A Christian defense of libertarianism

Goetz on naturalism and libertarian agency

Punishment, freedom, and determinism

This post was prepared for my ethics course.

This section is devoted to two topics: One is freedom and determinism, and the other is criminal punishment. Although the issues seem to be very separate, I have put them together for a reason. One significant motivation for criminal punishment has been the issue of desert. That is pronounced like dessert, but it comes from the same root word as the word deserve. Now there are other reasons, perhaps, for criminal punishment (deterrence, protection of society, etc.), but some people think criminal punishment is first and foremost about giving people what they deserve.




On the other hand, we might ask why one person is virtuous and the other vicious? How did Mother Teresa end up the way she did, and how did Jeffrey Dahmer end up the way he did? Are they both simply the inevitable products of heredity, environment, or even (if you believe in God), God's predestination, or fore-ordination of all events before the foundation of the world (a belief held by Calvinists even today). Is it possible that if Jeffrey had had Teresa's heredity and environment, he (she?) would have been virtuous, and if Teresa had had Jeffrey's heredity and environment, she would have been a serial killer? This is the thesis of determinism, and some people have the inclination to withdraw claims of desert when they start thinking things through from a deterministic perspective. The line of thought leads us to think that the very idea of one person deserving one outcome, and another deserving another outcome, doesn't make sense. But this is a difficult conclusion to accept, it is the idea that in the last analysis, nothing is really anyone's fault, since their actions are the inevitable result of what came before.



There are a couple of ways of responding to this. The first approach, taken by philosophers such as Moritz Schlick and J. J. C. Smart, suggests that what moral responsiblity is all about it finding the right behavior to modify. They maintain that the very idea of deserving punishment is a barbaric notion we need to just get over.



The second approach is to say that looking all the way up the causal chain and seeing someone's actions as the result of past causes obscures the most important fact, and that is the fact that the person not only performed the act, but wanted to perform the act. It wasn't as if Jeffrey Dahmer wanted to be virtuous, but some alien power forced him to commit murder against his will. No, these crimes were willed actions, however inevitably they might have followed from past events.



The third option is the option of libertarian free will. When we act, we can do otherwise. Perhaps this kind of free will is a gift from God. Even the physical world, if we accept what modern physicists tell us, isn't strictly determined. So, perhaps, our actions aren't strictly determined either.



So, I would ask two questions: Can we talk about what people deserve? To do so, do we have to reject determinism? If we can deserve something good for doing something good, and deserve something bad for doing something bad, should that be the primary basis on which we determine how criminals should be punished? And does it provide a basis for the traditional doctrine of eternal hell?

Standard Materialism, Non-Standard Materialism, and Libertarian Free Will

I think there are standard and non-standard forms of materialism. I consider a form of materialism to be standard if it holds to three theses.




1) Reality at the basic level is mechanistic. There is no teleology, no intentionality, no subjectivity, and no normativity at the basic level.



2) The basic level (typically called physics) is causally closed.



3) Higher level states (such as the biological, the mental, or the sociological) supervene upon the physical. Given the physical, the higher level states must be exactly as they are.



It seems to me that if you accept this picture, nothing like libertarian free will can be coherently maintained. Now if one is trying to call oneself a materialist and reject part of this picture, in other words, if one adopts a non-standard form of materialism, in virtue of the fact that, say, everything in the mind has a spatial location, then you might be able to find room for libertarian free will.



Which always makes we wonder about Christians, like van Inwagen, who call themselves materialists. Do they really conform to the standard definition of materialism?

C. S. Lewis on why God created us with libertarian free will

He doesn't use the phrase, of course.

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.A world of automata-of creatures that worked like machines-would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is that happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other…And for that they must be free.”
(Mere Christianity, 47-48)

Abortion voting: What looks like a Libertarian perspective

Though he does not identify himself as libertarian himself.