Free man, free person: Locke vs. Grice

by JLS
for the GC

Reading through Locke's Essay ("Powers") on 'free' and 'will'.

http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/modern/locke_power.html

We tend to equate Liberty = freedom. Liberty = freedom:

“the power to think or not to think,
to move or not to move,
according to the preference or direction of his own mind.”

So unfreedom can result either from the lack of volition -- that’s why rocks aren’t free -- or from our inability to do what we will.

It is crucial that for Locke we read these sentences correctly.

Freedom of thought is

“power to think or not think” (II.xxi.8).

It is important that this be read “power to (think or not think),” not as “(power to think) or (power to not think).”

If the power to think something if we will that we think it were a kind of liberty, then there wouldn’t be examples of unfree agents who act voluntarily.

Freedom isn’t the same thing as voluntariness.

You can do something freely even though you aren’t at liberty to do otherwise.

Placed in a locked room with someone you “long to see and speak with”: II.xxi.10.

Kinds of unfreedom (= necessity)

So free actions are always voluntary, but voluntary actions are not always free.

Thus we cannot simply identify freedom with voluntariness and necessity with its absence.

Why freedom of the will doesn’t make sense

First, because freedom and will are both powers, and powers don’t have powers (§16).

----

This first reason seems like a mere verbal trick. It’s true (maybe) that it doesn’t make sense to think of the will itself as being free or unfree.

But presumably that’s not what people have meant.

They have meant that we are free to will various possible things.

B.

Second, because talking about freedom to will, rather than freedom of the will, leads quickly to an infinite regress (§25).

Under what conditions are we free to will one thing rather than another?

If we think of volitions as actions, and freedom to will as therefore a special case of the freedom of action, if Locke’s analysis of freedom of action is right, we’ll have to say that one is free to will something only if one wills to will it.

But the volition to have a certain volition will be free only if it is produced by a still further volition.

And this volition to have a volition to have a volition will be free only if . . . .

And so on.

Note that Locke’s analysis of freedom seems to amount to the claim that there are two necessary conditions for freedom which are jointly sufficient.

An action is free iff
(a) it is voluntary, i.e. produced by a volition; and
(b) had one willed to refrain from performing the action, one could have.