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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Ethics & moral philosophy
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A Metaphysics for Freedom (Paperback)
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A Metaphysics for Freedom (Paperback)
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A Metaphysics for Freedom argues that agency itself-and not merely
the special, distinctively human variety of it-is incompatible with
determinism. For determinism is threatened just as surely by the
existence of powers which can be unproblematically accorded to many
sorts of animals, as by the distinctively human powers on which the
free will debate has tended to focus. Helen Steward suggests that a
tendency to approach the question of free will solely through the
issue of moral responsibility has obscured the fact that there is a
quite different route to incompatibilism, based on the idea that
animal agents above a certain level of complexity possess a range
of distinctive 'two-way' powers, not found in simpler substances.
Determinism is not a doctrine of physics, but of metaphysics; and
the idea that it is physics which will tell us whether our world is
deterministic or not presupposes what must not be taken for
granted-that is, that physics settles everything else, and that we
are already in a position to say that there could be no irreducibly
top-down forms of causal influence. Steward considers questions
concerning supervenience, laws, and levels of explanation, and
explores an outline of a variety of top-down causation which might
sustain the idea that an animal itself, rather than merely events
and states going on in its parts, might be able to bring something
about. The resulting position permits certain important concessions
to compatibilism to be made; and a convincing response is also
offered to the charge that even if it is agreed that determinism is
incompatible with agency, indeterminism can be of no possible help.
The whole is an argument for a distinctive and resolutely
non-dualistic, naturalistically respectable version of
libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of
organisation might make possible in the way of freedom.
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