Freedom Within Reason

This treatise charts a course between incompatibilism, or the notion that freedom and responsibility require causal and metaphysical independence from the forces of nature, and compatibilism, or the notion that people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. In this work, the author argues that, contrary to the tradition in analytic philosophy, freedom of the will cannot be understood as a purely metaphysical notion. You enjoy freedom of the will only if you are in a position that enables you, not only to govern your actions on the basis of your own values, but also to develop and alter your values on the basis of the right data and by the right means. Accordingly, free will is the freedom to be good, or the freedom to do the right thing for the right reasons. This approach allows us to explain the failure of attempts to provide satisfactory metaphysical accounts of free will, whether compatibilist or incompatilist: the metaphysical conditions of freedom of the will vary in accordance with the value of the action in question.