A Review of Edwards's "Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will"Tappan, Henry Philip
Religion
A Review of Edwards's "Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will"
Tappan, Henry Philip
Edwards, Jonathan, 1703-1758. Freedom of the will; Free will and determinism
Well, then, it is asked, is not this liberty sufficient to constitute
responsibility? And thus the whole difficulty seems to be got over. The
reasoning would be very fair, as far as it goes, if employed against
fatalists, but amounts to nothing when employed against those who hold
to the self-determining power of the will. The latter receive these
common ideas, feelings, and practices of men, as facts indicative of
freedom, because they raise no question against human freedom. The real
question at issue is, how are we to account for these facts? The
advocates of self-determining power account for them by referring them
to a self-determined will. We say a man is free when he does as he
pleases or according to his volitions, and has the sense of freedom in
his volitions, because he determines his own volitions; and that a man
is guilty for crime, if committed by his volition, because he determined
this volition, and at the very moment of determining it, was conscious
of ability to determine an opposite volition. And we affirm, also, that
a man is free, not only when he does as he pleases, or, in other words,
makes a volition without any impediment between it and its object,--he
is free, if he make the volition without producing effects by it:
volition itself is the act of freedom. But how do those who deny a
self-determining power account for these facts? They say that the
volition is caused by a motive antecedent to it, but that nevertheless,
inasmuch as the man feels that he is free and is generally accounted so,
he must be free; for liberty means nothing more than "power and
opportunity to do and conduct as he will, or according to his choice,
without taking into the meaning of the word any thing of the _cause_ of
that choice, or at all considering how the person came to have such a
volition,"--that is, the man is free, and feels himself to be so, when
he does as he pleases, because this is all that is meant by freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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