¹ Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 75.Google Scholar

² See, for example, Peter Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford University Press,1983) 182–8. For further references, and a different form of criticism of this argument, see Michael Slote, ‘Selective Necessity and the Free Will Problem’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. LXXIX no. 1(1982).Google Scholar

³ ‘‘Objectivist’ theories of freedom suppose, naturally enough, that the task of showing that we are free involves showing that we have certain properties, not including the property of believing we are free, that are necessary and sufficient for freedom.’ Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford University Press, 1986) 25. A familiar example is the discussion of whether an ascription of responsibility involves the claim that the person could have some other than what she did; and, if it does, how the relevant notion of ′could have done other' is to be analysed.Google Scholar

⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953) 178.Google Scholar

⁵ ‘I tell someone I am in pain. His attitude to me will then be that of belief; disbelief; suspicion; and so on. Let me assume he says: ‘It′s not sobad.’Doesn′t that prove that he believes in something behind the outward expression of pain?His attitude is a proof of his attitude.’310Google Scholar

⁶ P. F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in P. F. Strawson (ed.) Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford University Press, 1968). I say that Strawson's paper can be read in this way. I am not completely certain just how far Strawson would welcome this readingGoogle Scholar

⁷ The idea that traditional compatibilist and incompatibilist views have shared the mistaken assumption that we work with a single conception of free action plays an important role in Ted Honderich′s discussion of determinism. See Ted Honderich, A Theory of Determinism(Oxford University Press 1988) ch 8. In a significantly different spirit, Richard Double argues that the different strands in our thinking reveal an incoherence in our normal thought about freedom. See Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press) ch. 5.Google Scholar

⁸ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) (Oxford University Press 1978),221.Google Scholar

⁹ In my choice of examples, and my responses to them, I am following closely Douglas Gasking, ‘Causation and Recipes’, Mind 64 (1955), 479–87. Gasking, however, sometimes speaks as if he is offering us an analysis of causal statements; and, as will become clear, I want to distance L myself from that aspect of his thinking. See also, Georg Henrik von f Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge and Kegan i Paul, 1971), H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honore, Causation in the Law (Oxford University Press 1959), and Bas C. Van Fraasen, The Scientific Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) 125–6. For a discussion which links the point about causation and manipulation with the idea of responsibility see Lewis White Beck, ‘Agent, Actor, Spectator and Critic’, Monist, vol. 49, 1965, 167–95.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Tooley Michael, Causation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),239–42.Google Scholar

¹¹ Honderich, op. cit., 42.Google Scholar

¹² 12 Jonathan Bennett, Kant′s Dialectic (Cambridge University Press 1974) s 66.Google Scholar

¹³ I say ‘My own answer to this question′ because of the unfinished and, if I am right, unfinishable business in the final paragraph of the previous section. To the extent that we do not have a definitive answer to the question ‘What is it to be included in meaning what we do by a word?’ we do not have a definitive answer to the question of what is or is not a ‘logical* incompatibility. It is possible that an indeterminacy over’ what is and is not part of ‘logic’ is one of the factors responsible for our varying intuitions about the character of the tension between necessity and responsibility.Google Scholar

¹⁴ G. Strawson, op. cit., 56Google Scholar

¹⁵ As does Van Inwagen's startling claim that since we have very good reason for believing in free will, and since free will is incompatible with determinism, we have very good reason for believing in indeterminism. Peter Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will(Oxford University Press, 1983) ch. VI.Google Scholar

¹⁶ P. F. Strawson, op. cit., 80. It may be in the same spirit that Simone Weil writes: 'We must always consider men in power as dangerous things. We must keep out of their way as much as we can without losing our selfrespect. And if one day we are driven, under pain of cowardice, to go and break ourselves against their power, we must consider ourselves as vanquished by the nature of things and not by men. One can be in a prison cell and in chains, but one can also be smitten with blindness or paralysis. There is no difference.' Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) 143.Google Scholar

¹⁷ There is, then, a subtle, but serious, distortion in the following passage of Nagel′s critique of Strawson: When we first consider the possibility that all human actions may be determined by heredity and environment, it threatens to defuse our reactive attitudes as effectively as does the information that a particular action was caused by the effects of a drugdespite all the differences between the two suppositions. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press,1986) 125. For an illuminating discussion of such moves see Lars Hertzberg, ‘Blame and Causality’, Mind, vol. 84, 1975, 500–15.Google Scholar