves as existing on a higher level
than people who tackle the real world and its problems, and enjoy
its blessings.
WHy DeterMinisM is baD
I am going to say that determinism is a Bad Thing but I am not
going to say, or even suggest, that because of this we should deny it,
26 Koestler, Darkness at Noon, part 4, # 2, p. 204. This is about six pages
from the end.
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
196
even if it is true, or that for social reasons we should teach free will to
others even if we are unsure of it ourselves.27
It is sometimes said that according to determinists we are all like
puppets, which may seem to be acting as they choose but which are
in reality pulled this way and that by strings. This is not quite true.
A puppet is moved this way and that by a conscious agent, who imposes his or her plans on the puppet from above or below, whereas
according to determinism most of the time our actions are determined by our natures and our experience, not by conscious agents
distinct from us.
tHe HuMan agent
G. Dworkin, who edited a book about determinism, says that
determinists “have assumed that the only things that would disappear as a result of accepting their views are vengeance, vindictiveness,
smug views of moral superiority, and so forth”. He goes on: “What
has to be shown is that the consequences are far more drastic, that
the entire notion of a human agent disappears as well”.28 He is not
exaggerating, as Richard Taylor, a determinist, showed when, in a
passage which I quoted earlier and will here quote again, he wrote:
Both of these conceptions – that of an agent as distinct from the
states or events of his history, and that of performing [an action]
as distinct from being a sufficient cause [for it] – are certainly odd
and hard to conceive of clearly. Indeed, a philosopher could not be
accused of stubbornness if he preferred to give up moral responsibility to embracing these two notions.29
Here is the argument from clarity again, and I, for one, am able
to accuse of stubbornness a philosopher who in the name of clarity
refuses to embrace the simple notion of someone doing something,
which is what “an agent performing” means, because it seems to him
unclear. Moreover, according to a limerick,
27 Susan Wolf, in “The Importance of Free Will”, maintains that the acceptance of determinism does not have the bad effects which I am going to
say that it has.
28 Dworkin, Determinism, Free Will and Moral Responsibility, p. 10.
29 Taylor in Hood (ed.), Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern
Science, p. 216.
16 1 Against Determinism
197
There was a young man who said: “Damn!
According to science I am
Predetermined to move
In a definite groove,
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram!”
tHe Person anD His or Her resPonsibiLity
Of Skinner’s world-view Rogers says: “To me this kind of world
would destroy the human person as I have come to know him in the
deepest moments of psychotherapy”. One of many aspects of personhood that are denied by determinists is individuality: if determinism
is true, whenever I make a decision I know that another being who
was exactly like me and was in the same situation would make the
same choice as I am making, so that I am not choosing as a particular
individual person.30 He goes on:
In such moments I am in relationship with a person who is spontaneous, who is responsibly free, that is, aware of his freedom to
choose who he will be, and aware also of the consequences of his
choice. To believe, as Skinner holds, that all this is an illusion, and
that spontaneity, freedom, responsibility and choice have no real
existence, would be impossible for me.31
Edgar Bodenheimer, a lawyer, said: “It would seem that responsibility, in any morally meaningful sense, is destroyed if a radically deterministic position is taken”; he saw the harm that this had caused and
wrote Philosophy of Responsibility to remedy it. Morality aside, it is
surely bad to tell students that, while they do not know their futures,
these futures are predetermined and cannot be changed, so that they
are not responsible for them. I am not saying that students should
not be taught this even if it is true: I am saying that it is not only false
but harmful as well. Indeed, it can be catastrophic. When someone
who is bad-tempered, pugnacious, envious, resentful, moody, jealous, extravagant, irresponsible, unpunctual, lecherous, indiscreet or
depressed takes a course in psychology which is taught by a determinist, he can become convinced that he has no control whatever
30 See Kane, The Significance of Free Will, pp. 85-86.
31 Rogers, On Becoming a Person, p. 391. It is to be noted that Rogers
writes here as a clinician, not as a theoretician.
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over his behaviour. On the one hand, he can enjoy the freedom from
guilt of which I spoke earlier,32 but on the other hand he is rendered
incapable of taking action to solve or even mitigate his problem. Tell
him to submit to treatment which will condition him to behave differently and he can reply that he will submit to it if and only if his
genes, conditioning and environment make him submit to it and
that they do not seem to be doing this. What hope does he have?
Also, if someone with severe psychological disabilities learns that
they are due to things which happened to him when he was a child,
and if at the same time he embraces determinism, he says to himself
that he cannot take control of his own destiny because his future has
already been determined by his past, and that with a past like his he
has no hope.
tHe DeniaL of MoraLity
We have seen that determinism entails a denial of morality. This
has intolerable implications. If to say that people ought to keep their
promises were an old-fashioned, pre-scientific way of stating that society acts pleasantly towards those who keep their promises, making
it advantageous to keep them, then, first, if someone sees that by not
keeping a promise he can obtain something more advantageous, or
as Skinner would say more reinforcing, than pleasant treatment by
society at large, it would not make sense to say that he ought nevertheless to keep it; second, in a society which approves of the oppression of blacks, Jews, women or Catholics it would be correct to
say that people ought to oppress blacks, Jews, women or Catholics;33
and, third, it would not make sense to say that someone was persecuted by a morally bad society for acting morally. Also, if one takes J.
E. MacDonald’s words, which I quoted earlier,34 and applies them to
the Holocaust, one says that it was “some action that is abnormal, by
its infrequency of occurrence, and that has brought its doer into conflict with his fellows” and that “questions of ‘mad’ or ‘bad’, with their
value judgements and emotional loading, do not arise” concerning
it. As if Holocausts would be perfectly normal if they happened often
32 Above, p. 177.
33 See Begelman and Krapfl (eds.), Behaviorism and Ethics, p. 24.
34 Above, p. 141.
16 1 Against Determinism
199
enough! The Holocaust was not just infrequent, it was wrong, not in
terms of some particular society but absolutely. As Peter Berger says,
certain deeds “seem to violate a fundamental awareness of the constitution of our humanity”; they are “not only evil, but monstrously
evil”. We condemn these deeds, he says, and “our condemnation is
absolute and certain”.35
I said that determinism seems attractive because it offers a release
from feelings of guilt. It is neurotic of people to feel guilty or to have
“guilt complexes” because of things they did which were not wrong
or not deliberate, because they do not have qualities which other
people expect them to have, or because they exist; but it is bad, indeed it is horrifying, when people do evil things and experience no
guilt. When a man admits to having been corrupt or a liar and talks
only of having made mistakes, he seems so unnatural as to be eerie. A
doctrine, therefore, which implies that war-criminals, corrupt politicians, drug dealers and others like them are quite right not to feel
any guilt, is not a boon to mankind, and John Glenn Gray writes:
“Perhaps the feeling of necessity [determinism] is the final refuge of
that spirit in us which resists all attempts at self-reproach, that uncivilisable ego which stops at nothing to justify the self in its lowest,
most aggressive manifestations”.36 Our moral view of life is reflected
in our literature but in the determinist’s world there are no dramas
of evil deeds, guilt, remorse, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation; there is no tragedy, only some pathos; there is neither generosity
deserving of thanks nor heroism deserving of praise. In this world,
works of literature which deal with guilt and repentance, generosity
and gratitude, or heroism and praise, are even more remote from reality than the Norse sagas seem to us, and just as few people read the
sagas so the determinist expects that as people become progressively
more scientific,
we shall not only have no reason to admire people who endure
suffering, face danger, or struggle to be good, it is possible that we
shall have little interest in pictures or books about them. The art
and literature of a new culture will be about other things.37
35 Berger, A Rumour of Angels, pp. 85-86.
36 Gray, The Warriors, p. 208.
37 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 161.
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So Shakespeare will be staged no more and no one will read Dostoyevsky. We will be left with scientific books and, for stories, Zola,
in the new amoral culture.
our juDgeMent on tHe WorLD as it is noW
Determinism implies that all events are elements of what William
James called “the whole frame of things” or that the history of the
world, including human history, is “one unbroken fact”; in contemporary terms, everything that happens is in the universe’s program
and is inseparable from the program as a whole. In a lecture, he referred to a horrible murder which had recently occurred and said that
for the determinist “it is absurd to regret the murder alone. Other
things being what they are, it could not be different”. He went on:
I see no escape from this pessimistic conclusion, if, being determinists, our judgement of regret is to be allowed to stand at all.
The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to
abandon the judgement of regret.38
DeterMinisM anD tHe future of soCiety
Can we do anything about the world’s troubles? If the word “can”
implies “will not necessarily”, as it usually does,39 determinism implies that the answer is no. According to determinism, we shall do
whatever we are scheduled to do and we can do nothing else. We are
not entitled to think of the universe as being like a machine which
is controlled by a computer and of ourselves as like computer operators who can change its program. Operators are outside the machines which they control and their actions are not controlled by
their computers, whereas we are parts of the universe and, according
to determinism, our actions are controlled by its computer. “Que
serà serà”, we must say, fatalistically. Determinism thus implies that
the way our great-grandparents brought up our grandparents, combined with other factors, determined what they became and hence
how they brought up our parents, which determined what they became and hence how they brought us up, which determined what
we became and hence how we (I mean the people of my generation)
brought up our children, which determined what they became and
38 James, “The Dilemma of Determinism”, p. 126.
39 See above, p. 168.
16 1 Against Determinism
201
hence how they are bringing up their children, and so it will go on,
generation after generation, in a sequence from which there can be
no escape. It implies, also, that when a regime collapses, what takes
its place is determined by its antecedents, which include the regime
which has collapsed, and it will therefore be sure to have imbalances
in it, which will affect subsequent regimes, and so on until the end of
time. It implies that what has happened in the past between nations
and races has already determined their future relationships. Look at
the wars, the exploitation and oppression which have occurred and
ask: with antecedents like those determining our common future,
what hope is there for us? In all these cases, according to determinism it is impossible to alter the predetermined course of events. Seneca may have said that “it is a great consolation to be swept along
with the universe”, and according to Honderich “Engels speaks of a
tranquillity to be had from accepting nature as determined”,40 but it
looks like an untranquil desolation to me.
ConCLusion
Some people are afflicted with a strange hatred of all that is regular,
orderly, systematic, explicable or in a word rational. This is supposed
to be a scientific age but you will not think so if you mix with them.
Their literary classics are Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan
Poe, and they love gothic films, known to outsiders as horror movies. They are deep into magic, astrology and esoteric mystery cults,
which they take seriously. In their chaotic dwellings, decorated with
Blake prints and Tolkien maps, they prepare, at odd hours, bizarre
dishes which would make a dietitian wonder how they survive. They
are irrationalists. At the opposite extreme from them are people who
have a phobia for whatever is in the slightest degree irregular or unpredictable. They want to live where all clocks show the exact time
and everything runs on schedule. They love science and they want to
know the scientific explanation of everything, or at least to feel sure
that there is such an explanation. Many things in the universe puzzle
them, human beings most especially, and they begin to feel vertigo
and panic at the thought that there might be mysteries, in the sense
of things which inherently cannot be explained. Then determinism
comes, assuring them that everywhere in the universe there is strict
40 Honderich, How Free Are You?, p. 114.
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regularity, rigid order and the firm rule of scientific law. It admits
that there may be puzzles, but not mysteries. This is exactly what they
want to hear, and in spite of the lack of experimental evidence and
argument they give their wholehearted assent to this system which
seems to them to be so right. These are the ultrarationalists and they
seem to me to be as mad as the irrationalists.
CHaPter 17
DeterMinisM anD CriMinaL justiCe
For centuries, perhaps since almost the beginning of civilisation,
men and women have committed crimes, been held responsible for
them, and punished. In as much as punishment “cleared the air”, it
was a solution to the problem of a certain kind of evil. When, however, science became a dominant force in Western society, people
began to say that crime and criminals should be treated scientifically
and since belief in free will was regarded as unscientific this meant
that there could be no more talk of responsibility. This led to two
radically different theories and practices, one inhumane and grasped
by the political right, the other seemingly humane and embraced by
liberals, but both of them deterministic.1
HereDity anD eugeniCs
In 1876, in Italy, Cesare Lomboroso published Criminal Man,
in which he alleged that certain people are born criminals, or that
crime is involuntary and hereditary. He was extremely materialistic
in his approach: for instance, he maintained that thieves have thick
eyebrows and certain other features, and he aimed to make it possible to pick and classify criminals by their appearance. According to
Stephen Jay Gould, the Lomborosians “hoped to use modern science
as a cleaning broom to sweep away from jurisprudence the outdated
philosophical baggage of free will and unmitigated moral responsibility”.2 The question for the government, they thought, should
cease to be, for instance, “Did this person steal?” It should be, “Is
this person a born thief?”; if so, he should be put in gaol whether he
has actually stolen anything or not, to make society safe from him.
The book was influential on the continent of Europe and in 1890 in
England Havelock Ellis published The Criminal, which presented the
1 See above, p. 171.
2 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, p. 140.
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views of Lomboroso and others who had pursued his investigations
further.
In England, Francis Galton, who coined the word “eugenics” in
1883, had been saying for years that the reproduction of the human race should be put on a scientific basis, by which he especially
meant that the best people in the land should be encouraged to have
many children. In the eighteen-nineties, after the publication of The
Criminal, “negative eugenics” appeared as eugenicists began to say
that people with criminal propensities should not be allowed to have
children.3 In The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit (USA, 1891),
Victoria Woodhull wrote: “The best minds of today have accepted
the fact that if superior people are desired, they must be bred; and
if imbeciles, criminals, paupers and otherwise unfit are undesirable
citizens, they must not be bred”.4 The logical conclusion was drawn
from this and the sterilisation of criminals began. In 1899 a doctor
in a gaol in Indiana began to sterilise criminals by vasectomy and by
1907 he had sterilised 465 males. More than a third of these men
were said to have requested the operation. This, even if it can be believed, means that almost two thirds were sterilised against their will,
which raised a legal problem that was immediately taken care of: in
1907 Indiana passed a law according to which, if doctors judged that
it should be done, a person could be sterilised against his will. Other
states followed Indiana’s example and by 1917 sixteen states had sterilisation laws on their books, virtually all of which legitimised the
sterilisation of the insane, idiots in state institutions, epileptics and
(to come to what concerns us here) habitual criminals and rapists.
Iowa added felons convicted three times and drug addicts. By 1941
almost 36,000 people had been sterilised, many without knowing
what was being done to them. Behind all this lay the “scientific”
principle of determinism, which was taken to mean that if you have
inherited criminality from your ancestors in the way that others
inherit red hair, you will inevitably commit crimes if you get the
3 The promoters of eugenics were concerned with many qualities which,
they thought, made people “unfit” and were hereditary: these included imbecility or feeble-mindedness and pauperism as well as criminality, but I am
concentrating here on criminality.
4 Woodhull, The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit, p. 38.
17 1 Determinism & Criminal Justice
205
opportunity and your children, if you have any, will do the same.
Catholics, Jews and many others opposed eugenic sterilisation and
challenged these laws in courts below Supreme Court level, which
ruled that they were unconstitutional. In 1924 a new law, designed
to avoid constitutional problems, was passed. It was in due course
challenged and the case reached the Supreme Court, which in 1927
upheld it. The decision was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who
was a determinist.5
An unscientific objection to all this is that it is extremely inhumane.
A scientific objection is that if criminality is inherited, the genes for
it are being carried by millions of people who are not actual criminals and it would take centuries or even millenia to eliminate crime
by sterilising actual criminals. What stopped eugenic sterilisation,
however, was this: when the Nazi Party took over the government of
Germany in 1933, it immediately put eugenic theory into practice
and within three years 225,000 persons had been sterilised; at first,
eugenicists in the United States applauded this (a doctor in Virginia
said: “The Germans are beating us at our own game”), but by the end
of the Second World War no one wanted to be seen to approve of any
part of the Nazi programme, the word “eugenics” became disreputable (in England the Galton Eugenics Professor became the Galton
Professor of Human Genetics and in the United States the American
Eugenics Society became the Society for the Study of Human Biology), and eugenic sterilisation stopped.
More recently, many “conservatives” in the United States have observed with horror the violence in cities and have judged that many
people, especially blacks, are violent criminals by nature. What is
therefore needed, they go on to say, are more police, tougher police
methods, less concern for the “rights of the accused” and more severe
sentences, including more and quicker executions and the putting
of people in gaol if they commit three crimes. These conservatives
do not as a rule profess determinism explicitly, but it underlies their
position.
5 See above, p. 164.
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enVironMentaLisM anD LiberaL CriMinoLogy
tHe DeniaL of resPonsibiLity
Against this, “liberals” reacted, and by the nineteen-sixties in the
United States certain psychological ideas had become dominant in
the social sciences and in the discussion of what should be done
about crime. The most basic (but least original) of these ideas was
determinism. As Willard Gaylin (a psychiatrist) says in this connection, determinism is fundamental to the “psychiatric view of man”,
and it influenced criminology. Edwin H. Sutherland and Donald R.
Cressey, Principles of Criminology (7th edn., 1966) was much quoted,
and it said: “Criminal behaviour results from the same social processes as other behaviour”. It attacked classical theory on the ground
that it “assumes freedom of the will in a manner which gives little or
no possibility of further investigation of causes of crime or of efforts
to prevent crime”. All modern schools, it said, accept “the hypothesis
of natural causation”, that is, determinism.6
After Bernard Goetz shot some young men in a subway car in New
York and was arrested, an author wrote a book which, according to
a note on it, shows how his action had followed inexorably from
his childhood and the circumstances of his adult life. Evidently, the
presupposition here was environmental determinism and the implication was that Goetz had not been responsible for his action. Similarly, when the news broke in Canada about boys who were verbally,
physically and sexually abused by clerics in Newfoundland whose
virtual prisoners they were, an article appeared in a Catholic magazine which said that “unhealthy power relations” in the Church had
caused the clerics to act as they did and they were not responsible for
their actions. Indeed, when crimes of violence have been committed
or revealed, newspaper articles often appear by commentators who
explain them in terms of the immediate environment (which the
commentator may not actually know much about) and the larger
environment, with its wars and crimes, which is shown on television:
the message sometimes is, “Don’t blame the persons who did the
deeds; they are as much victims as the persons to whom the deeds
were done”.
6 Quoted in Wilson, Thinking About Crime, p. 42.
17 1 Determinism & Criminal Justice
207
I discussed earlier the eugenicists who maintained that crime is
caused, in a deterministic way, by an inherited factor which was
called criminality. The liberals whom I am now discussing reject this
explanation and maintain, instead, that crime is caused by social ills
such as crowding, poverty and unemployment, as inexorably as physical disease is caused by unhygienic living conditions. When a rise
in the crime rate is reported and conservatives demand more policemen, greater powers for the police and stiffer sentences for convicted
criminals, the liberals whose view I am now presenting reply that
this is bound to be ineffective, that an ounce of prevention is worth
a ton of cure, and that to eliminate crime the government should
go to the root of the trouble and eliminate crowding, poverty and
unemployment. This “social science” view of crime was in part the
view of President Johnson’s Commission on Crime and Administration of Justice and it was emphatically that of Ramsey Clark, once
attorney-general of the United States. Where this view is dominant,
deterrance is ridiculed.7
tHe rejeCtion of PunisHMent
If determinism is true, and people are not responsible for their actions, it is always wrong to punish people. Nietzsche said:
He who has fully grasped the theory of total unaccountability can
no longer accomodate so-called justice that punishes and rewards
under the concept of justice at all. ... For he who is punished does
not deserve the punishment: he is merely being employed [by the
punisher] as the means of henceforth deterring others from certain
actions.8
This is why in 1968 Menninger called his book The Crime of Punishment. In Social Psychology, William P. McDougall said: “The fuller
becomes our insight into the springs of human conduct, the more
impossible does it become to maintain the antiquated doctrine” of
retribution, or that people should be punished for crimes.9 Determinism was and is assumed by many philosophers who write attacking punishment: for instance, Ted Honderich, author of Punishment,
7 ibid., p. 55.
8 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, # 105.
9 McDougall, Social Psychology, p. 2; quoted in Paton, A Textbook of Jurisprudence, p. 321.
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the Supposed Justifications (1969), has also written A Theory of Determinism (1988). In the United States, Clarence Darrow, a lawyer who
was a determinist, used to argue in this way when defending people
accused of murder, and defence attorneys have obtained some spectacular acquittals by calling as expert witnesses psychiatrists who testified that the accused were not responsible for their actions (without
making it clear that, according to them, neither is anybody else).10
Determinism was and is also assumed by many philosophers who
write on criminal justice.
WHat to Do about CriMe
The liberals maintained that, ultimately, what needed to be done
was the elimination of poverty, overcrowding and so on, but in the
meantime? J. E. MacDonald said that “we have to decide how to
obviate or minimise repetition of such conflict, for the good of all
concerned”.11 He also said:
Relegating questions of responsibility, and with them those of
punishment, to the amusement of the religious and others of that
kidney, we are left with the important and practical question of
the disposal of the convicted.12
The authors I am discussing maintain that “criminals” should be regarded as sick and given curative treatment: that is, they maintain
that punishment should be replaced by rehabilitation. They say that
the aim of whatever is done should be to benefit the so-called criminal; of course, his cure will be of benefit to society, but, they say, this
should be only an indirect aim of the treatment. Two basic principles
of this position are: first, in dealing with so-called criminals, society
should look to the future, not the past;13 second, in deciding what
form treatment should take and what its duration should be, society
should consider the offender, not the crime, or, as the slogan put it,
should make the punishment fit the criminal, not the crime. This
position was forcefully stated by Menninger, who said that the secret
10 See Gaylin, The Killing of Bonnie Garland, chap. 7.
11 See above, p. 171.
12 MacDonald, “The Concept of Responsibility”, p. 716.
13 MacDonald says: “We are concerned not with the past but with the
future of the individual and of the community” (ibid.).
17 1 Determinism & Criminal Justice
209
of success in all programmes for dealing with criminal behaviour
“is the replacement of the punitive attitude with a therapeutic attitude”,14 and von Hirsch says that up to 1970 the consensus among
psychologists was that rehabilitation should be the aim of punishment.15 If the hereditarian view is pessimistic, inasmuch as it tends
to assume that “once a criminal, always a criminal”, this scheme,
as Gaylin says, was “born in optimism and faith and humanism”.16
It has caused social reformers to associate free will with prison bars
and hangman’s ropes, determinism with counselling rooms, therapy
centres and slum-clearance programmes, and hence to have a strong
emotional preference for determinism over free will.17
When this theory is acted on, its practical implications are as follows:
(1) A new vocabulary is introduced: prisons become correctional
facilities, the Department of Prisons becomes the Department of
Correction, prison guards become correctional officers, and so on.
The word “punishment” is sometimes used, but one senses that it
does not mean punishment, properly so called.
(2) In the correction centres, the inmates have therapy sessions of
various kinds, the view being taken that this is what the inmates are
primarily there for, and, as in hospitals, the view is taken that life for
the inmates should not be any more unpleasant than it needs to be
– after all, they are not being punished.
(3) Psychiatrists in these institutions are like doctors in hospitals,
and the governors are like hospital managers. Many, perhaps most,
of the decisions are made by the psychiatrists.
(4) People who have behaved in antisocial ways are forced to enter these institutions and ideally they have to stay there until they
have been, to the satisfaction of the psychiatrists, rehabilitated (more
or less as people with infectious diseases are forced to enter special
hospitals and stay there until doctors declare that they are no longer
infectious). That is, ideally the length of time a person spends in a
corrective institution is not determined by the gravity of his or her
14
15
16
17
Menninger, The Crime of Punishment, p. 262.
Hirsch, Past or Future Crimes, p. 4.
Gaylin, The Killing of Bonnie Garland, p. 342.
See above, p. 178.
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offence: as I said above, according to this view society should not
look to the past, to the deed. It is determined by how long it takes to
change the person into a social, as opposed to an antisocial, human
being. Struggle for Justice, a Quaker report on crime and punishment
published in the United States in 1971, says that there has been an
“enthusiastic and uncritical acceptance by most of the liberal and
progressive elements in our society of reformative, indeterminate,
individualised treatment as the ideal goal of a criminal justice system”.18
I will conclude by remarking that the people whose view I have
been presenting see themselves as “liberal and progressive”, scientific
and humane, and they tend to dismiss their opponents (of whom
I am one) as reactionary, unscientific, racist, inhumane and therefore utterly unworthy of a hearing. Which makes it difficult to get
through to them.
soMe CoMMents on tHis LiberaL tHeory
This theory, and the practice which stems from it, have considerable appeal. The scheme seems to be scientific, modern, humane,
practical, non-judgemental and optimistic – all the right things. It
seems particularly appropriate where young offenders are concerned:
if young people have committed robberies or similar crimes basically
because they have no trade skills, their whole problem may be solved
by counselling and the opportunity to learn some way of earning an
honest living. It is, however, open to a number of objections.
If someone has spent the first twenty or forty years of his life in
an environment which has caused him to become a criminal, how
long is he likely to need to be in therapy in a correctional institution before he is rehabilitated? The prospect arises of a small-time
habitual burglar being deprived of his liberty for years after he has
been caught stealing a video, while someone who has killed his wife
is freed after a short time.
18 Struggle for Justice, p. 46, my emphasis. Prison the Last Resort (published
by a number of churches in Australia in 1989) says that the attempt was
made in Australia to combine the old method with the new in the same
institutions, but, it says, “treatment-oriented and custody-oriented institutions require different and mutually incompatible organisational structures”
(p. 28).
17 1 Determinism & Criminal Justice
211
The question also arises: What about people who, after committing crimes, do not respond to treatment? Some rehabilitationists
admit that some people may prove incurable and they recommend
that these be kept in custody, in much the same way as homicidal
maniacs were kept in asylums. Menninger, for instance, says that
our aim should be “to reclaim offenders for social usefulness, if possible, and to detain them in protective custody, if reclamation is not possible”.19 In their optimism, believers in rehabilitation clearly believe
that there will not be many such people, but it is hard to believe that
a few months of individual or group therapy could eradicate the psychic harm done by a lifetime in a poisonous environment. Indeed,
more than a few people with “indeterminate” sentences could find
themselves locked up for all of their lives.
Also, what happened in the United States when this theory was
put into practice has shown that it does not work as it is supposed to
do. The indefinite sentences cause trouble – the Quaker report said
that it is torture for someone to be deprived of liberty for he knows
not how long, and that indeterminate sentences give the prison authorities an inordinate control over prisoners.20 When people who
have been in for long times after committing relatively small offences see others, who have committed big offences, leaving after short
times, they find this unjust. In the therapy sessions, the brighter inmates quickly learn how to play the therapy game in order to obtain
their release. Finally, it is confusing to tell a man that he is not being punished but nevertheless to lock him in an institution that, to
him, is still basically a prison where he is supervised by people who,
though now called correctional officers, are in his eyes only wardens
by another name. For all these reasons, this scheme fell from favour.
Gaylin says:
When the rehabilitative model intrudes too extensively into the
prison system, gross injustices result. That which is unconscionable under the rubric of punishment – extended sentences and
unlimited open-ended incarceration – is perfectly acceptable when
seen as treatment. The reformist movement for the prison system
came crashing down not in the traditional way – because it had
not attained its ends – but because it had. And the results were not
19 Menninger, The Crime of Punishment, p. 251. Emphasis mine.
20 Struggle for Justice, pp. 28-29.
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as anticipated. The disastrous implications of reformist politics on
the prison system became apparent almost immediately after the
reformists won their victories.21
Finally, in a number of actual cases in the United States the denial
of free will and responsibility has been found incredible by people
who have studied the cases. First, in August 1969 a man and two
young women belonging to the Manson “family” killed, in violent
ways, the actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant, another woman and
three men; on the next night the same man, one of the same women
and another woman killed a man and a woman. Clara Livsey, a family therapist, set out to study the women members of this “family”, in
the beginning inclined to believe that they were not responsible for
their actions. For one thing, it was hard to believe that such things
could have been done by sane people. In a book which she wrote after studying the case and interviewing the women, she talks of “how
difficult it was for me to accept that these women committed murder
of their own free will”.22 But that is what she came to believe. She
talks of “these women whom I regard as being fully responsible for
committing deliberate murder”.23 Second, in early November 1987 a
six-year old girl, Lisa Steinberg, died as a result of severe and repeated
beatings and it emerged that she had been horribly beaten for years
by Joel Steinberg, a well-off lawyer, who with Hedda Nussbaum had
adopted her. Joel Steinberg was eventually convicted of first-degree
manslaughter and sent to gaol, and a book on the case was reviewed
by Robert Coles, who said: “Needless to say, partisans of psychological determinism will insist on some formulation that accounts for
the behaviour of Mr Steinberg and Ms Nussbaum, individually and
together”, and, he says, the author of the book works through the
explanations which were offered; then, he says, “one by one certain
words start making a credible appearance in her text – ‘choice’, ‘will’,
‘evil’, ‘responsibility’” and the author “becomes the aroused chronicler of a moral tale”.
21 Gaylin, The Killing of Bonnie Garland, p. 151.
22 Livsey, The Manson Women, p. 20. My emphasis.
23 ibid., p. 19.
17 1 Determinism & Criminal Justice
213
refutation
I pointed out earlier that when people profess determinism there
is a conflict between what they say and what they assume in the
action of professing it. The same conflict can be found in the actions of those penal-law reformers who argue that because all human
actions are predetermined, no one should be held responsible for
his or her crimes and punished for them. If all human actions are
predetermined, police arrest criminals, prosecutors prosecute them,
juries find them guilty, judges sentence them and gaolers punish
them necessarily: hence these people should not be held responsible
for their actions or blamed for them.24 If determinism is true, the
cops as well as the robbers are acting roles in pre-scripted dramas
and none of them can leave the cast or change the script. Moreover,
the law-reformers who make speeches and write articles in an effort
to change all this are themselves (if determinism is true) doing what
they cannot help doing, while those who oppose them are talking
and writing as they have been programmed to do, so that the liberals
and the conservatives are locked in a pre-scripted drama exactly like
that of the cops and robbers, which will proceed by predetermined
stages to its inevitable outcome, whatever that may be. However, law
reformers do not in fact regard the outcome as already decided and
their own actions as predetermined: they believe that the system of
law-enforcement will not necessarily change but can be changed, and
they also believe that they have responsibly decided to change it.25
Again, there is conflict between the determinism they profess and the
actions in which they profess it.
24 Gross writes: “Those who prescribe and administer punishment are,
on these assumptions of determinism, likewise unfree to do otherwise, and
so criticism of them for what they do is equally misconceived” (A Theory of
Criminal Justice, p. 324).
25 Bridgman writes: “By what logic can the man who argues that punishment is unjustified expect his argument to affect the actions of his opponent, when both his argument and the response to it were already rigidly
determined?” (“Determinism and Punishment”, p. 156).
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DeePer objeCtions
While it is humane to say of certain law-breakers that they are not
responsible for their actions, to say this of all law-breakers is anything
but humane. It is insulting. Frankl says:
Criminals, at least once the judgement has been passed, do not
wish to be regarded as mere victims of psychodynamic mechanisms
or conditioning processes. As Scheler once pointed out, man has a
right to be considered guilty and be punished. To explain his guilt
away by looking at him as the victim of circumstances also means
taking away his human dignity.26
That is, in this context determinism deprives persons of recognition
of their responsibility and dignity.
Also, if it is true that personal restoration of a wrongdoer requires
that he admit his responsibility, acknowledge his guilt and repent of
what he has done, the system I have been discussing is bad because
it excludes all these things, starting with responsibility. I referred earlier to an article which appeared in Canada, explaining the abuse of
children by clerics in terms of “unhealthy power relations” in the
Church and absolving the clerics of responsibility. Another author
replied to this, saying:
We do these offenders no good if we treat them with misguided
kindness. ... Only after the abusers have confessed their sin and
sought forgiveness can they and their victims hope to be released
from their memories.27
a PositiVe Position
Though it is not fashionable to say this, I believe that behavioural
tendencies are to some extent inherited. By this I mean that some
people are innately more irascible, or more curious, or more acquisitive, or more competitive, or experience stronger sexual desire, than
others: it is in their genes.
Other behavioural tendencies are environmental in their origin. A
person who grows up in an orphanage may have some unusual tendencies; a second child in a large family may have different tendencies from an eldest child and a third child may be different again; if
26 Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, p. 51.
27 Fraser, “Let’s Call Child Abuse What It Is – Sin”, p. 50.
17 1 Determinism & Criminal Justice
215
a child is abused, he or she will probably manifest certain tendencies
in adult life; and when children grow up in depressed areas where
violence and prostitution are among the basic facts of life, they are
affected by this.
In exceptional cases, involving insane people, these tendencies determine actions for which the persons are not responsible. The law
has for a long time recognised this. If, to take an extreme case, one
person kills another and it is proved to the satisfaction of the court
that he or she was insane at the time, the verdict is “not guilty”, or
not bad but mad. The court may direct that because the person is
dangerous he or she is to be confined to an asylum, but that is not a
matter of criminal justice. Generally speaking, however, persons do
not necessarily act according to their tendencies. If, for instance, an
irascible man is provoked he may feel strongly inclined to strike whoever is provoking him; a man who has strong sexual desires and who
has grown up in a certain environment may in a particular situation
feel strongly inclined to rape a woman; and a timid man may want
not to do something that he is obliged to do: but it is possible for
them to go either way. Generally speaking, then, if persons commit
crimes they do so freely and are responsible for their actions.
Degrees of resPonsibiLity28
In ordinary life, outside courts of law, in judging people who have
done wrong we usually consider mitigating circumstances, which
may include their natural tendencies (innate or environmentally
caused), their provocation and factors in the situation. If someone
who has just lost his job behaves rudely on a social occasion, we may
criticise his behaviour in talking about it later but we make allowances and blame him less than we would blame someone else. That
is, we work on the supposition that there are degrees of responsibility
and hence of blame. For a long time, the law divided people cleanly
into the sane and the insane, or (as a judge said in 1923) into those
who were completely responsible for their actions and those who
were not responsible for them at all. Murder cases came into courts,
however, which involved people who, while not insane, were of low
intelligence or were emotionally disturbed or who had been under
terrible stress. In these cases, if there was no doubt about the fact
28 See above, p. 53.
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that the accused had killed someone, and if he was not demonstrably
insane, he had to be found guilty of murder, which in many places
meant that he had to be sentenced to death (this could later be commuted to life imprisonment). This seemed unfair, and to remedy
the situation in many jurisdictions the statutory defence of “diminished responsibility” (or, in some places, “diminished capacity”) is
now admitted. (I am told that it was introduced in England by the
Homicide Act of 1957.) According to a lawyer who advised on this
paragraph, it is used in cases of people who on the one hand are not
insane and were in some measure responsible for what they did, and
who are therefore found guilty and sentenced to punishment, but
who on the other hand suffer an abnormality of mind (because of
inherent causes or induced by disease or injury) which affects their
capacity to control their actions, to understand the nature and quality of their actions, or to know that what they are doing is wrong;
that is, it is used in cases of people who were only in a small measure
responsible for their actions. When the jury is convinced by this defence, the person is found guilty, but of manslaughter, not murder.
The judge does not then have to condemn him or her to death or life
imprisonment, but can impose whatever sentence seems just in the
circumstances.
Also, when it comes to sentencing, the degree of a person’s responsibility often determines the severity of the sentence. If a man suddenly needed a lot of money as bail for his son, used money which
had been entrusted to him intending to pay it back, was later unable
to do this because his son absconded, was charged with embezzlement and pleaded guilty, he will probably be sentenced less severely
than a man who without being in need misused money entrusted to
him to buy luxuries for himself.
I should perhaps add that the degree of responsibility can also vary
according to a person’s position in an organisation, and according to
whether he or she is acting under orders or not. If, for example, some
soldiers are ordered by their officer to commit a crime and if they
and he are later brought to trial and found guilty, the men will not
be allowed to plead that they were obeying orders and therefore were
not responsible for their actions (this is known as the Nuremburg
defence and it is not accepted), but the officer will be treated as the
17 1 Determinism & Criminal Justice
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person most responsible for what happened and will be (or rather
should be) punished more severely. And Simon Wiesenthal said that
“a man who, as a member of an ad-hoc execution squard, shot dead
ten Jews is less guilty than one who, without any order or pressure,
broke a detainee’s limbs by beating”.29
a note on retribution
A disputed question is whether wrongdoers ought to be punished
not to rehabilitate them or to deter them or others, but simply because justice demands it. I will not discuss this here but will simply
say that while, as we have seen, determinists are opposed to punishment in this sense, believers in free will are divided on the subject.
Belief in free will does not entail belief in retributive justice.
29 Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, p. 4.
Part four
MaKing DeCisions
A most important distinction between free decisions is that which
exists between those which are purely rational, by which I mean that
the agent is not emotionally drawn to any of the alternatives and is
not emotionally repelled by any of them, and those in which emotions play an important role. I shall deal with these in separate chapters.
CHaPter 18
PureLy rationaL DeCisions
By a purely rational decision I mean one in which there is no emotional preference for one alternative over the others, and no abhorrence for any alternative or alternatives. It might be a decision which
involves only the person who makes it. If, for example, I have to
make a long flight and I feel no preference for or against any airline,
and if I obtain brochures and timetables from a number of airlines,
I may consider only times, routes and prices and so coldly arrive at a
decision. On the other hand, it might be a decision which a person
makes for a company or community of which he or she is a member,
and about which he or she is quite unemotional. For example, if a
man in a company is asked to interview some applicants for a position, when he does not know any of them, is neither attracted nor
repelled by any of them, and will not himself work with whoever
is chosen, he may make a purely rational decision. It is true that in
these cases there may be a desire to make a rational choice, but in
the cases I have in mind his emotions do not cause him to prefer any
particular option.
tHe faCts
To make a judgement, one has to know what the decision is about.
This means, first, that one needs to obtain or review the facts which
define the existing situation. This may be difficult for practical reasons, and it may demand long investigation, the study of reports
and balance-sheets, the conducting of hearings and long hours of
work on a packed dossier to bring all the significant facts into focus
at once. To achieve this, people may need to examine evidence again
and again, to calculate and recalculate, or to read and reread certain
documents, in order to be able to say at last: “Very well, I see the
situation. Now what should be done?”
Second, it is necessary to see what the options are. At this stage we
may be well advised to include even seemingly remote possibilities,
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because on closer examination they may prove to be not remote at
all, and we may also do well, when we think we have thought of everything, to ask ourselves whether there is perhaps another possibility, quite different from all the others, which we have overlooked. If
we close our list of options too soon we may make our decision, act,
and later think of something else we could have done and say: “Why
didn’t we think of that?”
Third, the objective facts about the various alternatives need to be
obtained, so far as that is possible: what each would require, what
its certain, probable and possible consequences, direct and indirect,
would be, and what it would or might cost. In many cases, “hard” or
certain information will simply not be available: it may be possible
only to say what will probably happen. However, one obtains whatever information and educated guesses one can.
Finally, among the facts, it is often necessary to find out what other
people are doing or intend to do.
tHe VaLues
Any decision is made in view of a value or values, and so when
a decision is made there is question not only of facts but of values.
Truths are never incompatible, so that faced with incompatible theories, one cannot affirm both but must find which is true and which
is false, or else interpret them in such a way that they only seem to
be incompatible. Values, however, can be incompatible even though
both are genuine, in which case it is often necessary to choose one
value and reject the other, while not denying its genuineness.
This means that not always but often it is impossible to do good
without at the same time causing harm. An owner of a farm or business might decide to sell it, though this will mean that he will not
be able to employ his children in it, and eventually give it to them.
A person might have to choose between some beautiful trees and a
new building. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw, it is a law of being that frequently good cannot be achieved without harm being
done. Progress, he said, is always bought at a price, which is paid in
suffering.1 This principle must not be used to justify ruthless disregard for whoever or whatever is standing in one’s way; but it does
mean that if we were to make it our policy never to do anything that
1 Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 51.
18 1 Purely Rational Decisions
221
would hurt anyone, we would never do anything important – and
that would cause harm.
I have dealt at different times with the difference between theoretical and practical thought, and it may be true that theoreticians are
inclined to see only one element in a complex situation and present
what seems to them to be a knock-down argument which runs something like this:
We ought not to hurt old people (or divide a community)
But to do X would hurt some old people (or divide a community)
Therefore we ought not to do X.
In practical matters, however, it is often not a matter of which alternative is right and which is wrong (as one might say: which is true
and which is false), but of choosing between alternatives, both of
which have value. As Ricoeur says, “The law of theoretical thought
is the conjunction ‘both/and’; the law of action is the disjunction
‘either/or’.”2
tHe iMPLiCit Content of tHe
PossibLe DeCisions
Many decisions have an unexpressed or implicit content. To be
honest and clear about what we are doing we may need to bring this
to the surface and express it. If, for instance, to refuse an offer or
invitation would be implicitly to break off relations with the organisation or person from whom it came, to make a good decision one
should say to oneself that that is what the action would involve.
abiDing VoLitions WHiCH We aLreaDy HaVe
We all have abiding volitions, which give structure to our lives and
consistency to our actions. As a rule, if a person has an important
abiding volition and the opportunity presents itself to do something
unimportant which would conflict with it, he or she at once, without
much thought, turns down the opportunity. For example, if a student has a firm intention of completing a certain course and doing
well in it, if to fulfil its requirements he has to write an essay, and if
he is invited to go away for a weekend he may at once say: “I can’t,
I have an essay to write”. (One of the benefits of abiding volitions
is that they reduce the number of decisions which we need to think
2 Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p. 166.
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about, so that when significant decisions have to be made we can
give them the time and attention they need.) Moreover, there are
situations in which our abiding volitions do not point definitely to
one particular course of action, as they do in the above example,
but where we must nevertheless ask ourselves how the various possibilities harmonise with them. For example, if a person is invited to
enter political life he normally asks himself to what extent that would
interfere with, or help, his work, his family life and his other commitments and pursuits.
I am not here saying that abiding commitments, once formed,
must be regarded as immutable, for while it is true that we should
not be constantly reviewing our fundamental options and seriously considering radical changes in our lives, it is also true that some
abiding volitions were ill-considered in the first place and changed
circumstances have caused others to become unreasonable, and they
ought to be reconsidered. What I am saying is that when a decision
has to be made, existing abiding volitions need often to be considered.
MoraL obLigations
The next question is whether any moral obligations exist. This
is not the place for a complete treatise on ethics, but a few remarks
may be in place. There is in general no moral obligation to do a good
thing simply because it can be done,3 and generally speaking there
is no obligation to choose whichever of two alternatives is the better
one. The reason for this is that moral evil consists in directly willing
the destruction of some good,4 and to choose one good rather than
another, even a lesser good rather than a greater one, is not to wish
the destruction of the good which is not selected. Hence, very often
when we have to make a choice there is no moral obligation either
way.
If a moral obligation exists to choose one of the possible courses,
the endeavour to find the right thing to do should stop here. There
should be no weighing of other considerations for and against either
3 I here disagree with Journet, who says: “Anyone who can bring about
something good and does not do so is blameworthy” (The Meaning of Evil,
p. 105).
4 See Cowburn, Shadows and the Dark, pp. 52-57.
18 1 Purely Rational Decisions
223
alternative, as to do this would be to imply that choosing evil was not
excluded, and the non-exclusion of evil is itself evil.
There are also times when a course of action would not be unjust,
or in any other way strictly immoral, but when it would be somewhat hard on others, and there are times when an action would be
not obligatory but generous or noble. This needs to be considered.
In certain circumstances a Christian will judge that he has a kind of
obligation to be generous, kind or patient beyond the demands of
sheer ethics.
PossibiLity
I said earlier that it is impossible to decide to do something which
one believes to be impossible.5 Hence, if you want to persuade someone to give up smoking, you will get nowhere if he believes that he
simply cannot do it, and all your talk about the dangers of smoking
will only make him miserable. Therefore, when someone else has
to make a decision you may need to make sure that he or she really
believes, about a particular “possibility”, that it is possible. Also, suppose that someone has been a doctor or teacher and now wonders
whether to leave the profession or to stay in it. For his making up
his mind to be more than a charade, and for it to give him the peace
of mind which a well-made decision can give, he must approach the
decision regarding his leaving his profession as a genuine possibility.
If at the back of his mind he knows that he would never have the
strength of character to make a move like that, no real choice will be
made.
Sometimes people judge that a course of action is impossible when
it is extremely difficult, indeed, but not impossible. It is, for instance,
not impossible to give up smoking. Also, if a man says to a woman:
“I’d like to marry you but my family is utterly opposed to the marriage and, therefore, I cannot do it”, she may be entitled to reply:
“I don’t believe that you can’t, but I accept that you won’t”. Let us,
therefore, not to be too quick to judge that something is impossible:
it is a way of evading responsibility.
5 Above, p. 25.
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HoW binDing tHe DeCision WiLL be
Some decisions can be reversed at any moment. Others are reversible for a time and then become binding. Yet other decisions are
made with the intention of permanence but later have to be reversed.
Finally, certain decisions are of their nature utterly irreversible: the
decision to destroy an old building, to close a school, to have or not
to have a child at a certain time or to let somebody die rather than by
extraordinary means to keep him or her alive, is final once it has been
carried into effect. Naturally, in making decisions we consider this.
taLKing WitH otHers
All through this process, particularly in the case of these purely
rational decisions, it may be good to talk about the decision with
other people, sometimes seeking information and advice, sometimes
not. If one has an obligation to share important things in one’s life
with another person, or if another person will be deeply affected, it
may be obligatory to keep that person informed as the process goes
on, and to listen to what he or she has to say. I cannot here go into
all that this involves – whole books exist about counselling – but will
nevertheless say that we need to be careful about dishonestly using
our choice of confidant to influence our judgement in a particular
direction, and about using advisers to escape the burden of responsibility by asking them to tell us what to do.
On the other hand, if I have to make a rational decision, there may
be pressure on me from outside, tending to influence my reading of
the situation and to make me form a judgement that may be wrong
and that, whether right or wrong, will not really be mine. The pressure may come from almost a whole society, telling me (for instance)
that people of a certain nationality are unreliable. It may come from
a particular group of people – a conservative business group, a liberal
academic group or, for a young person, a peer group – to which I
belong, which holds certain dubious propositions to be self-evident
and is intolerant of dissent from them. Pressure can also come, as I
said earlier, from an individual person who is trying to persuade me
to do something. When such pressure is being exerted on me, I need,
first, to see it for what it is. If, for instance, someone is trying to get
me to judge that I ought to do such and such a thing, he has a better
chance of succeeding if he is subtle and I do not realise what he is
18 1 Purely Rational Decisions
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up to; and if I can recognise social pressures for what they are I am
better able to make my own judgement. Second, if to choose one of
the alternatives would cause me to be ridiculed or rejected by society,
by my own social group, or by particular persons, I may do well to
ask myself: “If that is the right thing to do, will I have the courage to
face that fact, or will I turn my mind away from the truth?” If I have
to answer that I perhaps would not have the courage, I should talk
strongly to myself until I am able to say, “Yes, I would”. I will then
be free, that alternative will be possible, and I will be able to proceed
to consideration of the issue, feeling confident that I will make my
own judgement.
WeigHing
One sets up a sort of mental balance, and weighs one value against
another, disvalues against each other and against the values. If the
decision is of the kind which ought to be made on purely practical
grounds, this is where the judgement is made. Sometimes one goes
over the facts in one’s mind or on paper, one recalls the advice which
one has received, one weighs the values, and the pointer of the balance swings to one side immediately and decisively. At other times,
nothing is clear and then a piece of information is found and evaluated and, when it is added, in a flash the answer is apparent – it is like
a heavy item added to one of the trays of a hovering balance, which
tips it. At other times, one considers; one sleeps on the question and
studies the dossier again next morning, when one is fresh; one goes
for a walk or plays an outdoor game to clear one’s brain; and slowly,
like a figure emerging from the mist, the right thing to do becomes
clear. At other times, however, the balance goes on hovering and the
most we can say is that there seems to be a slight tendency for it to
go down on one side rather than on the other; or, to leave the metaphor, one concludes that the most one can say is that on balance one
course of action seems to be slightly preferable to the others.
I am talking here about making a judgement and so concluding
the first phase of the decision-making process. In these purely rational cases, which involve no emotion, the decision follows quickly
and easily on the judgement, when it is clear.
CHaPter 19
DeCisions WHiCH inVoLVe eMotions
WHat is Meant by eMotions Here
Emotions can be studied at great length and I shall simply say that
by the term, as I use it here, I shall mean what I will call non-cognitive psychological experiences, except the actual making of decisions.
I shall include impulses, drives and desires as well as what are ordinarily called feelings or emotions.
sense-LeVeL DriVes anD feeLings
It is often said that human beings have a self-preservative tendency,
which leads us to defend our lives and to look after ourselves, and a
sex-instinct, which causes people to tend to engage in sexual behaviour, from preening and staring at sexually attractive people to having sexual intercourse. At least many people desire to have children
and delight in being affectionate to other people’s children. We may
have what I might call a making drive, which causes people to do
carpentry, to make clothes and to cook. Many of us want to have an
area of some kind which is in some sense ours and in which we feel
at home. Finally, there is a fairly general competitive drive, because of
which, if two boys have to go somewhere, one will say to the other,
“I’ll race you”; and adults enjoy competitive sports.
The above drives are almost universal but others are relatively rare.
It is possible, for instance, that some people are born with a wanderlust or a desire to travel, even to live in many different places
– I remember an American in an army base in Germany who said:
“I find I’m starting to feel homesick – not that I want to return to
where I grew up, but I want to go and live somewhere else”. Other
people want to spend their whole lives in one place, and feel ill at
ease whenever they are away from it.
Some states of feeling which we experience are not directed towards any outside object. For instance, a person might wake up after
a good night’s sleep and face the day with a sense of physical well-
19 1 Decisions Which Involve Emotions
227
being, which he or she expresses by bounding out of bed, walking
with a spring in the step, and perhaps singing; or a person may feel
tired and in a bad mood, for no particular reason. Other feelings are
directed towards other beings.
Within the range of what is normal, there is a great variety in the
strength of these feelings. Certainly, some people are more competitive than others, or more parental, or more highly sexed. Sometimes
the feeling is so strong or weak as to be pathological. If, for example,
a man is so lacking in self-confidence that he will undertake almost
nothing, we may say that he is pathologically shy.
HigHer eMotions
We also have emotions which are not at the sense level, and which
are not responses to sense-perceptions. For instance, when we become aware of something, we often want to understand it. “How can
this be?”, we say, expressing a desire which is for knowledge but is
not itself knowledge, and it is at a higher level than desire for food
when we are hungry. Also, normal human beings have a moral sense,
so that they love justice and are emotionally troubled by injustice.
Moreover, human beings appreciate beauty in works of literature and
other works of art. For instance, if a human being sees a beautiful
building and is delighted by it, no animal could have this emotion,
and if people enjoy a ballet they get sense-pleasure from the colours
and also from the human bodies which are displayed, but mainly
their delight is above the animal level. Finally, if a man and a woman
not only find one another physically attractive but, and if this for
them is far more important, they appreciate one another’s minds and
characters, so that they love one another, their love (which supposes
knowledge but is not itself knowledge) is, and is accompanied by,
spiritual emotion.
DeCisions WHiCH sHouLD be MaDe
on MoraL grounDs,
WHen eMotions are inVoLVeD
In most decisions there is no conflict between feelings and morality, but there are times when there is a conflict. For instance, a businessman may see that he could make a lot of money in a dishonest
way, and he might feel a strong desire to go that way, while at the
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same time saying to himself, “This would be immoral”. A man and a
woman, one of whom is married to someone else, might feel a strong
sexual and personal attraction towards one another, and know that
they ought not to let an intense relationship develop between them.
In this connection it is worth noting that in general people ought
not to be too quick to judge that a certain course of action would
be immoral. In some cases, people ought to make sure that they
have all the significant facts and at times they should perhaps consult
someone. Also, we ought not to be too quick to judge that others are
deliberately acting immorally: in many cases their ideas about morality are not the same as ours, and they are doing what they believe to
be right, or at any rate not immoral.
DeCisions WHiCH sHouLD be MaDe
on PureLy rationaL grounDs
WHen eMotions are inVoLVeD
If a teacher is marking examination papers, he or she may like
some students and dislike others, but that ought not to affect the
marking. Similarly, if a cricket umpire has to decide whether a ball
which hits the batsman’s pad would have hit the wicket, he ought
not to let any emotions he might feel influence his decision. This,
one may say, involves a moral obligation, but consider the following
case. A man is to work on a high floor and he is shown into an office which is perfect for his needs. It has, however, a thick floor-toceiling window and, when he stands near it and looks down, he is
suddenly terrified and runs out of the room. He observes, however,
that everyone else walks in and out of the office, and in and out of
their own offices, which have similar windows, without the slightest
anxiety and he makes the intellectual judgement, first, that his feeling, though natural, is irrational, and, second, that he will quickly
get used to the window. He accepts the office.
Also, to take a slightly less clear case, suppose that someone is a
member of a school committee which has to decide whether or not
to dismiss a male teacher who has been turning up late and half
drunk, missing classes, and not covering the course. Some of the
students, who would normally be able to go to university, will be
unable to go there unless something is done. On the other hand, a
dismissal will make life difficult for the teacher and his family. Let
19 1 Decisions Which Involve Emotions
229
us suppose that the committee should decide to dismiss the teacher.
Now let us suppose that a committee member, who is going to have
to cast a vote when the discussion is over, is a friend of this teacher.
Need I say that he or she should vote for dismissal, in spite of not
wanting to do so?
In these cases, we should consider the situation rationally for as
long as necessary. This may be a few seconds or it may be necessary to
study the facts, to ponder them and to discuss them. To be rational
when emotions are involved is not aways easy. For example, a person
may shy away from facing the fact that he lacks the ability to pursue
the career on which he has set his heart, that he is a failure in what
he is doing and should find something else, or that by smoking and
drinking he is endangering his life. Also, a group of people responsible for running an institution or a business, which they warmly love,
may listen as someone explains to them, with graphs and figures,
that a disaster will occur unless some drastic changes are made; and
they may then say: “It can’t be as bad as that. You can prove anything
with statistics”.
DeCisions WHiCH sHouLD be MainLy DeterMineD
by eMotions, WHere tHere is
no serious MoraL or rationaL objeCtion
In these cases, too, the rational question should be considered, for
as long as necessary. If there is a practical problem of some kind, it
should at least be faced honestly. Then, if difficulties later arise, the
person will not say, “I never thought of that” but, instead,will say:
“I was expecting this, I knew what I was letting myself in for, and I
stand by the decision”.
The feelings or emotions should be evaluated. The result can at
times be negative, though usually it is positive.
negatiVe juDgeMents on eMotions
Let us suppose that a certain man, whose family was not wealthy,
has started a business and is now, for the first time in his life, a fairly
rich man; and let us suppose that one morning, looking at advertisements in the newspaper, he looks at a picture of an expensive car
and says to himself, “I wish I had a car like that”. Let us also suppose
that he could, with some difficulty, afford such a car. He might ask
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himself, “Why do I wish I had such car?”, and he might judge that it
was not because of its merits as a car but because it would cause other
businessmen, who drive similar cars, to accept him as a member of
the unofficial fellowship of rich men. After which he might judge
that it would be better to keep the money for other purposes.
Here is another case. A shy man is asked to give a speech which
is well within the range of his ability and he feels inclined to say,
“No, let someone else do it”. He then evaluates his own shyness,
decides that at least in this case it is unreasonable, and concludes
that it would be better for him to force himself, as it were, to give the
speech, in the hope that it will be a success and that it will help him
to overcome his shyness.
Here is a third case, which I will set as if it were a quotation.
A young girl’s father left her mother and herself and she grew up
living with her mother. She had little education. At eighteen she
raved about male film stars and singers who were no longer young.
In her twenties her intellectual level was that of “popular” illustrated magazines and she had affairs with men who were more
than ten years older than herself. At thirty, she met a divorced
writer in his forties who was highly respected as a leading intellectual, she threw herself at him, he caught her and they started
an affair, which involved an almost entirely physical relationship.
She wanted them to get married. He, however, evaluated both her
feelings and his own, and refused. He could see that she had been
looking for a father-figure and he judged that that was no basis for
a marriage. Also, he saw that his physical desire for her was also no
basis for a marriage.
Here, finally, is a fourth case. A single man and a single woman
who are both scholars have become friends and they meet frequently.
After a while they realise that their friends are waiting for them to get
married, and they can see that this is understandable. However, they
agree that there is no sexual attraction between them, so that their
friendship is purely spiritual, and they judge that they ought not to
get married, at least to one another.
PositiVe juDgeMents on eMotions
A single man in his late twenties has a vacation coming, he has
decided to leave town and he is wondering whether to go to a certain
seaside resort, to surf and swim, or to go to a place in the mountains,
19 1 Decisions Which Involve Emotions
231
to hike and climb. In the end, the judgement will be based on what
he feels like doing.
A single man and a single woman find that they are both sexually
attracted towards one another, have similar interests and values, and
are in love. They quickly judge that they should get married.
A violinist is offered a position in a great orchestra and there is no
reason why he or she should not accept it. The judgement is made
at once.
Here is a somewhat more complex case, which again I shall set as
if it were a quotation.
A girl grew up in a rich family. Her idea of a home was that of her
family’s big house and the similar houses of her friends, she went
to an upper-class private school, and she always wore expensive
clothes. She went to university, where she fell in love with a young
man from a middle-middle-class family who aimed to become a
school-teacher. Choosing her moment, she brought up with him
the question of marriage. He said: “I love you, as you know, but I
would not be able to support you in the way to which you are accustomed”. She replied: “I know that, and it won’t matter, because
we love one another”. They got married, and from then on she
took great care always to live at his level, so that it became their
level. Her parents, who liked the man, took care to behave towards
them with great tact.
In these case, emotions were positively valued.
DeCisions WHiCH sHouLD be MaDe
on botH rationaL anD eMotionaL grounDs
Here are two cases:
People are going to live in Melbourne and they have decided to
buy a house here. They visit various houses, and they consider both
the practical aspects (price, size, state of repair, nearness to schools)
and their own emotions (would we be happy living in this house?).
Eventually, they reach a decision. It may be that they choose a house
which is not the one which appealed most strongly to them, but
involved too many practical problems. It may be that they choose
the house they like most, in spite of a problem which they see in it.
The final judgement goes to the house which, all things considered,
they prefer.
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An unmarried girl student has a baby and is considering offering it
for adoption. She consider practical matters, as they involve and will
involve both herself and the child, and also her own emotions. Her
judgement will be based on both considerations.
Also, if a couple who have two children are considering having a
third, they will probably consider both practical matters and their
own feelings.
CHaPter 20
Doing goD’s WiLL
It is often said that our ultimate aim in life should be to do God’s
will, so that whenever we have to make a decision the question we
should ask ourselves is, ultimately, “What does God want me to do
in this situation?”
MoraL CHoiCes
If a person faces a choice between morally right and wrong alternatives, there is no doubt about what is the right thing to choose. It is
also clear that if he makes the right choice he does God’s will, but
there is a difference of opinion over whether, in the end, a person is
morally obliged to do the right thing because it is God’s will that he
do it, or whether God wants him to do the right thing because he is
morally obliged to do it.
A Suarezian theory of moral obligation was that obligations can
come only from the will of a personal superior and that moral obligations come from the will of God. According to this view, I can make
statements of fact about alternatives before me, such as that they are
reasonable or irrational, beneficial or harmful, but I become morally
obliged to choose one of them only when I know that God wills it.
This theory, I think, is dead. We now derive moral obligations from
the value or dignity of persons. Where an updated Suarezian might
say that we should respect persons because God wills it, we say that
God wants us to respect persons because persons have value or dignity. Perhaps children, when small, think that it is wrong to steal
because their parents have told them not to; later, they realise that
they had had things back to front and that their parents told them
not to steal because it is wrong. For those who held it, the abandonment of Suarezianism was an analogous step. It follows that when
I am in a situation which involves moral issues the basic question
which I must ask myself is: “Do I have any moral obligations here,
and if so what are they?” rather than: “What does God want me to
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do?” I shall here consider choices between alternatives none of which
is immoral.
non-MoraL Cases WHere tHere is
onLy one rigHt tHing to Do
Consider these cases: (1) A man decides to buy a television set and
finds that he has a choice between an extremely good and reliable
one which is on sale at a very reduced price, and a very inferior one
which is available at a slightly lower price. It would be possible for
him, out of miserliness or timidity about spending money, to buy the
cheaper one, but that would be a mistake.1 (2) A girl has a passion for
classical music – she listens to it, plays it, remembers it, reads about
it and remembers everything she reads – and as she comes towards
the time when she will start to work she desires above all to find a
job somewhere in the world of classical music. At the right moment,
a good job of this kind is offered to her, and so is a slightly more
highly paid job which has nothing to do with music. The music job
is the right one for her. (3) A man and a woman are in love and there
is no reason why they should not get married. For them, this is the
right thing to do. I think that everyone will agree that if the man
buys the better television set, if the girl takes the music job and if
the couple get married, they please God. But the question is whether
they should do what is right because it is God’s will or whether God
is pleased with them because they do what they should do.
The case of the television set is so similar to a moral case that it
surely should be solved in the same way: in general it is unreasonable to give in to miserliness or timidity, the better television set is
the right one to buy, and God therefore wants the man to buy it.
In the cases which involve strong subjective inclinations, the question is: Which comes first, the inclination or God’s will? Does God
decide that he wants a girl to work in the world of music when she
leaves school and implant in her, when she is a teenager, a love of
music to move her to do that? Does God decide that he wants two
1 In considering this case, please do not invent other factors: e.g., do not
say: “But what if the buyer belongs to a community which should look
poor and so ought not to have a high-quality television set even if it can be
bought cheaply?” or “But if the better set was made by a company which
also makes arms, the other one should be bought”.
20 1 Doing God’s Will
235
people to get married, and stir up in them emotions which will move
them to do it? This is supposed by those who see the inclinations
as coming from God and showing his will.2 It seems to me to be
far better to suppose that the inclinations arise out of natural causes
like genes and environmental conditioning and that God wants the
girl to work in music and the couple to get married because that is
what they deeply want to do and what will make them happy and
there is no good reason why they should not. It seems to me to be
far more reasonable for a couple to say, “Let’s get married because
we’re in love – we can be sure that God approves”, than to say, “The
love which God has made us feel for each other shows that he wants
us to get married, so let’s do that”. It also seems to me that the view
which I am rejecting is objectionable because it maintains that God
manipulates our emotions for his own ends. There have been times
when two sets of parents hoped that their children would get married
and they did all they could to encourage this; if it had been possible
for them to get inside their children’s hearts and make them fall in
love with each other they would have done that. But would it have
been right? No, it would not, and it would not be right for God to
do it, either.
In the above examples it is easy for the person to see the one and
only right thing to do. There are, however, times when anyone who
knew all the facts would see that there is only one right thing to do,
but some decisive facts are hidden from the person who has to make
the decision. If he or she is supposed to discern God’s will, is God’s
will based on the full facts or on the facts known to the person? If it
is based on the full facts, the person cannot hope to find it without
a private revelation or a miraculous intervention of some kind; but
this is not part of God’s way of working in ordinary circumstances
and this is an ordinary situation; therefore the person is supposed to
do something impossible, which is absurd. If God’s will is based on
the facts known to the person, God makes what for him is a bad decision and expects the person to discern it, which is odd. This is the
dilemma which these situations involve for someone who says that
2 Ignatius Loyola says that in certain times God “so moves and attracts the
will that a devout soul without hesitation, or the possibility of hesitation,
follows what has been manifested to it” (Spiritual Exercises, # 175).
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when anyone has a decision to make he or she should ask, “What
does God want me to do?”
WHen tHere is not one
“rigHt tHing to Do”
There are other situations, which are not such that there is only
one right thing to do. Many unimportant situations are of this kind,
but important decisions, too, can be like this. For example, a fortunate student can choose between several universities, in different
cities, which have different approaches to his subject. He is not yet
committed to a particular approach but will in effect commit himself
to one in making this choice. Also, the cities differ in what they offer
in the way of religious, political, cultural and other opportunities.
And no university, with its city, seems to him to be the right one for
him to choose. They are all eligible.
It has been traditional teaching in some schools of spirituality, as
distinct from theology, that God has a definite and detailed plan for
each of us, so that whenever a person has a choice there is always one
alternative which God wants him or her to choose. Where factors
in the situation cause one of the alternatives to be the right thing to
do, God does not have to make a choice: he simply wants the person
to do the right thing. When, however, the situation is not such that
there is a right thing to do, according to this teaching God chooses
one of the alternatives and by so doing makes it the one which he
wants the person to choose, and he or she must try to discern which
one it is. Some recent Jesuits have expressed this clearly. For instance,
William A. M. Peters says: “In actual fact, one of two alternatives
must be the will of God, and consequently be more in the service and
honour of God.”3 M. Sheeran says that what is needed at times is
discernment, which, is “the capacity to discover the concrete divine
will in a given situation in which reason (principles) does not make
that divine will clear”.4 John Futrell says that “men must discern
within the ambiguity of these situations, and among the various
alternative choices of morally good decisions and actions open to
them, which one choice is actually the response to the real call of
3 Peters, The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, Exposition and Interpretation,
p. 124.
4 Sheeran, “Discernment as a Political Problem”, p. 449.
20 1 Doing God’s Will
237
God to them here and now”.5 David L. Fleming says: “In making a
choice or in coming to a decision, only one thing is really important
– to seek and find what God calls me to at this time of my life.”6 I
propose to call this the Directive View.
This view is supposed by Karl Rahner in The Dynamic Element in
the Church and it is very obviously supposed by Jules J. Toner in two
articles in a book which he edited with John Carroll Futrell, Essays
on Discernment. In “The Deliberation that Started the Jesuits” Toner
discusses the deliberation which took place in late Lent, 1539, about
whether Ignatius and his companions should form a permanent
group. Toner asks whether, before the group met, Ignatius already
knew that God wanted them to form a permanent group. If he knew,
he “could not honestly enter into a search for God’s will”, and if he
did not know, why was that? (Note that this question arises for Toner
only because he believes that God always has a definite will which
we need to find.) Toner goes on to discuss the question of whether,
when a meeting is held and the majority view is that God wants
the group to do a certain thing, the minority has to believe that the
majority is right, and he says that if the members of the minority believe that God in his goodness teaches people his will when they do
their best to find it, they must judge that the majority is right about
what God wants done.7 The second article, “A Method for Communal Discernment of God’s Will” is about “a process undertaken by
a community as a community for the purpose of judging what God
is calling that community to do”.8 It says that if a community meets
to discuss, let us say, the joining together of two schools or two par5 Futrell, “Ignatian Discernment”, p. 49.
6 Fleming, The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius and a Contemporary Reading,
p. 103.
7 Here are Toner’s words: “If they [members of a minority] really believe
that God’s goodness leaves no doubt he will teach them his will when they
make the best effort they honestly can, if they believe that their conclusion
after such an effort is inspired by the Holy Spirit, then there is no escaping
assent (as opposed to mere volitional consent) to the conclusion as truly
God’s will after it is approved by the majority” (“The Deliberation that
Started the Jesuits”, p. 24).
8 Toner, “A Method for Communal Discernment of God’s Will”, pp. 5455.
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ishes, and if after some days they are still undecided, this is probably
not because as a group they are indecisive but because “God does not
submit to our timetable. God has his own time”.9 Clearly, the entire
supposition is that when we come to a crossroads there is always one
way which God wants us to go and our first task is to find out which
it is: as only God knows it only he can tell us and he will tell us at
whatever time he chooses.
Although this has almost the same status in some schools of spirituality as a dogma has in theology, I am going to argue against it and
propose a Non-directive View according to which, when no one alternative is the right thing to do, God does not select one alternative
and make it the one which he wants the person to choose: he wants
the human person to choose, responsibly and for good motives, and
he accepts whatever choice the person makes. God, according to this
view, is like the parents of a young man who is considering the offer
of a job. If they are good parents they do not say: “We want you to
take it – it is what we have always wanted you to do”, nor do they
say: “We want you to refuse that offer”. They say: “Think it over
carefully, talk about it to us as much as you like, and make your own
decision. Whichever way you decide, we will approve and support
you.” God, again, is like a person in high authority who is asked by
someone with subordinate authority who has a problem: “What do
you want me to do?” The higher-up person says: “Make the decision
– that’s what I want you to do, that is what you are there for. And
if you make a responsible decision I will back you up.” Finally, God
is like a husband whose wife has a responsible job outside the house
and who has to make a difficult decision in it. He listens to her when
she talks about it, if she chooses to do so, but he does not then decide
what should be done and tell her to do it: he leaves it to her to make
the decision. In my view, then, when a group of people have to make
a decision as a community, they should discuss the various alternatives fully and then, usually by voting, make a decision. Once a decision has been made, especially if there is a solid majority for it, the
minority should as a rule accept it, not because it is sure to be what
God wanted but because the right to make the decision was vested in
the group as a whole. And if the group is a religious community, the
9 ibid., p. 58.
20 1 Doing God’s Will
239
members should begin by asking God not to tell them what he wants
them to do, but to help them to make their decision well: instead of
beginning by saying, “We have come together to find God’s will”, the
leader should say, “We have come together to make a decision”.
reasons for Preferring
tHe non-DireCtiVe VieW
The first and principal reason for preferring the Non-Directive
View is that it supposes that God treats us as adult persons ought to
be treated. In the examples above, why do the young man’s parents
refrain from making a decision about his job? Not because they do
not have enough information or insight, nor because they do not
care, but because they respect their son as an adult person. Why does
the higher-up not make the decision for the person lower down? Not
because he does not have enough information or time, but because
the person lower down has the responsibility.
Second, where there is one right thing to do we can in principle
discover it, and hence know what God wants us to do, by studying and analysing the situation. In the situations which we are now
discussing, however, if God makes a decision, no indication of it is
given by the facts of the situation. As Rahner says, other knowledge
is needed. It can come only by a revelation or miraculous intervention. There is something wrong with a theory according to which
private revelation or special divine intervention is necessary for us to
make good decisions in perfectly ordinary situations.
Third, if I hold the Directive View and believe that I have succeeded in discerning God’s will, I am logically compelled to think
that anyone who opposes me is opposing the execution of God’s will,
or is opposing God. If I hold the Non-Directive View, I regard my
decisions as my own and any opponent as my opponent, not God’s.
This seems preferable.
Fourth, if God is deciding what he wants people to do and letting
them know, why are the actions of good people, when they make
decisions separately, not better co-ordinated? Is it because God does
not co-ordinate his own decisions, as Ignatius seems to have thought
since he said that “the same Divine Spirit could move me to this action for certain reasons and others to the contrary for other reasons”?
Or is it because even wise and good people rarely succeed in finding
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
God’s will, though this is what we are all supposed to do? This seems
to be a dilemma.
Finally, suppose that someone who holds the Directive View faces
evenly balanced alternatives. He asks God to indicate what he has
decided. If no message comes, he waits, he keeps others waiting, he
prays intently. If still no message comes, he becomes desperate. It
can happen that a person in this state hears a chance remark or happens upon something in the Bible which seems to point towards
one of the alternatives, and he takes it as the sign for which he has
been waiting; or else he may experience a subjective flutter of preference for one course of action over the others and take that to be a
movement of the Spirit in him. In most cases, he might as well have
drawn lots. The person who holds the Non-directive View may find
it difficult to make up his mind and he may keep himself and others
waiting while he agonises over the alternatives, but at least he knows
how to end the suspense: he must make a decision.
In favour of the Directive View it has been said that it is how holy
men have experienced decision-making. They have asked God to let
them know his will and God has made it known to them. To this
I can only reply that of course, if they believed the Directive View,
they interpreted their experiences in that way.
CHaPter 21
MaKing tHe DeCision
anD afterWarDs
iMMeDiateLy before tHe DeCision
We ended chapters 18-19 with a judgement or judgements: one
alternative is morally obligatory, clearly the most reasonable one, the
only emotionally acceptable one in a situation which should be decided on emotional grounds, or, when both practical and emotional
factors should be considered, on balance the best. Alternatively, we
may have ended with favourable judgements about several alternatives.
Some authors maintain that because “the will follows the intellect”,
it is impossible for anyone to make a judgement and then a volitional
decision contrary to it. According to them, the choice is made in
the final judgement, which the will simply follows. Since moral evil
consists in deliberately willing something which the person judges to
be against reason and destructive of value, these authors in the end
deny the possibility of moral evil; indeed, they deny the possibility
of any deliberate irrational volition or action. Confronted with what
appears to be an immoral or otherwise irrational action, they insist
that immediately prior to his or her decision the agent mistakenly
judged that it was a reasonable and good thing to do: they do not
claim to have observed this judgement; rather, from their principle
that the will follows the intellect they deduce that it must have been
made. However, moral evil is a reality, and we have all had experience of judging that something was unreasonable or even wrong and
then deciding to do it, without making a different judgement at the
last moment: we knew, as we made our decisions, that we were being
irrational or even immoral.1 Therefore, whatever “the will follows
the intellect” means, it is not true in the sense that the intellectual
judgement determines the volition.
1 See Cowburn, Shadows and the Dark, pp. 48-49, 64-68.
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Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
As I said earlier,2 even when the judgement is in favour of only
one alternative, it does not necessitate the decision. Often in these
cases the decision is made with such ease that the person is not conscious of being able to choose in any but one way, and he or she may
say, “I had no choice”, but as a rule one has free will and is able to
go any way.
tHe not MaKing of DeCisions
PerManent systeMatiC aVoiDanCe of DeCisions
We have almost all had the experience of being temporarily released
from many of the obligations which we usually have, and of being
able to do almost whatever we felt like doing from one moment to
the next. One has been convalescing after a serious illness, so that
one has had no work to do and no social obligations, and one has
walked, read, listened to music and in general done as one pleased
when one pleased. Or one has gone by oneself to a conference and
had a free day at the end of it. One felt then as free as a bird in the
sky. Extrapolating from this, we have a dream of complete freedom
– of having no obligations, restraints or bonds of any kind and of
coming completely fresh, and available for anything, to every situation as it arises. As a dream this is probably harmless enough, but it
was proposed as a way of life by André Gide, who “meant to remain
permanently attached to the age of life in which the future still seems
completely open, in which the undefined being feels unbounded”
and enjoys a pure availability.3
If someone makes up his mind to realise this dream of freedom
not in a limited way but completely and in his whole life, he must
systematically make no decisions which go beyond the immediate
future. He may, for example, decide to go for a walk now, but he
must not decide to go for a walk every day; and he may not promise
to attend a party tomorrow night, because if he were to do that the
obligation of going to it would weigh on him for the rest of today and all of tomorrow and he would not be available for anything
else that might offer itself for tomorrow night. According to Marcel, Gide saw that his total freedom involved “forbidding myself any
2 See above, p. 23.
3 Delay, The Youth of André Gide, p. 492.
21 1 Making the Decision & Afterwards
243
form of commitment, any kind of promise”.4 Also, he might have
passing encounters with other people and very short affairs, but he
may not permit himself to love anyone else, for if one loves another
person one is not free to consult only one’s own moods and inclinations when one makes decisions. Permanent systematic avoidance
of decisions thus turns out to be itself a decision, in which a person
commits himself or herself to a certain way of life; and in this way
freedom-lovers are extremely limited in what, consistent with their
choices, they can permit themselves to do, which is to say that they
are not free at all.
Freedom, one may say, is like a sum of money, ultimately meant
to be spent. It is agreeable to have some money which one does not
have to spend on any particular thing, so that one can walk along a
street with it in one’s pocket, looking into shop windows and saying to oneself, as one looks at one thing after another, “I am able to
buy that”. If one makes a choice and buys something, has one lost
the money? No, one has exchanged it for the thing which one has
bought. One can no longer window-shop, saying, “I could buy that”
as one looks at goods on display; but one has the thing which one has
bought. One has given up the enjoyment of manifold possibility, an
enjoyment which is in the imagination only, and obtained actual
possession of one thing, which one can enjoy. If, however, in order to
be able to enjoy window-shopping for ever, one were to decide never
to spend the money, one would be preferring imaginary ownership
of a number of things, one at a time, to real possession of some definite thing. Moreover, by making that decision one would kill even
the joy of window-shopping, for when one saw a desirable article in a
shop-window one would have to pass by it quickly saying to oneself:
“I have enough money to buy that but I must not look at it because
I’ve made up my mind never to spend the money”. It turns out that
one has found a particular way of using the money that, like spending it, makes it unavailable for any other use; and this way of using
it destroys its value, for money that is never going to be spent might
as well be waste paper. To be free is to be able to do this or that with
one’s life and to choose one’s friends and spouse. It is exciting, when a
4 Marcel, “Some Remarks on the Irreligion of Today” in Being and Having,
p. 212.
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man is young, to consider becoming an architect, a composer, an actor, a carpenter and a dozen other things, and it is agreeable on meeting attractive girls to know that he is free to court any of them; but
if, in order to make this stage last for all of his life, he decides never
to choose a career, a spouse or friends, then he does in fact choose a
particular way of life, abandoning his uncommitted state, so that he
can no longer think of other possibilities as open; and he renders his
freedom worthless by using it in this way. What total scepticism is in
the intellectual sphere, this systematic avoidance of decision is in the
volitional sphere, and both are self-cancelling in the same way.
unsysteMatiC aVoiDanCe of DeCisions
There are people who have been treated contemptuously while they
were growing up and who in consequence lack the confidence in
themselves which is needed to make serious decisions. There are others who for years were not allowed by a dominating parent, spouse
or religious superior to make any decisions and who, when they are
required to make decisions, suffer agonies of indecision over even
small issues. These people often postpone decisions until the last moment and manage to be busy then so that the moment passes by and
afterwards they see with relief that it is too late to decide; or they let
things drift indefinitely. Alternatively, they beg someone else to tell
them what to do, and a well-meaning person may do that for them.
They may suppose that they see the thing to do revealed in some
omen, or take some chance occurrence as a sign from heaven. They
may toss a coin. A superior, required to make an administrative decision which he or she should make after careful study of the dossier,
may call a community meeting and ask a whole group of people to
make the decision, though almost none of them will be able to study
the dossier. And so on: there are plenty of ways of avoiding decisions.
Paradoxically, one way of avoiding a troublesome decision-making
process is to make a decision quickly, after a minimum of thought,
and then to commit oneself to it in some binding way or to insist
that the decision has been made and will not be reconsidered.
People who lack confidence in themselves and find decision-making an agony are precisely the kind of people who are in danger of being drawn into cults or other movements with Führer-type leaders; or
they may choose to live in total institutions, even gaols, where there
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is almost no scope for the exercise of free will. That is, they may have
what Erich Fromm calls “the fear of freedom”. Walter Kaufmann
seems to think that all religions offer an escape from freedom,5 but
this is one point on which churches differ from cults: cult-members
are required to think and act at all times as the leader dictates, but
church-members often have many options open to them, and make
decisions on their own responsibility.
Others, who are not weak like the above people, are nevertheless
afraid of the ordeal that they foresee in a particular serious decision
and they put it off or even refuse ever to face it. A person whose
marriage is unhappy may dread the prospect of talking about it, especially with other persons, and so may refuse to discuss it or may
insist that things are not really very bad. A superior may see a person
or an institution deteriorating but fear the flare-up that intervention
might cause, and so let the deterioration continue instead of making
a decision which might stop it.
Other people, again, without systematically adopting the avoidance of decision as their way of life, like to play with the idea of
doing one thing while actually doing another. A Catholic layman,
for instance, may go on for years “thinking about becoming a priest”
but not making up his mind about it one way or the other: he then
has the enjoyment of actual life as a layman combined with whatever
satisfaction he gets from imagining himself as a priest, and by postponing the decision he can keep both. The trouble, of course, is that
he is not a priest or even training to become one; and he is not really
a layman, either, since he is avoiding permanent commitments in the
secular world: he is not really anything.
Finally, there are perhaps people who never decide on anything
because they are waiting for some ideal to appear. In Sartre’s The Age
of Reason, Mathieu has waited for years.
His sole care had been to hold himself in readiness. For an act. A
free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand
at the beginning of a new existence. He had never been able to
engage himself completely in any love-affair, or any pleasure, he
had never been really unhappy; he always felt as though he were
somewhere else, that he was not yet wholly born. He waited. And
during all that time, gently, stealthily, the years had come, they
5 Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice, pp. 7-9.
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had grasped him from behind: thirty-four of them. He ought to
have taken his decision at twenty-five. ... And he thought: “I’m no
longer waiting. She is right: I have cleared myself out, sterilised
myself into a being that can do nothing but wait. I am now empty,
it is true, but I am waiting for nothing.”6
PretenDing to be about to MaKe a DeCision
Sometimes people go through all the motions of making a decision
– they consult many experts and talk a lot about it – but it is all a pretence, to themselves as well as to others. Such people are maddening
to their advisers, who time and again give them carefully considered
opinions, only to see nothing come of it. Certain people in authority
are like this: when a problem exists they have reports drawn up, they
call meetings, they retire to consider the matter, after a time they
emerge to call more meetings and so they go on and on, because deep
down they have no real intention of making a decision.
Others go through the motions of making a decision when in fact
they have already made it, though they would not admit this. Thus
they seek counsel until someone advises them to do what they have
settled on; there they stop, and (they say) act on that advice. Again,
people in authority can be like this: they call meetings to discuss
what should be done and if the meetings make the recommendations
they want they act on them, whereas if the meetings make other recommendations they decide that more meetings are needed and they
go on holding meetings of different groups until eventually they get
the recommendation they want.
WHen to MaKe a DeCision
At the risk of saying what is obvious, I will say that, as a general
rule, one should not rush serious decisions. People who want to buy
a house should normally take their time, thoroughly inspecting the
houses which are available, and people who have to make significant
administrative decisions should give them the time they need. A man
who has taken a job for three years, with the possibility of staying
on after that time, might for a couple of years deliberately not make
up his mind about staying on. On the other hand, people ought not
unduly to delay decisions, as this can be destructive. For instance, if
6 Sartre, The Age of Reason, chap. 3, p. 51.
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247
there is a deadline, to go over it without making a decision is equivalent to making a negative decision. If a student is doing one course
while thinking of changing to another, and delays his decision for
months, there is a long period during which he is not seriously pursuing either course. If an unofficial engagement is allowed to drag
on for years because the couple delay deciding either to set a date
for their wedding or to break off the engagement, there is a long
period during which they should be either married or else free and
seeing other people. If a couple are undecided about whether or not
to have another child, they may know that with each passing year it
is becoming less likely that, if they want a child, they will succeed
in having one. And if a man’s drinking is becoming a problem, the
sooner he decides to stop, the better.
Another and only slightly less obvious fact is that, if it can be
avoided, decisions ought not to be made in extreme emotional states.
In a state of elation or excitement a person can easily underestimate
difficulties and make rash decisions which he or she will later regret
(revivalist meetings and recruiting rallies used to be designed to work
people up emotionally, then make them commit themselves in some
way, and it was not fair), while in a state of depression one can overestimate difficulties or feel that something is not worth doing, when
it is. This is why people who have suffered a bereavement or whose
marriage has broken up are advised not to make any major decisions
until a year or so has passed (except, of course, for decisions which
cannot be put off).
Finally, it is difficult to make a good decision when other people
present are trying to influence you, whether it is a persuasive salesman trying to sell you a product or a woman who is violently opposed to the institution of marriage urging a woman whose marriage
is in trouble to leave her husband. At such times one may have to
refrain from making a decision until the person has gone. Also, if
in a complex situation one factor has just made a deep impression
on you, you may need to restrain yourself from at once making the
decision because of that; you may need to give yourself time to be
capable of giving that factor no more than its proper weight.
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taLKing WitH otHers
In the end, a person makes a decision in his or her own consciousness, but it may be obligatory for him or her, at this stage to talk
about it with another person or other persons.
“HoVering” oVer tHe aLternatiVes
Let us go back to where we were at the end of chapter 19. The
person, who has not yet made a decision, may now behave like a
pilot in an aeroplane who is looking for somewhere to land and who
descends and circles over a possible landing-place, then ascends and
flies to another such place and circles over it, then returns to circle
over the first place again, then climbs high into the air to where he is
not over any landing-place in particular. That is, he may feel drawn
to one of the alternatives, think mainly about it and be on the point
of choosing it, then turn his mind to another possibility and start
thinking about it, instead; and then he may try to consider all of
them at once. At this moment, immediately before his decision, he
may realise that choosing one alternative will mean saying good-bye
to all the others: he must, let us suppose, choose between a job in the
city and one in the country; he has been thinking about the delights
of city life and enjoying them in prospect, and he has also pictured
himself living in the country and he has in imagination enjoyed that,
too; now, he realises, he must opt for one of these alternatives and so
put an end to his enjoyment of the other as a prospect; and he finds
it hard to let go of either. Perhaps more often, people find indecision
painful, and they talk about agonising over decisions or about the
strain of having to make decisions.
When there is a clear “right thing to do”, but it is difficult to decide to do it, some people at this point beg God to move their wills
and make them do it. Others hope that some other powerful spirit
will hurl them in the right direction. Others, as they lie in bed in
the morning when they know they should get up, and at other more
significant moments, wait for a burst of irresistible energy to spring
from the depths of their being and sweep them to where they know
they should go. Some turn to other people and say, in effect, “Please
talk me into doing what I know is the right thing for me to do”.
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Where, intellectually, the situation is not clear, some people at this
point decide to reconsider the judgement or judgements which they
have made, and they go back to where we were three chapters ago.
tHe DeCision
The mature person, at once or eventually, makes a decision. He
or she opts for one of the alternatives before him or her, choosing
to prefer the reasons and other factors which favour it over all that
favours other alternatives, and in some cases choosing to accept the
recommendations made by certain people and not to be guided by
recommendations made by others. He or she makes the decision in
mental words such as “I accept it”, “I’ll buy the Ford” or “I’ll leave
things as they are”.7 He or she ceases hovering, and lands. The ability to make decisions without undue delay is one aspect of the great
virtue called decisiveness.
As I said above, some decisions are effortless, but they often involve what William James calls “a feeling of effort”.8 One is aware
of not being passive but of actively making a decision. One is also
aware of one’s responsibility for one’s decision and that one is taking
a position as “first cause” in what may be a series of linked causes
and effects.
after tHe DeCision
Some people, when they have made a decision, fairly soon begin
to have second thoughts about it and they start to go over in their
7 I said above that these words, though they are propositions, do not express judgements: they are “performative”, like words which express promises. See p. 26.
8 William James describes five ways in which decisions come. In the first
way, he says, we consider the arguments for the various alternatives, see
that one is clearly preferable and effortlessly adopt it. In the second way, we
feel ourselves drifting, with no preference either way, and then something
happens outside us which we allow to determine us. In the third way, we
are drifting and then feel a sudden emotional preference for one of the
alternatives and we let that preference determine us. In the fourth way, we
hesitate, then some event, or some change in us, ends our hesitation and we
at last choose. In the fifth way, we feel as if we are weighing the alternatives
on a balance and then we ourselves push one side down. Here we have both
alternatives in view as we choose and there is an undeniable “feeling of effort”. (Principles of Psychology, II,531-535.)
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minds again all the arguments for and against the various alternatives
which were before them. Others, after they have chosen one thing,
soon begin to think constantly of the other and to wish that they
had chosen it: if they had to choose between a holiday at the beach
and one in the mountains, and they chose the beach, they sit there
wishing that they were in the mountains (quite probably, if they had
chosen the mountains they would wish that they were at the beach).
A strong person, however, when he has made a decision well, goes
forward from there and, unless he learns something new or the situation changes in some significant way, does not look back. If other
people, who have not studied the situation as thoroughly as he did,
express disapproval of his choice, he does not at once feel unsure of
himself and worry about whether he is doing the right thing. This
ability to be firm after one has made careful decisions is another aspect of decisiveness.
After making a difficult decision well a person may feel a certain
inner calm. He was, after all, drawn in different directions, but now
his energies have only one direction, which he has chosen. The decision which he was going to make seemed to him, in advance, like a
testing ordeal; now it is behind him, and he has done well in the test.
He feels like an aeroplane pilot who, after having had trouble choosing a place to land, has landed safely and who now breathes a great
sigh of relief and feels a sense of accomplishment.
Later, as he lives with his decision or puts it into effect, this person
feels a deep sense of being at one with what he is doing. He feels:
“This is right for me”. He is thus very different from people who are
doing things because others persuaded, cajoled or influenced them
into doing them: these people often feel a deep malaise; they do not
feel that their actions are theirs, or they feel, “The real me, and the
person who is doing this, are two different people”.
Moreover, when people have made decisions well, they have a certain firmness of purpose in carrying them out. They find that, not
all the time but often, they can work for hours and not notice time
passing. They find that when it comes time for them to do something that flows from their decision, they do it almost always without
reluctance or delay, and that when obstacles arise they gather their
forces and overcome them. They differ markedly from a person who
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251
(let us say) is studying for the priesthood or to be a doctor not as a
result of a well-made decision which he himself made but because
other people urged him in that direction and he did not assert himself against them, even in his own mind. Such a person is likely to
find that his work is boring and that an hour spent studying feels
like five hours; he is likely to go reluctantly to his classes; and when
obstacles come he will probably be unable to overcome them, and
will give up.
Furthermore, people who are not really at one with what they
are doing often devote an inordinate amount of time to playing or
watching sport, to escapist entertainment or to sitting around talking
about nothing in particular; they may also drink to excess. People
who are doing what they themselves decided to do may play sport,
go to entertaining films or sit around talking, but not to excess and
if they talk at times about wanting to “get away from” their work, it
is not because they are unhappy in it and need to escape from it in
order to feel at home with themselves, and when they return to their
work it is with renewed zest. They enjoy life – their own real lives.
reConsiDering DeCisions
Sometimes persons make decisions in ignorance of some crucial
facts, which they later learn: for instance, they decide to buy a house
near a school, not knowing that the school is booked out for years
and will not take their children. Then they find out. Sometimes, too,
they make decisions based on full information, but the situations
subsequently change: for instance, they decide to buy a house near
a school and then the school authorities decide to close it. Clearly,
in such a situation, if one can reverse the decision one should at
least reconsider it. Not to do so would seem to indicate a stubbornness which is not decisiveness but the vice of that virtue. If it is too
late to reverse the decision, one may do well to say: “Well, I made a
mistake”, or “If I had known what was going to happen, I would not
have made that decision”; then, after giving vent to one’s annoyance
in some appropriate way, one should resignedly accept the situation
and make the best of it.
Sometimes people make decisions based mainly on subjective inclinations and fairly soon begin to doubt whether what they have
chosen really is what they deeply want to do. Believing, for instance,
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that he is in love, a man becomes engaged, or believing that he wants
to be a doctor he commences a medical course; and then he has
doubts. “Do I really want this?”, he asks himself. At such a time, a
person will probably do well to ask himself or herself, “How wellmade was my decision?” If a man got engaged to a girl whom he had
known for only a short time, or when he was elated or depressed, or
if when he decided to do medicine he was too strongly influenced by
another person, he may well decide to reconsider the whole question
with the intention of making a good decision, one way or the other,
this time. He should also ask himself, “Are my uneasy feelings serious or only superficial?” Almost everyone who makes a significant
decision has some misgivings about it, but these are different from
a genuine malaise. If a person feels, “What I am doing is not me”;
if other people’s talk about what he is doing or going to do seems
unrelated to him; if he cannot take any interest in what he is doing
or in the preparations for what he is supposed to be going to do; if
the whole thing feels like something that is happening to him, not
like something which he is doing or going to do; and if these feelings
persist for a long time: then his malaise is probably genuine and he
should reconsider his decision. What he ought certainly not do is go
on for years, or even for many months, acting out the decision which
he has made but about which he has serious doubts, without clearing
his mind. He should not, for instance, let an engagement drag on for
many months, not making up his mind either to end it or to get married; he should not continue, in a half-hearted and miserable way, to
do a medical course because he has started and will not decide either
to drop it or to finish it. As a rule, within a reasonable time he should
make a decision and give his life a definite direction.
Finally, a person may come to have doubts about continuing to
do something which years earlier he decided to do and which he
has been doing ever since. For instance, a businessman may feel, at
the age of fifty, that perhaps he wants to become a farmer for the
remainder of his life; and a woman doctor who has often playfully
talked of giving up medicine to write novels may find that the idea of
doing that now appeals seriously to her. Of those who have had such
thoughts and acted on them, some have attained success in their new
lives while others have found only failure and misery, so that it would
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be wrong to say that a person should always or never embark on a
“second journey”.
Let us consider first the case of someone for whom change is impossible or for whom it would be immoral. (Sometimes people too
quickly judge that change is impossible or that it would be immoral,
but let us suppose that this is actually the case.) Many people would,
I think, say that such a person should put away any thoughts of
change, regarding them as threats to his peace of mind or as temptations. I doubt the wisdom of this. If the person faces his situation
squarely he may conclude that in the end he wants to go on as before,
and then he will be free of his doubts and unease. If, however, he
ends by admitting to himself, in a moment of truth, that he is seriously unhappy and wishes that he had not chosen as he did, all those
years earlier, he should not despair or yield for long to regretful grief;
he should summon up his courage, accept his situation as a blind
person accepts his blindness when it cannot be cured, and decide to
make the best of the bad job that the rest of his life is going to be.
There is nobility in this and there can be peace, and I believe that it
is better than refusing to face the situation and living with mental
confusion and emotional turmoil.
Let us consider, second, a person who has begun to have doubts
and to feel unhappy about what he has been doing for years, and for
whom a radical change would be possible and not immoral. What
such a person ought not to do is go on for the rest of his life with
these doubts and this discontent, continuing to do what he has hitherto been doing only because he has not faced the issue. If he does
that, he will be confused and half-hearted about what he is doing,
and may age rapidly. He should, in good time, consider changing
and make a decision about it one way or the other. He may decide to
embark on a “second journey” and do that while there is still time.
Many have done this and found happiness. They have seemed to
become younger and they have talked of finding themselves after
being lost. On the other hand, he may decide to continue as before,
and this decision can be as positive, as whole-hearted and indeed as
wrenching and courageous as another person’s decision to change
course. After such a decision, while there is no outward change in
the person’s life there is a profound inner change, for he finds again
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his earlier certainty and goes ahead with energy and joy. He, too,
embarks on a second journey, only it is a continuation of the first.
ConCLusion
Throughout this book I have been dealing with decisions which
are made by one person. I have said that in certain situations a person
with a decision to make should consider others, and that he or she
may be well advised or even obliged to consult others, but I have not
considered those situations which arise when two or more people
must make a decision together. In these situations, different things
can happen. At times the persons begin with no clear ideas or preferences; they talk about the situation and the different possibilities,
they simultaneously reach a judgement or come to feel a preference,
and so they arrive at a decision which they feel is made by both of
them, or all of them, thinking and willing together. At other times
they begin with conflicting ideas or preferences and have an argument which one person or party wins. They may, if there are many of
them and the situation is complicated, appoint one or several of their
number to make the decision for all; in this case, ideally the others
agree in advance to accept whatever decision is thus made. In these
and other processes by which two or more people make decisions,
various things can go wrong: one person can use advantages unfairly
to make the group decide as he or she desires; discussion may be prematurely cut short with the result that many members of the group
feel unhappy about the decision which is made; or a divided group
may flounder in repetitious discussion because no one can find a way
to reach a decision and end it. To discuss all this would take another
book.
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naMes
Allan, D. J., 256
Allport, 156
Aristotle, 8, 62, 136, 146-147, 192,
256, 262
Arminius, 7, 104
Augustine, 7, 87, 89-95, 115, 121122, 126, 130, 256, 258, 262
Ayer, 256
Ayers, 256
Balmer, 256
Bañez, 7, 107-108, 111-112, 122
Bellarmine, 256
Berger, 199, 256
Berlin, 186, 256
Blanshard, 145, 165-166, 175, 177,
179, 256
Bodenheimer, 197, 256
Boethius, 94, 99, 133
Bok, 166, 256
Bonhoeffer, 48, 50, 256
Bradley, 256
Bridgman, 192, 256
Brown, 256
Budd, 256
Burnaby, 256
Burns, 103, 135, 256-257, 262
Byrne, 256
Cabanis, 149
Caesarius, 94
Calvin, 103-104, 115-116, 257
Campbell, 185, 256
Camus, 37, 256
Cassian, 93-94, 96
Charlwood, 77, 256
Cicero, 126, 186
Clarke, 133, 257
Collins, 149, 260-261, 263-264
Comte, 155
Craig, 140, 257
Croxton, 257
Davies, 152, 257
Davis, 190, 257
Donceel, 181, 257
Double, 95, 169, 172-173, 257
Dworkin, 196, 257
Eccles, 184, 257, 262
Eddington, 154, 257
Einstein, 152, 154, 169, 176, 257
Ellis, 20, 203, 257
Epicurus, 186, 189
Erasmus, 102, 106
Farrelly, 257
Farrer, 57-58, 257
Fessard, 35, 262
Feuer, 171, 257
Fisher, 257-258
Fiske, 163, 258
Fleming, 236-237, 258
Frankfurt, 170, 258
Frankl, 44, 161, 214, 258
Fraser, 258
Freud, 154, 157-158, 187, 193,
256, 258
Futrell, 236-237, 258, 263
Galton, 175, 204-205
Garrigou-Lagrange, 100, 131, 258
Gaylin, 206, 209, 211, 258
Geach, 130, 258
Gide, 242, 257
Gould, 203, 258
Gray, 178, 199, 258
Griffith, 192-193, 258
Hasker, 111, 258, 261
Hill, 140, 258
Hintz, 192, 258-259
Hobbes, 149, 165
266
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
Holmes, 164, 205
Honderich, 144, 169, 173, 178,
182, 189, 191, 201, 207, 259
Hopkins, 47
Hospers, 172, 259, 262
Houghton, 137, 258-259, 262
Hunt, 129, 259
MacDonald, 171, 198, 208, 260
Magill, 166, 179, 260
Marcel, 242, 260
Maritain, 63, 117, 139, 141, 260
Maslow, 161
Matson, 260, 262
May, 13, 15-16, 18, 21-25, 27-28,
30-34, 37, 41-43, 45-46, 48, 50,
Ignatius Loyola, 106, 235
52-54, 56-60, 63, 65-66, 71, 73Irenaeus, 87
77, 84, 88, 91, 100, 106, 109,
118-120, 130, 132, 134-135,
James, 34, 68, 153, 157, 161, 170,
137, 139, 142, 144, 155, 159176, 185, 200, 249, 256, 258162, 168-170, 174, 178, 184259, 264
186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196,
Jansen, 111-112
201-202, 206, 210-211, 213-215,
John of Damascus, 87
219-229, 231, 240-245, 247-253,
John of the Cross, 121
255, 260
Jonsen, 48, 259
McCormick, 38-39, 260
Journet, 139, 259
McDougall, 207
Justin, 86-87
Menninger, 162, 207-208, 211,
260
Kane, 18, 63, 154, 259
Methodius, 87
Kant, 149-150, 195, 259
Midgley, 181, 260
Kaufmann, 245, 259, 261
Mill, 47, 171, 260
Kenny, 139, 259-260
Milton, 102, 104
Kierkegaard, 149, 260
Molina, 7, 107-111, 258, 260
Knight, 160, 260
Molinos, 37-39
Knox, 37
Monod, 74, 261
Koestler, 194, 260
Mooney, 137, 261
Kolnai, 151, 260
Kropf, 137, 260
Newcomb, 6, 71
Niebuhr, 48, 64, 261
Laplace, 153, 260
Nielsen, 184
Laud, 105
Nietzsche, 149-151, 169, 177, 207,
Leo IX, 95, 126
261
Leo X, 106
Lewontin, 260
O’Connor, 154, 173, 176, 261
Livsey, 212, 260
Locke, 47, 149, 171
Pagels, 152, 261
Lomboroso, 203-204
Pascal, 47, 126
Lonergan, 260
Patrides, 261
Lucas, 139, 260
Pelagius, 87-91, 93, 96, 121-122
Luther, 7, 102-103, 106, 116
Peter de Rivo, 141
Lyons, 260
Peters, 156, 236, 261
1 Index
Pius XII, 140
Tropman, 257
Plantinga, 110, 261
Polkinghorne, 74, 261
Vaihinger, 182, 263
Popper, 163-164, 184-186, 261- Vatican II, 49, 113
262
Pousset, 39, 262
Waddington, 152
Prendiville, 90, 262
Ward, 133, 263
Priestley, 149, 169
Watson, 263
Weiss, 63, 135, 139, 151, 263
Quine, 155-156
Wells, 58, 67
Westbrook, 263
Radcliff, 262
Whitacre, 108, 263
Rice, 133, 261
Wiesenthal, 217, 263-264
Ricoeur, 34, 221, 262
Williams, 115, 264
Rahner, 34-37, 64, 130, 138, 237, Wilson, 264
239, 262
Wojtyla, 46, 48, 264
Rogers, 161, 197, 262
Woodhull, 204, 264
Ross, 147, 262
Roubiczek, 189, 262
Rowling, 70, 262
Russell, 152, 155, 262
Ryle, 262
Sartre, 34-35, 45, 151, 177-178,
180, 245, 262
Seneca, 146, 201
Sertillanges, 98, 100, 262
Shakespeare, 8, 25, 141, 147-148,
199-200
Sheeran, 236, 263
Skinner, B. F., 263
Skinner, R.C., 263
Spinoza, 149
Strawson, 173, 263
Taine, 163, 263
Taylor, 60, 166, 172, 181, 196, 263
Teilhard, 220, 263
Theophilus, 87
Thomas Aquinas, 87, 98, 101, 107,
112, 139, 166
Tolstoy, 163
Toner, 237, 263
Trigg, 189-190, 263
267
Free Will, Predestination & Determinism
268
subjeCts
avoiding decisions, 244
morality, 5, 9-10, 28-29, 43, 84,
88, 115, 162, 170-171, 195, 197198, 227-228
banezianism, 8, 112, 122
behaviorism, 157, 194, 257, 260,
263
omniscience, 8, 135
calvinism, 104
chance, 6, 8, 15, 18, 62, 72-76, 87,
98, 136-138, 142, 146, 163, 174175, 184-185, 224, 240, 244,
261
crime, 10, 51, 178, 203, 205-208,
210, 216, 260, 263-264
pelagianism, 7, 87, 89, 94, 121-122
petition, 118
prediction, 6, 26, 61, 67, 76-77,
124-126, 128, 138, 141, 153,
164
probability, 6, 53, 64, 66, 76, 137,
185
prophecy: see prediction
determinism, 1, 3, 8-10, 13, 15,
30, 111, 114-115, 139, 143-146, random: see chance
150-151, 153-158, 160-182, 184- responsibility, 5-6, 9-10, 12, 19, 46193, 195-209, 212-214, 256-257,
54, 83, 91, 93, 96, 107, 113, 117,
259-260, 263
123, 147, 162, 166, 168-172,
174, 177, 179-181, 186, 196evil, 7, 24, 29, 34, 36-37, 78-79, 85,
197, 203, 206, 208, 212, 21487-88, 90-91, 95, 99-100, 103,
216, 223-224, 239, 245, 249,
126-127, 135, 148-149, 195,
256-260, 262, 264
199, 203, 212, 222-223, 241,
258-260
scholasticism, 7, 97, 257, 259
films, 6, 37, 67, 70, 201, 251
freedom, 5, 9, 35, 40-44, 64, 92,
105, 112-113, 115, 133, 138,
149-150, 154, 158-163, 165166, 171, 173, 175, 178-179,
181, 184, 189, 191, 193, 197198, 206, 242-245, 256-263
God’s will, 11, 81, 84, 98, 100, 118,
120, 135, 232-235, 237, 239240, 263
molinism, 8, 108, 112, 122-123