Abstract
Contrary to what so many philosophers believe, we urge that freewill is not subject to gradations. If we have it, we have it complete and entire. Descartes long ago observed that if our will is free, it is as free as God’s. (And this bears interestingly upon the imago dei doctrine.) The only limit upon our will is the limit of our imagination, which, strictly speaking, is not a limit of the will as such at all.
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P. H. Nowell-Smith, defending determinism, says, “The problems of freewill are puzzling because it seems impossible, without indulging in sheer dogmatism, to know where to stop treating desires as ‘compelling forces.’” Ethics, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 291. But the strict libertarian does not have to draw arbitrary lines. He simply urges that no desires are “compelling forces.”
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© 1971 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Davis, W.H. (1971). The Radical Consequences of Freewill. In: The Freewill Question. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3020-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3020-5_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-247-5101-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-3020-5
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