Transcript Ted Honderich

Ted Honderich
The Man
Born 30 January, 1933
 Canadian-born British philosopher
 Currently chairman of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
 Main work on five things: determinism’s truth, nature of
consciousness and relation to brain, right and wrong in
contemporary world, justifications of state punishment
and political tradition of conservatism.
 His thoughts on determinism are summed up in his
work, How Free Are You?:The Determinism Problem.
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Determinism
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He believes that it and not free will is true.
He considers the suggestion of "near-determinism." He says, "Maybe
it should have been called determinism-where-it-matters. It allows that
there is or may be some indeterminism but only at what is called
the micro-level of our existence, the level of the small particles of
our bodies."
Honderich does not claim to have found a solution to the problem
of free will or determinism, but he does claim to have confronted
the problem of the consequences of determinism.
He is "dismayed" because the truth of determinism requires that we
give up "origination" with its promise of an open future, restricting though not eliminating - our "life hopes.“
One hope is that we can originate actions affecting our future life.
The truth of determinism, which denies the freedom to originate
actions, might give rise to a "sad" attitude of "dismay."
Quantum Physics
He makes the point that quantum physics
is only concerned with non-spatiotemporal things such as numbers.
 Determinism would not therefore imply
that quantum physics is determined as
these cannot have causes or effects.
 Determinism is therefore untouched by
such a theory.
 Brap.
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In/compatibalism?
He does not however agree with either compatibalism or
incompatibalism for 3 reasons:
 First, he says that moral responsibility is not all that is at
stake, there are personal feelings, reactive attitudes, problems
of knowledge, and rationalizing punishment with ideas of
limited responsibility.
 Second, these problems can not be resolved by logical
"proofs" nor by linguistic analyses of propositions designed
to show "free" and "determined" are logically compatible.
 And third, he faults their simplistic idea that one or the other
of them must be right.
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How Free Are You?
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“We have a kind of life-hope which is incompatible with
a belief in determinism. An open future, a future we can
make for ourselves, is one of which determinism isn't
true…This is the image of origination. There can be no
such hope if all the future is just effects of effects. It is
for this reason, I think, that many people have found
determinism to be a black thing. John Stuart Mill felt it
as an incubus, and, to speak for myself, it has certainly
got me down in the past.” (p.94)
Big Quote
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“All our choices, decisions, intuitions,
other mental events, and our actions are
no more than effects of other equally
necessitated events” (Honderich 1995)
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Implications:
We have no freedom because even our decisions are
pre-determined.
He makes the point that free will is problematic because
even our will is determined, therefore restricting our
freedom.
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Moral Responsibility
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Honderich implies that moral responsibility can be reconciled with
determinism.
He doesn’t think that ‘voluntariness’ is incompatible with determinism but
that ‘origination’ is.
“Since we do not share a single settled conception of a free decision, it is
pointless to assert, with Compatibilists, that freedom is consistent with
determinism. It is exactly as pointless to assert, with Incompatibilists, that
freedom is inconsistent with determinism. The problem of determinism
and freedom is in a sense not an intellectual or conceptual problem. We
have different attitudes, and what we must do, if we accept determinism, is
to seek and keep and value those in which we can rationally persist.”