You Tube Theology

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Richard Swinburne (University of Oxford)
Title: 'Phenomenological Evidence of Libertarian Free Will'
Respondent: Ludwig Neidhart (University of Augsburg)
Date: 22 August 2019
Location: Schloss Fürstenried, Munich, Germany

This talk was part of the conference "Free Will and Divine Action", 21-23 August 2019, organized by the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein (IAP).
For more information, please see http://iap.li/event/tagung2019-en/

Abstract:
There is psychological evidence that it seems to most people that when they make choices to perform intentional actions of certain kinds, no causes totally determine how they will choose. By the principle of credulity that things are probably as they seem to be in the absence of counter-evidence, that makes it probable that humans have libertarian free will - in the absence of any contrary evidence from neuroscience. Objectors claim that it is evident that many different causes of which we are ignorant influence our choices. But in our choices of intentional actions, causes influence us only by affecting the strengths of our different desires, and we are able to judge by introspection the strengths of different desires and to recognise that we can sometimes act contrary to our strongest desire. Van Inwagen's "rollback argument" against libertarian free will fails, because it unjustifiably assumes that the chance of each indeterministic choice has a particular numerical value. But indeterminism does not entail fixed numerical chances; and the desires which influence our choices, being conscious events, do not have particular numerical degrees of strength.