"of his own will" and Grice and Lord Kames on "do not say what you believe to be false"

By JLS
for the GC

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) isiscussed by J. Harris in his landmark study: "Liberty and necessity: the free will debate in eighteenth-century British philosophy" (Oxford, 2005). In his "Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion" (1751) he proposes a novel solution to the free will problem. Kames admits that we naturally believe that we possess a libertarian freedom of choice; but argues that this natural belief is in fact false, given us by God in order that we be prompted to act, and in order that we think of ourselves as morally responsible for our actions. Kames’s proposal excited much controversy, and Kames moderates his view in the second and third editions of the Essays.

The idea of the truly false belief has a charitable ring to it! (Davidson via Grice, "Do not say what you believe to be false!")