Analysis of Roderick Chisholm's 'Human Freedom and the Self'

In Roderick Chisholm’s essay Human Freedom and the Self he makes the reader aware of an interesting paradox which is not normally associated with the theory of free will. Chisholm outlines the metaphysical problem of human freedom as the fact that we claim human beings to be the responsible agents in their lives yet this directly opposes both the deterministic (that every action was caused by a previous action) and the indeterministic (that every act is not caused by anything in particular) view of human action. To hold the theory that humans are the responsible agents in regards to their actions is to discredit hundreds of years of philosophical intuition and insight. Chisholm’s view on the matter can be broken down even further. As many

Besides in the case of constraint, (A) the agent could have done otherwise. Then, by extension, it would also be equal to say that (B) if the agent had chosen to do otherwise, then he would have done otherwise. As Chisholm describes, this later statement is clearly in a accordance with determinism as, even if by an exaggerated chain of causal events, it can be seen that if he had decided to do otherwise, he would have done so. Under this conclusion, if (B) is in agreement with determinism, and (A) and (B) are of equal value, (A) would also be deterministic in nature. Accordingly, it would then be possible to find that (A) is both consistent with determinism and moral responsibility, and that these two theories must also be equal with one another. Additionally, under very specific circumstances it could be possible to find (B) to be true while (A) to be false, such as in the case of a man who, unbeknownst to him, is locked in a certain room with no way out. However, the man in this case is certainly content in the aforementioned room with no intention of leaving. If he had wanted to leave he is of the belief that he would be able to do so, proving (B) true. This is despite the fact that he would not have done this, as he is not able to, showing (A) to be false. Therefore we can see the need for an additional statement (C), he could have

In effect, a concept that is not the result of everything that has happened before the action and that is not completely random nor unfounded. Is it possible that the concept of free will falls in this category? For an action to be held as done “freely” it must meet certain criteria described by Chisholm. In effect, the conditions he sets out state that the action must not be caused by prior events, must not occur by just chance and the actions must not be uncaused. In other words for something to be considered free will the agent must cause it and not be under any constraint. This appears to severely limit what we would be able to define as freewill. Even Chisholm notes that it is difficult to find an event that could be caused by an agent while also not being caused by any previous event. However, to say that the agent caused the event is just another way to detail the event causation and does not add anything of value to the to the description of that specific causal event or resulting events. In the opinion of Chisholm this is quite frankly a mistake. In his view, the only reason it seems at all reasonable that we would correlate immanent-causation with transeunt-causation is simply that we do not have a strong enough grasp on the idea of causation as a whole. To this he offers the example of a man moving his hand. Through this example he describes to us that although