Freewill Through the Eyes of Stace

Freewill Through the Eyes of Stace

I can most relate with Stace's views on freewill. I feel that the freewill argument is more about definition and the word's true meaning. I also agree with his statement of, "if there is no free will there can be no morality." Stace believes that is doing what we want to do and not being constrained from doing so. Morality is a good argument of why we do what we do. Then there is the idea that we have choices and choices are made by the individual and not by outside influences.

Stace's main argument in stated in, "The dispute is merely verbal, and is due to nothing but a confusion about the meaning of words. It is now what is fashionably called a semantic problem." Words are all we really have to explain our thoughts. We can add to words by using body language and pictures, but even these are still explained in words. Words are given meaning, according to Stace, by, "Common usage is the criterion for deciding whether a definition is correct or not." This means that words should be used, as everyone knows them. The exception to this is slang. So to a point it is philosophers changing the words of freewill and creating their own slang definition and like Stace says, "the mistake which the deniers of freewill have made is rather subtle and difficult to detect." Stace feels that the wrong definition of freewill is the ability to do something else.

On the topic of morality and Stace's quote of, "if there is no free will there can be no morality." This quote makes a lot of sense, if there is no free will then why do we spend so much time worrying about morals. Society today spends much of its time "trying" to teach people ethical behavior. This is why there are laws and rules everywhere you go and in everything you do. If we had no freewill we would either not do anything wrong or it would just be our nature or outside forces causing us to do them. In either case it would be useless to have rules to change our judgment because there would be no judgment if there was no freewill. Like Stace said, " Morality is concerned with what men ought and ought not to do. But if a man has no freedom to choose what he will do, if whatever he does is done under compulsion, then it does not make sense to tell him that he ought not to have done what he did and that he ought to do something different." Then he continues on to say, "All moral precepts would in such case be meaningless. Also if he acts always under compulsion, how can he be held morally responsible for his actions? How can he, for example,