Ferenc Huoranszki
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Ferenc Huoranszki
Ferenc Huoranszki is a Central European philosopher whose 2011 book, Freedom of the Will: A Conditional Analysis is a defense of "compatibilist free will," based on what he calls the "conditional analysis" of doing otherwise, namely, the agent could have done otherwise IF he had chosen to do otherwise. This he traces back to Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, and he cites the explicit example of G.E. Moore
Huoranszki accepts physical determinism, that events can happen only as they actually do happen. He denies that "determinism at the level of fundamental physical laws is incompatible with agents having free will." (p. 3.) Like John Martin Fischer, Huoranszki regards "the issue of free will only as a question about the conditions of responsibility for our behavior." (p. 6.) He is right that "many things originate in us and are attributable to us even if we do not do them of our own free will," so that we can be held responsible even if we were not "free" to do otherwise. But this should be grounds for separating free will and moral responsibility, not conflating them. The problem of free will and determinism is a scientific question. The problem of moral responsibility and appropriate reward or punishment is a social and cultural question. For a compatibilist, Huoranszki has a very sympathetic understanding of Robert Kane's "plural rationality" and Self-Forming Actions, and he offers a strong defense for them against Richard Double's criticisms. He starts with Peter van Inwagen's idea that free decisions where the agent can do otherwise are restricted to three special occasions - Buridan's Ass cases (the liberty of indifference), when our duty is in conflict with our interests (Kane's Self-Forming Actions are here), and when we have to choose between incommensurable values. (p. 151) All these cases are what Huoranszki calls "indifference cases." But can libertarians avoid the conclusion, he asks, " that the ultimate grounds of our responsibility must be our indifference?" "What free will would require is that our preferences be undetermined because our reasons do not determine our judgment about the best course of action." (p. 159) This sounds very much like Kane's Self-Forming Actions. "Why would our responsibility be rooted in the fact that sometimes our reasons fail to determine what we judge to be best," he asks, and then explains,
In such cases, agents are not determined to act upon one set of reasons. But the chosen action is undetermined not because the agent's action might go against her reasons, but because it is undetermined whether one set of reasons rather than another will eventually cause her action. Hence, although agents' rational preferences (what they judge to be good) causally explain their actions, it is up to them which set of their reasons shall cause their action.
Huoranszki points out that Kane's plural rationality argument does require the ability to do otherwise (the availability of alternative possibilities), nor does it even assume that the resulting decision is "free" in the sense of undetermined by reasons, character, motives, etc. He quotes Kane,
Huoranszki's claim that we cannot determine our own selves is a variation on Galen Strawson's Basic Argument that a causa sui is impossible.An adequate account of incompatibilist free will should allow that some (and potentially many) everyday acts explicable by reasons may be caused or determined by characters and motives already formed. The possibility of such actions, as I see it, is part of a complete theory of ultimate responsibility. (Kane 1996: 120)Thus, Kane accepts that agents can be responsible even if they could not have done otherwise at the time when they perform the action. We have seen already that every theory of the freedom of will as a condition of agents' responsibility must accommodate this possibility. But Kane, following Dennett and van Inwagen, does not only claim that there are special situations in which we are responsible even if we lack the ability to do otherwise. They assume that most of our actions that are explainable by our motives and character are not freely willed at all. Most motivated actions cannot be spontaneous in the sense that they cannot depend on the agent's choices and hence cannot be freely willed either. It is for this reason that they must introduce a strong and — as I shall argue in the next chapter — unsatisfiable condition of responsibility: the condition that agents must determine their own self. There are well-known arguments aiming to prove that free will and responsibility are impossible, no matter whether our world is deterministic or not. According to those arguments, we could be responsible only if we were causa sui in the sense that we determined our own self. For how we are, mentally speaking, determines what we do. And even if how we are, mentally speaking, is determined by our earlier choices, since those choices are also determined by how we were, mentally speaking, at an earlier time, responsibility would require that agents themselves create their own self. But no finite being, like us, is able to do that. So we are never 'truly' or 'ultimately' responsible. Some libertarians hope to answer this difficulty by claiming that there are some 'buck-stopping' undetermined actions by which agents can ultimately control how they are (Kane 1996: 114). According to them, we are responsible for our other actions only because they are the results of these self-forming and hence buck-stopping actions. For Teachers
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