Browsing by Subject "Free will"
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Item A Thomistic account of divine providence and human freedom(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Lim, Joung BinThis thesis presents a Thomistic account of divine providence and human freedom. I defend and develop the traditional view by adopting some contemporary interpretations of it. I argue that the Thomist solution provides an idea that divine providence is compatible with libertarian freedom. In the first chapter I provide the definition of divine providence, which is God??????s continuing action in preserving his creation. In another word, not only does God create the universe and conserve it in existence at every moment, but he also guides it according to his purpose. In the second chapter, I critically examine three solutions to the problem of providence and human freedom. They are compatibilism, open theism, and Molinism. I argue that the solutions are unsatisfactory in that they too easily give up some of the important doctrines concerning God and humans. In Chapter III, I develop a Thomistic account of divine providence and human freedom. The Thomistic theory, I argue, well preserves traditional doctrines concerning both God and humans without damaging either providence or libertarian freedom for humans. In particular, I briefly examine some characteristics of God, which are timelessness and his activity as the First Cause. Based on these features of God??????s nature, I show how human beings enjoy entire freedom in the libertarian sense although God has complete sovereignty over human free choices in the world. If the present view is correct, what makes it less attractive is that the theory seems to make God the author of sin. So I finally deal with the problem of moral responsibility and the problem of evil and sin, showing that humans, not God, are the author of sin. I contend that God wills that humans sin but he has a certain purpose for doing so within his providence. But that never destroys human freedom, so humans are responsible for their decisions and actions. Within the Thomistic explanation we can have a logically coherent view of compatibility of divine providence with libertarian freedom of humans. In the last chapter, I summarize my argument and deal with some implications of it.Item Departing From Frankfurt: moral responsibility and alternative possibilities(2009-12) Palmer, David William; Deigh, John; Kane, Robert, 1938-; Fischer, John; Ginet, Carl; White, Stephen; Woodruff, PaulOne of the most significant questions in ethics is this: under what conditions are people morally responsible for what they do? Assuming that people can only be praised or blamed for actions they perform of their own free will, the particular question that interests me is how we should understand the nature of this freedom – with what kind of freedom must people act, if they are to be morally responsible for what they do? A natural answer to this question – and the one I think is correct – is to point to the freedom to do otherwise. This is encapsulated in the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), the principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. PAP has led many to believe that the freedom required for moral responsibility must be incompatible with determinism or the existence of God because it is plausible to argue that if determinism is true or if God exists, then people would lack genuine freedom of choice and hence could not be morally responsible for their behavior. In the light of two important articles by Harry Frankfurt almost four decades ago, which challenged the claim that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise, compatibilism – the opposing view that the freedom for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism – has experienced a resurgence. Inspired by Frankfurt’s work, those wanting to reject PAP – typically compatibilists – attack the principle on two main grounds: directly and indirectly. First, they have argued directly that PAP is false by developing alleged counterexamples to it. Second, they have challenged PAP indirectly by arguing that there are alternative conceptions of freedom from freedom of choice that, it is claimed, are not reliant on alternative possibilities but are sufficient to capture the freedom required for moral responsibility. My dissertation evaluates these two lines of attack on PAP. In particular, I attempt to defend the truth of PAP against both kinds of challenge.