Libertarianism

For centuries philosophers have debated over the presence of free will. As a result of these often-heated arguments, many factions have evolved, the two most prominent being the schools of Libertarianism and of Determinism. Within these two schools of thought lies another debate, that of compatibilism, or whether or not the two believes can co-exist. In his essay, Has the Self "Free Will"?, C.A. Campbell, a staunch non-compatiblist and libertarian, attempts to explain the Libertarian argument.

To achieve this, Campbell first sets out the two pre-suppositions necessary to the Libertarian argument. Firstly, he defines which kind of freedom he is discussing when he speaks of free will. Campbell characterizes "the freedom at issue" as one that predominantly concerns a person's inner acts and decisions (377). A person's observable acts are important only as they show an inner "life of choice"(377). Therefore the moral freedom assumed is that freedom which concerns inner acts.

The second, and more complicated, of Campbell's requirements is to define what constitutes a "free act." There are two parts to this definition. The first necessitates "that the act must be one of which the person judged can be regarded as the sole author" (378). This point raises the question of how one can determine authorship. For certainly "the raw material of impulses and capacities that constitute [one's] hereditary endowment" cannot be determined by the individual and surely have an impact on his inner acts (378). Further, the individual cannot control "the material and social environment in which he is destined to live" and these factors must influence his inner acts as well (378). Campbell allows that, while these aspects do have an impact on one's inner acts, people in general "make allowances" for them, and still feel morally responsible for one's self (378). In other words, one recognizes the effects of hereditary and environment on his inner acts, but acknowledges that his self can and should still be held morally responsible, as it can overcome these factors. Thus, Campbell claims, sole authorship of an act is possible. The second part of this definition of a "free act" requires that one could have acted otherwise because one could have chosen otherwise (380). With this final presupposition, Campbell states that an act is a free act if and only if the agent could have, by his own volition, preformed otherwise, not because his character or environment compelled him to choose otherwise, but because he had chosen to perform otherwise. This is all that is needed to maintain the agent's moral responsibility. With these definitions in place, Campbell has finally set the stage for his argument.

To begin his argument, Campbell attempts to provide sufficient evidence for Libertarianism. He contends that, from phenomenological analysis, the self is inescapably convinced that it possesses a freedom in the decision to exert or withhold the moral effort needed to rise to duty (389). In laymen's terms, when one must make a moral choice, one can hear both the call to duty and the desire to do the opposite. This conflict and the opportunity to choose offer proof, as far as Campbell is concerned, of moral freedom. While this may not be concrete proof, he claims that no one in the position of making a moral choice can deny that they are the sole author of that decision, nor can they deny that they could have chosen otherwise. It is through this experience of making moral choices that one can ascertain one's moral freedom.

Campbell's next step is disproving the leading arguments and criticisms against Libertarianism, in order to secure its place as the leading philosophical view. If there are no sound arguments against Libertarianism, it must, therefore, be the pre-dominant theory. In order to achieve this Campbell attacks what he believes to be the two strongest criticisms: that of predictability and that of meaninglessness. The advocates of the predictability argument claim that the mere basis of Libertarianism eradicates all ability to predict one's actions. Since it is common practice to predict the behavior of friend based