The catching of the whale: Grice and Bramhall defend true liberty against the Hobbesians

By JLS
for the GC

John Bramhall (1594-1663) attacked and defended against Hobbes's Leviathan. In 1655, Bramhall wrote "Vindication of True Liberty". Hobbes replied with "Animadversions, and Bramhall replied to this with "Castigation of Hobbes' Animadversions" (with an afterpiece called "The Catching of Leviathan, the Great Whale") in 1658.

Bramhall’s position, which he took himself to share with ‘the much greater part of philosophers and Schoolmen’, is that a human agent has absolute power over the choices he makes. No matter how strong the motive to act in a certain way, there is always the possibility of choosing to act in a different way. No normal, healthy human agent can ever truly claim that he has to choose as he does. In the case of any choice made in the past, it is possible for the agent to have chosen differently. But this is not to say that
the will is indifferent to the deliverances of the understanding. Bramhall says that there is a middle way between motives having no infuence on choice and their taking away the capacity of choosing differently. ‘Motives determine not naturally but morally,’ he says, ‘which kind of determination may consist with true liberty'.

JLS