Free Will is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to [603123]

Universitatea ” Lucian blaga” din Sibiu
Facultatea de Științe Socio-Umane
Departamentul de Jurnalism, RelațiiPublice, SociologieșiPsihologie Specializarea PSIHOLOGIE
Fundamentele psihologice ale deciziei umane
Anul III
Free will
Student: [anonimizat]: 06.11.2016
Free wiil in philosophical courrent
“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to
choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is
Coordonator: Prof.univ.dr. Eugen Iordănescu

what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this
question for over two millennia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to
say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely
connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just
to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being res ponsible for one's action. (Clearly, there
will also be epistemic conditions on responsibility as well, such as being aware—or failing
that, being culpably unaware—of relevant alternatives to one's action and of the alternatives'
moral significance.) But t he significance of free will is not exhausted by its connection to
moral responsibility. Free will also appears to be a condition on desert for one's
accomplishments (why sustained effort and creative work are praiseworthy); on the autonomy
and dignity of persons; and on the value we accord to love and friendship. ( Kane 1996,
pag81. and Clarke 2003, Ch.1; Pereboom 2001, Ch.7.)
Walter, H.( 2001) distinguish three aspects of free will in courrent philosophical. These
aspects are: the first aspect to act fre ely is to be action in another way, the second aspect is
action freely can be understend that as choosing for a reason (for example a p erson hits
another person while he/she is tickled , which does not occur for a reason, is not a free
action, nor do we blame the person for such an action), thrid, free will must be pioeer-
(causal) source- of one’s source .
Kane, R. (1998) the free will debate in philosophy is largely concerned with the question of to
what extent each of these aspects is, indeed, essential to the concept of free will.3 More
precisely, at the moment, it is not clear which of these senses is pertinent to a notion of free
will that is required for moral responsibility.
Free will in forensic psychiatry
The most influential is the M’Naghten Rule, which can be formulated as follows: ‘‘At
the time of committing the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect
of reason, from the disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the
act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was
wrong’’( Elliott, C. 1996, p.11) .
Luthe and Rösler, that forensic psychiatrists ‘‘will have to concern themselves with the
question of whether human actions can be freely chosen or whether the acting person could
not avoid acting as he did’’ (Luthe, R., and M. Rösler. 2004).
Three senses of free will
Based on current philosophical, free will can be assigned three different meanings.
Acting for (intelligible) reasons . In mental disorders, tics are carried out for no reason. In
these cases people may have reflexes of hands or utterin g words without any particular
reason. For example: this person may be a stereotypical, repetitive behavior that
does not seem to be explicable in terms of reasons. A characteristic of mental disorders is that,
unlike many ‘‘somatic’’ disorders, they affect the intentional aspect of behavior. For example,
a person who acts because of a paranoid delusion, acts for reasons influenced by a delusion:
he killed his mother because he was convinced that she was continuously intoxicating him,
and therefore, he wanted to stop her.
The genuine source of the action (origination). This idea of ‘‘mental disorder as the cause
of an offense’’ provides room for the view that it was not the person himself who did it but
that it was, instead, a mental disorder that caused t he crime. The attribution of blame and
responsibility,therefore, should not be directed at the person proper—for he or she is not the
genuine source of the action. In one of the quotes from the philosophical debate this can
Coordonator: Prof.univ.dr. Eugen Iordănescu

indeed be found: ‘‘just so long as one is not caused to act by… kleptomaniac impulses,
obsessional neuroses’’(Strawson, G. 1994.)
Alternative possibilities . Are alternative possibilities for action or choice requiredfor free
will? This has been one of the thorniest issues in the philoso phical freewill debate, especially
during the last decades. Meanwhile, in the forensic literature,alternative possibilities are
mentioned as being compromised by mental disorder.
Conclusion
Free will, in philosophical acceptable means a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to
choose a course of action from among various alternatives.
Based on these different meanings of free will means people can act according to
understandable reasons, the source of authentic action and the alternative possibilities that
arise in a situation.
References
1.Clarke, Randolph (1993). “Toward a Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free
Will,” in O'Connor (1995), ed., 201–15.
\
2.Elliott, C. 1996. The rules of insanity: Moral responsibility and the mentally ill
offender. Albany:State University of New York.
3.Kane, Robert, ed., (2002). Oxford Handbook on Free Will . New York: Oxford
University Press.––– (2005). A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will . New
York: Oxford University Press.
4.Luthe, R., and M. Ro¨sler. 2004. Freedom of will, freedom of action and psychiatry:
Concerning the relationship of empirical to intelligible character and so-called
freedom of choice in the view of forensic psychiatry. In Philosophy and psychiatry,
ed. T. Schramme and J. Thome, 295–308. Berlin: De Gruyter.
5.Pereboom, Derk (2001). Living Without Free Will . Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
6.Strawson, P.F. 2003. Freedom and resentment. In Free will, ed. G. Watson, 72–93.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7.Walter, H. 2001. Neurophilosophy of free will: From libertarian illusions to a concept
of natural autonomy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
8.http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11017-010-9158-5 data: 01.11.2016, ora
19.30
Coordonator: Prof.univ.dr. Eugen Iordănescu