Philosophical Issue 2 Revisited: The Conscious Decision to Act and Free Will

Abstract

Recall from Chapter 4 how, traditionally, Anglo-American approaches to action, in accordance with the common-sense view, posit a causal role for mental states of the right kind, and that these mental states amount to conscious decisions that we understand to be intentions. Moreover, such accounts (and certainly the common-sense view) have at their heart the view that I choose to act when the act is voluntary, and that these mental states of the right kind — these conscious intentions that express my choice — are evidence of my free will. Here, free will is restricted to the causal role played by one’s conscious decision to act. Despite the appeal of this view, there is an increasingly pervasive line of thought emerging from the scientific study of human agency which threatens our common-sense commitment to the existence of free will as described above (Bayne, 2012).KeywordsCausal RoleConscious ExperienceConscious AwarenessConscious DecisionReadiness PotentialThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.