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On Some Arguments Concerning Freedom and Determinism

In this article I review a few approaches that can lend a support for libertarian understanding of freedom of the will and freedom of the action. Namely, professor Pradhan claims, and I agree with these claims, that human beings are autonomous persons and that human beings are not a kind of machines. I construe autonomy as property of having freedom in a fundamental sense. First, I give incompatibilistic understanding of freedom and determinism. I show then that an ability to do otherwise and to be an autonomous proper source of an action can amount to the same thing. Argument involving Gödel's incompletness theorem, deployed by Lucas and Penrose to show that human beings are different from the machines, is used here in libertarian interpretation also. If processes which characterise our deliberations are non-computational, then they are not fully determined processes. In the last part of the article I tried to show that if we employ Hume's own notion of causality which claims that there is no necessity between cause and effect, then this could be a support for libertarian, rather than compatibilistic, conclusions about freedom of the will.

Freedom, determinism, libertarianism, causation, Pradhan

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