HUMAN NATURE

1
Topic 3

• HUMAN NATURE

2
personhood

• Human beings are biological entities
• Homo sapiens
• Their classification is therefore a problem for
  biology and not philosophy
• But theres a notion of human thats not just
  biological
• Our humanity

3

• The term person helps us to distinguish the
  biological category from the philosophically
  interesting one
• Human and person can come apart
• (i) Human being yet not a person
• Persistent vegetative state
• (ii) Non-human persons?

4

• A person is an autonomous being
• Can determine the shape of their lives through
  reasoned free choices
• Forced to do certain things
• Drive on the right, drink coffee on waking, feel
  good when its sunny
• But some of our actions are free

5

• Reflecton the character of the experiences you
  have as you engage in normal, everyday
  ordinaryactions. You will sense the possibility
  of alternative courses of action built into those
  experiences. Raise your arm or walk across the
  room or take a drink of water, and you will see
  that at any point in the experience you have a
  sense of alternative courses of action open to
  you. (John Searle)

6

• Certain specific circumstances when people are
  not autonomous
• And we shouldnt treat them as such
• When under the influence of drugs, mentally ill,
  angry
• There is also an argument to the conclusion that
  autonomy is always illusory

7
determinism

• Assumption what goes on in our minds is
  determined by what goes on in our brains
• Brains are bunches of chemicals and electrical
  impulses
• Succession of different brain states is
  determined by the laws of nature
• And thus the succession of our mental states is
  also determined by the laws of nature

8
The Problem of determinism

• Freedom would seem to be incompatible with
  determinism
• I am not free to act or think because my actions
  and thoughts are determined by the laws of nature
• two kinds of indeterminist
• 1. Libertarians
• our actions are not necessitated
• Our will is not constrained by the causal laws of
  nature
• 2. Hard Determinists
• they deny that we are free

9
compatibilism

• Actions can be free and determined
• Soft determinism
• How?!
• We must first understand the nature of necessity
  and freedom
• a few intelligible definitions would immediately
  have put an end to the whole controversy (Hume,
  Enquiry)
• We just need to get clear on what necessity and
  freedom mean

10
Shaping ones life

• Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept
  of a Person
• one essential difference between persons and
  other creatures is to be found in the structure
  of a persons will
• The Will a subset of ones desires
• Those that lead to action

11

• 1st order desires
• Desire for food, sun, chocolate, etc.
• 2nd order desires
• I desire that I desire to eat more healthily
• I wish that I wanted to go skiing
• Volitions the 2nd order desires that one wants
  to act upon

12

• Wantons just act on their 1st order desires
• Animals
• May have freedom of action able to act on their
  desires, but not freedom of the will
• Persons are those who are capable of having 2nd
  order volitions

13

• Wantons are simply controlled by whatever desires
  they happen to have
• Persons can shape their lives
• Survey their desires and decide to act on those
  that they want to shape their lives
• I desire to stay in bed
• I desire to write a paper on Freedom
• I desire that the latter desire will become my
  will because I want my life to have the shape of
  an academics

14
Personhood, determinism and science

• My conception of the freedom of the will appears
  to be neutral with regard to the problem of
  determinism. It seems conceivable that it should
  be causally determined that a person is free to
  want what he wants to want. If this is
  conceivable, then it might be causally determined
  that a person enjoys a free will (Frankfurt, p.
  95)

15

• Scientific / biological account of 1st order
  desires
• Brain states / computational states
• Perhaps teleological account of the intentional
  content of desires
• Desire for water
• The flux of such brain states is determined by
  laws of cognition (laws of nature)

16

• 2nd order desires could also be given such a
  description
• Theyre also controlled by the laws of nature
• My actions are therefore determined, and yet I am
  free

17
Problems

• 1. Does Frankfurts account fit our concept of a
  person?
• Can we think of people without 2nd order
  volitions, or those who are capable of 2nd order
  volitions, but who we would not call people?

18
2. Alternative possibilities

• Freedom entails that I could have done something
  else in any given situation
• alternative courses of action open to me
• not so if one is a determinist

19

• "An Intelligence knowing all the forces acting in
  nature at a given instant, as well as the
  momentary positions of all things in the
  universe, would be able to comprehend in one
  single formula the motions of the largest bodies
  as well as the lightest atoms in the world,
  provided that its intellect were sufficiently
  powerful to subject all data to analysis to it
  nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as
  the past would be present to its eyes." Laplace

20

• Humes strategy is a wretched subterfuge with
  which some persons allow themselves to be put
  off, and so think that they have solved, with a
  petty word jugglery, a problem at the solution of
  which centuries have laboured in vain. (Kant,
  1788 189-90)