| | Ted wrote, I see volition in its broadest sense to be the ability of at least higher animals to act when their circumstances are insufficient to determine their actions. An example would be best.
Imagine a dog is in a corridor, and, hungry, senses a bowl of food at the end of the corridor. All other things being equal, the dog will traverse the corridor and consume the food. But imagine if there are two identical corridors, side by side, leading to the same food, or imagine again the problem of Buridan's ass. Of course the dog will choose to move along one or the other corridor, or the ass will eventually (and probably rather quickly) chose one of the bails of hay. Obviously no verbal debate will rage in the animals' heads as to which path to take, but a path will be chosen. Nothing in the environment necessitates one path over the other. The cause is internal to the animal, and the choice of path cannot be traced back to an inherent value of the animal. I don't know what you mean by "inherent value." If, as you say, the cause is internal to the animal and the act is one that is conscious and goal directed, then it is caused by the animal's values in conjunction with its external environment. (Even if we object that the animal may have a preference or a tendency to, say, move to the right, we can always set up the conditions such that the rightside path is slightly longer, thus neutralizing the rightward tendency as a causal factor.) The same will apply to humans, but with a twist.
Humans too have this volition, this ability to act even though external inducements are "sub-determinate." A man may be faced with an infinite number of choices to obtain values, all of apparently equal optimality. He may even fret and find it hard to come to a decision. A fully rational and calculated decision, even if processed by his "lightening swift subconscious" may still not give a determinate result within a reasonable timeframe. When being chased by a killer, pausing to consider which path to follow for escape is counterproductive.
The man will not say that he cannot make up his mind, and surrender to being stabbed, he will choose a path. He might even resort to the expedient of flipping a coin if he is so internally conflicted - but even this choice to resort to flipping a coin is not forced upon him by either his circumstances or his values. It isn't "forced" upon him, but it is necessitated by his values. To say that it is "forced" upon him implies that he is forced to act against his values, which is what "force" means in this context. You cannot be "forced" to act in accordance with your values. He could just as easily use any number of random devices (one-potato-two-potato, e.g.) in order to solve his dilemma. And we would not say that he values one-tay-two-tay over coin tossing, at least not without sounding pedantic. Observe that the choice he faces is not simply choosing a coin toss over some alternative procedure, but also entails the act of choosing a decision procedure over not choosing one. So, when he chooses to delay the choice of a decision procedure, he is making a choice, which it itself the result of a value preference. If he decides eventually on the coin-toss, because it is the procedure that he happens to be focused on at the time that he wishes to make a choice, he can be said to value the coin-toss, not over an alternative procedure, but over any further delay in deciding on a procedure. Furthermore, humans have "free will" because they (at least tacitly) realize that they have a choice while animals do not have that capacity to understand their own mental processes. Thus we ascribe free will to competent adults who are not acting under duress or mere physical necessity. I don't think this is an adequate account of "free will" in the classical or Objectivist sense of that term (i.e., in the sense that one could have acted otherwise under the same conditions). In a previous post, I gave the example of the student who is taking a multiple choice test. Let us say that the student, who wants to pass the test, knows the correct answer. He realizes that he "could" choose one of the other (wrong) answers if he wanted to, but he doesn't want to, because he wants to pass the test. Is his choosing the correct answer "free" in the sense that he could just as well have chosen one of the other answers, even though he didn't want to? No, because given his desire to pass the test, he had to choose the answer that he recognized as correct. Yet he was not under duress or in any way forced to choose the answer he did. If I jump out of a window to avoid capture for a crime, I do so of my own free will. If I jump out of a window to avoid being burnt to death, my action is voluntary, but not "free" in the sense that if I kill someone that I land on in the fall I will not be held responsible for homicide. The issue here is not one of freedom versus necessity, for in both cases, your action was necessitated by your values in conjunction with the external circumstances. If you jump out of the building to avoid capture for a crime, you are taking an action that is (reasonably) prohibited by law, so that if you kill someone in the process, you will be held legally responsible for the person's death and charged with manslaughter. Jumping out of the window in order to escape a fire is not prohibited by law, so that if you kill someone inadvertently in the fall, you will not be charged with manslaughter. However, in both cases, your actions were necessitated by your values. The fact that, given your criminal values, you saw no reason to abstain from committing the crime, does not absolve you of responsibility for it. We punish you in order to get you to re-evaluate your actions and to change your values, as well as to deter others from committing similar crimes. What does it mean to "deter" others from committing similar crimes? It means to cause potential criminals to change the value that they place on crime in light of the consequences they will suffer if they are apprehended. I believe that the Buridan's ass dilemma does indeed have a most profound importance in the understanding of what volition is. The point of the Buridan's ass dilemma is to argue that an animal or a person can choose an action arbitrarily without any reason or motive for the choice, which contradicts the fact that a person's choices are goal-directed -- that they are taken for the sake of of a value -- for the sake of something which the person desires to gain or keep. If free will were of this character, it is hard to see how punishment or rewards could influence a person's free-will choices. If his free-will choices were arbitrary, pointless decisions that did not reflect his value judgments, then punishment or rewards would have no effect on his behavior, in which case, it would be sheer, pointless brutality to punish someone for a crime that was due to the exercise of free will.
But if this conception of free will as arbitrary pointless decision making is rejected, then the only reasonable alternative is a compatibilist or value-determinist view of free will in which punishment and rewards do make sense, because a person's choices are the result of his value judgments. A free choice in this sense simply means one in which the moral agent would not have been prevented from choosing an alternative if he had evaluated it as worth choosing.
- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer
on 7/11, 12:24pm)
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