Making Sense of Your Freedom: Philosophy for the Perplexed.

Copan, Paul

Felt, James W. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. xi + 110 pp. Cloth, $28.95; paper $8.95--Felt, a philosophy professor at Santa Clara University, has helpfully expounded the freedom-determinism discussion in a popular, understandable manner. Although he admits that there are no knock-down arguments against determinism (the doctrine that whatever happens could not have been otherwise), belief in freedom is the more plausible, sensible perspective. Felt presents the basic arguments defending the related concepts of determinism, compatibilism, and fatalism and (I believe) successfully refutes them. Felt also discusses concepts of temporality, causality, and the problem of evil as they relate to freedom.

Freedom is not simply, as Locke supposed, the ability to carry out one's own choices (what Felt calls "external freedom"); after all, utterly brainwashed persons can carry out what they choose. Rather, freedom is found in the choosing itself ("internal freedom")--an ability to choose otherwise, without compulsion. (Felt's defense of freedom and "becoming" parallels that of Henri Bergson.)

Felt considers internal freedom self-evident, and thus it cannot be strictly demonstrated. The presumption of freedom is justified by our feeling free to make decisions as well as by our belief in personal and moral responsibility. In some ways, however, determinism may prima facie seem credible given certain phenomena such as the power of motives or the influence of character upon choices (psychological determinism), physical inputs like genetic coding (physical determinism), and the ineluctable conclusions of logic (logical determinism). When examined in greater detail, however, these factors are not a sufficient reason to believe a person could not have chosen differently. For example, which comes first--character or choices? It begs the question, Felt argues, to assume that character determines our choices when character is shaped largely by our choices. Furthermore, although determinists are correct to link character or motives with decisions, they are wrong to think that the regularity or predictability of behavior is due only to necessity or that motives compel choices. So while decisions may be enabled by motives, they are not necessitated by them.

Determinism seems to assert without argument a mechanistic view of human beings, speaking only in terms of cause and effect, but Felt believes this is too narrow a view of causality. He wonders why the language of agency should be excluded from the determinist's consideration. Agency is the process of deliberative, uncompelled personal action that actualizes potentiality. The buck stops with the agent, and there is no reason to look further than the agent to account for an ultimate reason for an action. (Felt points out that determinists tend to present a false dilemma of choices/events either being rigidly determined or else utterly random. But personal agency offers a third alternative.)

Furthermore, taking a particular view of time may elucidate the plausibility of freedom and agency, Felt argues. So he nicely parallels "lived time" and agency. "Lived time"--the time of persons--is experiential, heterogeneous, and qualitative whereas "clock time"--the time of machines--is indefinitely divisible, homogeneous, and quantitative. The former is relational, the latter is an abstraction. So when causality is spoken of as a mechanized abstraction, it tends to be cast in deterministic language; utilizing the language of "lived time" helps render plausible the concept of agency (by which the vagueness of the future is turned into actuality in the present).

Despite my disagreement with Felt's rejection of a possible-worlds ontology (which he wrongly implicates as minimizing human freedom), Felt has written a fine primer on freedom "for the perplexed."