Grice: a closet determinist?

By JLS
for the GC

In the cited fragments from Grice's final considerations on 'free' in "Actions and Events" we see his need to defend determinism as being prime in the phenomenal world. There is a long history behind this. We need not all be Aristotelian.
From wiki: "David Sedley and Anthony Long speculated in their 1987 masterwork The Hellenistic Philosophers that Epicurus's swerve of the atoms might be limited to providing undetermined alternative possibilities for action, from which the mind's power of volition could choose in a way that reflects character and values, desires and feelings."
"Here at last a significant role for the swerve leaps to the eye."
"For it is to answer just this question, according to Cicero, that the swerve was introduced. The evident power of the self and its volitions to intervene in the physical processes of soul and body would be inexplicable if physical laws alone were sufficient to determine the precise trajectory of every atom. Therefore physical laws are not sufficient to determine the precise trajectory of every atom. There is a minimal degree of physical indeterminism — the swerve. An unimpeded atom may at any given moment continue its present trajectory, but equally may 'swerve' into one of the adjacent parallel trajectories."
"As far as physics is concerned there is simply no reason for its following one rather than another of these trajectories. Normally, then, the result will be, in this minimal degree, random. But in the special case of the mind there is also a non-physical cause, volition, which can affect the atoms of which it is a property."
"Sedley and Long assume a non-physical (metaphysical) ability of the volition to affect the atoms, which is implausible. But the idea that a physical volition chooses - (consistent with and adequately determined by the agent's character and values and its desires and feelings) from among alternative possibilities provided randomly by the atoms - is quite plausible."
"It does so, we may speculate, not by overriding the laws of physics, but by choosing between the alternative possibilities which the laws of physics leave open. In this way a large group of soul atoms might simultaneously be diverted into a new pattern of motion, and thus radically redirect the motion of the body. Such an event, requiring as it does the coincidence of numerous swerves, would be statistically most improbable according to the laws of physics alone. But it is still, on the swerve theory, an intrinsically possible one, which volition might therefore be held to bring about. For a very similar thesis relating free will to modern quantum indeterminism, see A. S. Eddington, The nature of the physical world (1928). (It may be objected that swerves are meant to be entirely uncaused; but, as E 2 shows, that was only an inference by Epicurus' critics, made plausible by concentrating on the swerve's cosmogonic function, cf. 11H, for there it must indeed occur at random and without the intervention of volition.) [20]"
"Given today's quantum mechanical indeterminacy, Epicurus's intuition of a fundamental randomness in nature was correct."
"But he did not think the swerves were the direct causes of our actions. He agreed with Aristotle that beyond necessity (άνάyκη) and chance (τυχῆ) there is a third kind of basic cause - agent causes that are "up to us" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν or παρ’ ῆμᾶς). How exactly determinism and chance relate to autonomous agent causality is not made clear, but Aristotle and Epicurus should be classed today as "agent-causal libertarians." Grice would have loved to provide further critical apparatus!