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Every day we seem to make and act upon all kinds of choices: some trivial, others so consequential that they change the course of one's life, or even the course of history. But are these choices really free, or are we compelled to act the way we do by factors beyond our control? Is the feeling that we could have made different decisions just an illusion? And if our choices are not free, is it legitimate to hold people morally responsible for their actions?
Thomas Pink looks at the fundamental philosophical question of free will, critically examining the claim: If our actions are causally determined by events beyond our control, that means that we can never act freely, and so can never be held responsible for our actions.
- Sales Rank: #673091 in Books
- Published on: 2004-08-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 4.30" h x .50" w x 6.80" l, .26 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 144 pages
About the Author
Thomas Pink is Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College, London. He is also an associate editor of Mind.
Most helpful customer reviews
59 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
Not terribly helpful
By Maxwell Goss
I read this book because I wanted a concise and thorough refresher on the problem of free will and because I thought it might shed some helpful new light on the subject. The book was disappointing in both regards, unfortunately, and thus I cannot recommend it, either to the beginning or the advanced student.
Let me mention that my disappointment is not due to any lack of sympathy for the author's project. Like Dr. Pink, I affirm libertarian freedom and I reject attempts to naturalize human agency. I am glad that the author wishes to defend a traditional, robust conception of free will, but I found his exposition repetitive and confusing and his arguments almost wholly unpersuasive.
It should also be said that the book is not without insights. For example, it succeeds in showing how, thanks to the naturalist program of Thomas Hobbes, the modern problem of free will differs importantly from the problem as treated in the medieval period. The book frames the free will problem in terms of action theory, a somewhat interesting approach, and it contains a pretty good critique of agent causation.
Nevertheless, in my judgment, the book's negative qualities outweigh the positive. A constant source of irritation is Pink's appeals to "what we ordinarily believe" to answer determinist and compatibilist objections. It is as if he thinks that folk ontology includes a worked-out libertarian theory of agency, and that compatibilism and determinism enjoy absolutely no support from our everyday intuitions.
A more serious problem is the author's failure to define his terms clearly or to give a precise map of the terrain he is covering. For example, he never clearly distinguishes, and in some places seems to conflate, freedom as ultimate responsibility and freedom as alternative possibilities (cf. Robet Kane, The Significance of Free Will). And he makes no mention of, among other things, the consequence argument, the distinction between agent causation and event causation, reactive attitudes, or Frankfurt examples. Such omissions are surprising in a book purporting to introduce the subject of free will.
Worse yet, while the author discusses compatibilism at some length, if only as a foil for his own view, he does not consider incompatibilist determinism in any detail and he does not mention semi-compatibilism at all. This book is really an introduction to libertarianism, not free will, and an unclear one at that. There is nothing wrong with defending one's point of view, of course, but the reader does not come away with a clear understanding of alternative theories, let alone the arguments for them.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the book is its obscurity. Not only is the author's writing muddled, as already mentioned, but I find his theory, well, bizarre. Pink's thesis is something like the following: Freedom is a sui generis non-causal power to form goals exercised through the medium of action. Perhaps this speaks to my shortcomings more than the author's, but I am still puzzling over what this amounts to. I think Pink would need to develop his view in much more detail, including a careful excursus on causation, before it became clear. In the present book, his attempt to lay out his view competes with his aim of providing a "very short introduction" to free will, and consequently he succeeds in neither.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
AN EMBRASSMENT TO BOTH PHILOSOPHY AND THE VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION SERIES
By A. Person
I have read a large number of the Very Short Introduction series and am on the whole very impressed with them. Reading this particular book, however, I felt I was reading a very bad exam paper. The text is replete with the type of flawed argumentation one would expect from a keen but unpromising high school pupil. It was so bad that I was able to find at least one major flaw per page, often more. Some of the worst flaws include:
* Pink frequently assumes that because something need not be the case that it therefore is not the case.
* Pink fails to present a theory for freedom, relying instead on very poor attempts to undermine the counter-arguments to the case for freedom of the will, arguments he is either willfully distorting or has not understood.
* Pink makes the flawed assumption that theories of causal determinism are necessarily reductive.
* Pink's arguments against determinism, garrulous as they are, are not more sophisticated than 'we have free will because we perceive that we have it'.
* Pink's book is, as another reviewer has highlighted, highly repetitive. In fact, this is an understatement. It could not be more repetitive if it tried. This could easily have fitted onto 30 pages.
* Pink takes certain key terms for granted (e.g. 'we', 'self', 'free agent'), perhaps realising that their definition may undermine his rambling hypotheses.
* At times, Pink seems to assume that prior causation must mean that things are mapped out for the individual since before birth, rather than acknowledging the chaos and flux which is at play in causal relationships. This in itself is an example of the reductionism he readily criticizes elsewhere.
* Pink argues against the Hobbesian view that action is driven by prior desires with the awful counter-example of 'if I am out walking, and decide to take a break on a bench, then decide to get up and continue my walk, that decision is not driven by prior desires'. His notion of temporality is skewed here, for 'man wishes to get up and continue walk, gets up, continues walk' is sufficient to undermine his argument. Immediately prior is still prior.
* In trying to undermine the role of desires in action, he replaces this term with `motivation'. However, he fails to define `motivation' and fails to show how it is any different or any more amenable to freedom than `desire'.
* Et cetera ad nauseum...
All in all, Pink has produced something that is an embarassment to philosophy. He shouldn't be teaching at a university, let alone publishing books. I suggest he goes back to school to learn the very basics of philosophy. Whether you come from the determinist, compatibilist or libertarian camp, this book has only one thing to offer: an example of how not to argue a case for the freedom of the will.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A misguided introduction to free will
By Fred C.
This was probably the worst VSI I've read (and, given that I love the series, I've read quite a few). It does very little in the way of an introduction to the subject, or even in the way of a lucid exposition. Pink treats the free will problem as a sort of constant problem throughout the ages, paying very little regard to profound historical differences in treatment (excepting, perhaps, his short discussion of the Middle Ages). The lack of the kind of sensitivity needed by a historian of ideas becomes apparent when the author again and again writes off Hobbes's theory as "wrong," in light of what we now know (or Pink now knows) about the subject (or when he talks about "reversing" some intellectual changes occurred since the Middle Ages). Common sense becomes too often the main judge and the sole source of evidence in the author's arguments. From the beginning, Pink frames the terms of the debate, in the way that best suits his purposes, and then purports to resolve the free will problem in a way consistent with freedom. The last section of the book is called "In defence of libertarian freedom." That should be the name of the book, even if the defense the author accomplishes is markedly capricious (frequently omitting, for instance, the names and arguments of his opponents). The book may be useful in a class setting aimed at presenting Pink's "solution" to the free will problem, but as a VSI on the subject it was very unsatisfying.
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