First of all, I will consider what Augustine says about free will in his excerpt of On Free Choice of the Will. Augustine presents the discussion about free will in form of a dialogue between himself and Evodius, and throughout this dialogue, he argues with Evodius about what meaning of free will that he thinks should be. Evodius ask Augustine:
Evodius: Now explain to me, if you can, why God gave human beings free choice of the will, since if we had not received it, we would not have been able to sin.
Agustine replies: If all of this is true, the question you posed has clearly been answered. If human beings are good things, and they cannot do right unless they so will, then they ought to have a free will, without which they cannot do right. True, they can also use free will to sin, but we should not therefore believe that God gave them free will so that they would be able to sin. The fact that human beings could not live rightly without it was sufficient reason for God to give it. The very fact that anyone who uses free will to sin is devinely punished shows that free will was given to enable human beings to live rightly, for such punishment would be unjust if free will had been given both for living rightly and for sinning. ( Pereboom 20)
Thus, we see that free will by God means that human beings should choose the right things to do and should not do wrong things because if God doesn't give us free will, he cannot punish us if we do wrong things. However, that is a divine concept which is explained clearly by Augustine; for Aquinas, free will is something more humanly and earthly because Aquinas thinks that human beings are prone toward errors and sins as a result of the sin that Eva had committed before the earth had its first couple to live on. In Summa Theologica, Aquinas presents his own thoughts about free will in the same format that he uses to write his Treatise on Law which contains statements of objections and then statements of replies. Aqinas thinks that free will and free choices are the same and that they are the powers of selection:
On the contrary, Damascene says free choice is nothing else than the will.
I answer that, the appetitive powers must be proportionate to the apprehensive powers, as we have said above. Now, as on the part of intellectual apprehension we have intellect and reason, so on the part of the intellectual appetite we have will and free choice, which is nothing else but the power of election... But to reason, properly speaking, is to come from one thing to knowledge of another, and so, properly speaking, we reason about conclusions, which are known from the principles. In like manner, on the part of appetite, to will implies the simple appetite for something, and so the will is said to regard the end, which is desired for itself. But to elect is to desire something for the sake of obtaining something else, and so, properly speaking, it regards the means to end... Therefore it is evident that as intellect is to reason, so will is to the elective power, which is free choice. ( Pereboom 40)
Thus, we see that human beings have power to will or to choose according to Aquinas. Next, Aquinas says that voluntary is in human acts and that voluntary is an act consisting in a rational operation. He writes:
On the contrary, Damascene says that the voluntary is an act consisting in a rational operation. Now such are human acts. Therefore there is something voluntary in human acts.
I answer that, there must needs be something voluntary in human acts. In order to make this clear, we must take note that the principle of some acts is within agent, or in that which is moved; whereas the principles of some movements or acts is outside... (Pereboom 43)
God moves man to act, not only by proposing the appetiable to the senses, or by effecting a change in his body, but also moving the will itself; for every movement both of the will and of nature proceeds from God as the First Mover... (Pereboom 45)
So, we see that when we will to do something, God preserves his part in it; however, to do something wrong is sometimes our own fault because to err is human. Aquinas is the philosophyer who sees the distinction between the will and the intellect as lying in their different relationship with the soul. This brings us to the question how the will is related to the intellect. Aquinas' argument is as follows:
It is in the nature of the will to tend toward the good because the good is desirable, or rather is the object of the will. Insofar as the good is the object of the will, it is the object of the mind in the second sense as distinguished by Aquinas above. (Kaphagawani 16)
Thus, another matter and another term is created regarding freedom and choice; that is Determinism in which Leibniz has difficulty making sense of the possibility of human freedom:
This difficulty is in many ways just a version of the old problem of reconciling God's foreknowledge of future events with human freedom. Leibniz realizes these worries in a discussion of Juda's free act to betray Jesus. Of such human decisions Leibniz wants to argue that God inclines our souls without at all necessiating them. Much of Leibniz's point here is that God has made it the case that human beings choose in accord with what we might term 'the law of practical reason': Human beings always choose the apparent good. So what human beings must do is to be on guard against appearances; we must decide or act only after mature deliberation. But given Leibniz's views about the nature of God's choice of the best, whatever decision Judas makes has 'been assured from all eternity.' (Scott-Kakures 156)
Thus, what we do, there seems to be something inside us that determines us to do so with the power of God according to Leibniz. Moreover, recent philosophers do not think about God as a cause of human actions as ancient philosophers did. One of these philosophers is Dr. Spakovsky. More about determinism, Dr. Spakovsky, in his book which is titled Freedom-Determinism, Indeterminism, writes the following paragraph:
This freedom of choice does not mean that this personal choice has no reason or cause. Every free personal choice has its reason and its cause, but they lie in man himself, in his bio-psychical structure and not outside the man, not in his social and cosmic environment. In other words, the difference between a free and an unfree choice is not that a free choice lies outside the character of determination, outside every law of causation, but in the character of determination. All in the universe is determined, and the term 'indeterminism' indicates only that the realization of the given phenomenon or event was on the ground of a free choice among different existential possibilities, i.e., the existence of the given phenomenon or event was not absolutely necessary but only relatively;... (Spakovsky 1)
Thus, we see that Spakovsky uses the term 'bio-psychical structure' to claim as the place where free personal choice lies in. Another philosopher is Hume who thinks that free will is compatible with determinism. We seem to act freely, that is, to determine our own actions, and hence, to be responsible for them. "However, the scientific view of the natural world is that all events are determined. So if we believe determinism is true in the natural world because there is regularity in the relations of events, then we have every reason to think the determinism is true with human behavior as well, for human behavior is just as regular. Indeed, we could have developed our idea of cause from observing the regularity in human behavior even if we had never observed constant conjunctions of events in the material world." (Scott-Kakures 224).
But in my own opinions, our liberty has external constraints such as hereditary, social, political, physiological factors. For example, we may want to fly to the moon on our own power, but we cannot, or we want to eat many fatty foods but we are too fat or overweight, etc. No matter how hard we try, there are external circumstances that will prevent us from doing so, and some of the constrainsts belong to natural law such as in the above example. Thus, liberty is not incompatible with being determined because we are determined by natural laws to do only what we are inclined to do.
Susan Wolf thinks that there is no compatibility between free will and psychological determinism because "Many people believe that if psychological determinism is true, the condition of freedom can never be satified... They therefore conclude that the condition of freedom requires the absence of psychological determinism. And they think this is what we mean to express when we state the condition of freedom in terms of the requirement that the agent 'could have done otherwise'." (Pereboom 200)
She thinks that if a person who does a right action then according to the phrase "could have done otherwise", he or she could have done a bad action instead, or that if a person who does a wrong action then he or she could have done a good action instead. If it is so, then how can we know whether a person should do a good or a bad action if anything he or she does turns out that she or he can do the other opposite action instead? And that is why she thinks that a person is not causally determined at all. The following paragraphs are written by her:
If an agent performs a morally bad action, on the other hand, then his actions can't be determined in the appropriate way. So if an agent is ever to be responsible for a bad action, it must be the case that his action is not psychological determined at all. According to my view, then, in oder for both moral praise and moral blame to be justified, the thesis of psychological determinism must be false. (Pereboom 210)
There is, admittedly, some difficulty in establishing that an agent who performs a morally bad action satisfies the condition of freedom. It is hard to know whether an agent who did one thing could have done another instead... It should be emphasized that the indetermination with which we are here concerned is indetermination at other levels of explanation... the nature of psychological explanation of our behavior cannot be relevant to the problem of free will.
I have suggested that the explanation for why a responsible agent performs a morally bad action must be, at some level, incomplete. There must be nothing that made the agent perform the action he did, nothing prevented him from performing a morally better one. It should be noted that there may be praiseworthy actions for which the explanations are similarly incomplete. For the idea that an agent who could have performed a morally bad action actually performs a morally good one is no less plausible than the idea that an agent who could have performed a morally good action actually performs a morally bad one. (Pereboom 212)
To answer the questions that I stated in the introduction about whether we can have a free will with having freedom and whether we can have a free will without having freedom, I think the first answer is that we can have a freedom but we cannot have a free will, or that we can have freedom without a free will. The reason is that, for example, in our society, America, polygamy is prohibited; thus, if a man who wants to have a free will as to marry two wives at the same time, he won't be able to do it legally. Hence, depending on the culture and the norms or the rules of a society, freedom is defined by that own culture and society, and there are many different cultures and societies; thus, there are different definitions or conceptions of freedom. And since free will is more inclined towards an individual will, it is probably that one who lives in a particular society can have freedom enacted by that particular society, but cannot have his own free will. In another word, a person can have freedom without free will, or cannot have free will with freedom.
The second answer is that if a person has free wills then of course, he or she will have freedom, and this freedom is an absolute freedom or the kind of freedom that harmonizes with her free wills. Thus, we can generally say that to have free wills is to have freedom, but to have freedom is not to have free wills as I already explained in the above paragraph. And this is, for example, in America, freedom is to do anything but not to legally being married with two people at the same time. And it is definitely that in a society, we can have freedom based on the laws, or the beliefs or the norms of that society only and our own free wills, such as polygamy will be opposite and violate with the freedom that we have. Thus, if we have a free will to marry two people at the same time legally without any restriction of freedom in society, then we have total freedom.
Works Cited
Kaphagawani, Didier. Leibniz of Freedom and Determinism in Relation to Aquinas and Molina. Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999.
Pereboom, Derek. Free Will. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.
Scott-Kakures, et al. History of Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins College Outline, HarperCollins Publisher, 1993.
Spakovsky, Anatol. Freedom - Determinism Indeterminism. Netherlands: The Hague Co., 1963.
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