Jacques Monod’s 1971 book Chance and Necessity was a landmark in the popular science literature for its unequivocal statement that the origin of life is purely a product of Chance.

…chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition — or the hope — that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.
(Chance and Necessity, p. 112)

Monod correctly denies any teleological forces are needed to create life from inanimate matter, but he finds that teleonomic purposeful behavior is one of the fundamental characteristics of life, along with what he calls autonomous morphogenesis (life is “self-constructing”) and reproductive invariance (life is “self-replicating”).

Information philosophy agrees that with the emergence of life, information structures with purposes entered the universe.

But there must have been information-creating, ergodic processes at work before terrestrial life appeared. They created the informational substrate for life, in particular, the sun and the planetary environment hospitable to the origin of life on earth.

Monod says that some biologists have been unhappy with his idea of teleonomy, that living beings are endowed with a purpose or a project, but he says this is essential to the definition of living beings. His next criterion is autonomous morphogenesis. He says,

…a living being’s structure results from a … process … that owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to “morphogenetic” interactions within the object itself.

We now know this is only “adequate determinism“

It is thus a structure giving proof of an autonomous determinism: precise, rigorous, implying a virtually total “freedom” with respect to outside agents or conditions — which are capable, to be sure, of impeding this development, but not of governing or guiding it, not of prescribing its organizational scheme to the living object. Through the autonomous and spontaneous character of the morphogenetic processes that build the macroscopic structure of living beings, the latter are absolutely distinct from artifacts, as they are, furthermore, from the majority of natural objects whose macroscopic morphology largely results from the influence of external agents.

Crystals are one of the few purely physical “ergodic” processes, reducing the entropy locally

To this there is a single exception: that, once again, of crystals, whose characteristic geometry reflects microscopic interactions occurring within the object itself. Hence, utilizing this criterion alone, crystals would have to be classified together with living beings, while artifacts and natural objects, alike fashioned by outside agents, would comprise another class.
(Chance and Necessity, p.10)

The quantum cooperative atomic phenomena that form crystals are of course the same as form the macromolecules of life, DNA, RNA, etc.

Monod thinks there is an “internal, autonomous determinism” that “guarantees the formation of the extremely complex structures of living beings.” The “guarantee” can not be perfect as a result of statistical physics. Monod is fully aware of quantum indeterminacy. After discussing chance in terms of probability and games of chance, he says,

on the microscopic level there exists a further source of still more radical uncertainty, embedded in the quantum structure of matter. A mutation is in itself a microscopic event, a quantum event, to which the principle of uncertainty consequently applies. An event which is hence and by its very nature essentially unpredictable.

Monod identifies the key evolutionary process as the transmission of information from one living information structure to the next. Note that this is accomplished in the constant presence of thermal and quantal noise

.

Such structures represent a considerable quantity of information whose source has still to be identified: for all expressed — and hence received — information presupposes a source. He says “the source of the information expressed in the structure of a living being is always another, structurally identical object.”

[Living beings have the] ability to produce and to transmit ne varietur the information corresponding to their own structure. A very rich body of information, since it describes an organizational scheme which, along with being exceedingly complex, is preserved intact from one generation to the next. The term we shall use to designate this property is invariant reproduction, or simply invariance.With their invariant reproduction we find living beings and crystalline structures once again sharing a property that renders them unlike all other known objects in the universe. Certain chemicals in supersaturated solution do not crystallize unless the solution has been inoculated with crystal seeds. We know as well that in cases of a chemical capable of crystallizing into two different systems, the structure of the crystals appearing in the solution will be determined by that of the seed employed.
(Chance and Necessity, p.12)

Monod claims that the main distinction between crystals and living things is the quantity of information transmitted between the generations. He thus neglects the creativity inherent in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge by living things.

Crystalline structures, however, represent a quantity of information by several orders of magnitude inferior to that transmitted from one generation to another in the simplest living beings we are acquainted with. By this criterion — purely quantitative, be it noted — living beings may be distinguished from all other objects, crystals included.

In his major contribution toward an informational approach to biology, Monod goes on to make a quantitative estimate of what he calls the “teleonomic level” of a species, arranging them in a hierarchy based purely on information content. This is an important beginning for information-based biological science.

…since a structure’s degree of order can be defined in units of information, we shall say that the “invariance content” of a given species is equal to the amount of information which, transmitted from one generation to the next, assures the preservation of the specific structural standard. As we shall see later on, with the help of a few assumptions it will be possible to arrive at an estimate of this amount.That in turn will enable us to bring into better focus the notion most immediately and plainly inspired by the examination of the structures and performances of living beings, that of teleonomy. Analysis nevertheless reveals it to be a profoundly ambiguous concept, since it implies the subjective idea of “project.” [Consider] the example of the camera: if we agree that this object’s existence and structure realize the “project” of capturing images, we must also agree, obviously enough, that a similar project is accomplished with the emergence of the eye of a vertebrate.

But it is only as a part of a more comprehensive project that each individual project, whatever it may be, has any meaning. All the functional adaptations in living beings, like all the artifacts they produce, fulfill particular projects which may be seen as so many aspects or fragments of a unique primary project, which is the preservation and multiplication of the species.

To be more precise, we shall arbitrarily choose to define the essential teleonomic project as consisting in the transmission from generation to generation of the invariance content characteristic of the species. All the structures, all the performances, all the activities contributing to the success of the essential project will hence be called “teleonomic.”

This allows us to put forward at least the principle of a definition of a species’ “teleonomic level.’ All teleonomic structures and performances can be regarded as corresponding to a certain quantity of information which must be transmitted for these structures to be realized and -these performances accomplished. Let us call this quantity “teleonomic information.” A given species’ “teleonomic level” may then be said to correspond to the quantity of information which, on the average and per individual, must be transferred to assure the generation-to-generation transmission of the specific content of reproductive invariance.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.13-14)

For François Jacob, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jacques Monod, teleonomy was a basic characteristic of every cell. Jacob said that the basic purpose and desire of every cell is to become two cells

.

But Monod sees that his teleonomy appears to be in conflict with a basic tenet, the very cornerstone, of modern science.

The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that “true” knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes - that is to say, of “purpose.” An exact date may be given for the discovery of this canon. The formulation by Galileo and Descartes of the principle of inertia laid the groundwork not only for mechanics but for the epistemology of modern science, by abolishing Aristotelian physics and cosmology. To be sure, neither reason, nor logic, nor observation, nor even the idea of their systematic confrontation had been ignored by Descartes’ predecessors. But science as we understand it today could not have been developed upon those foundations alone. It required the unbending stricture implicit in the postulate of objectivity — ironclad, pure, forever undemonstrable. For it is obviously impossible to imagine an experiment which could prove the nonexistence anywhere in nature of a purpose, of a pursued end.But the postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science; it has guided the whole of its prodigious development for three centuries. There is no way to be rid of it, even tentatively or in a limited area, without departing from the domain of science itself.

Objectivity nevertheless obliges us to recognize the teleonomic character of living organisms, to admit that in their structure and performance they act projectively — realize and pursue a purpose. Here therefore, at least in appearance, lies a profound epistemological contradiction. In fact the central problem of biology lies with this very contradiction, which, if it is only apparent, must be resolved; or else proven to be utterly insoluble, if that should turn out indeed to be the case.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.21-2)

Monod’s resolution of his “profound epistemological contradiction” is to make teleonomy secondary to - and a consequence of - reproductive invariance.

Since the teleonomic properties of living beings appear o challenge one of the basic postulates of the modern theory of knowledge, any philosophical, religious, or scientific view of the world must, ipso facto, offer an implicit if not an explicit solution to this problem.{T]he single hypothesis that modern science here deems acceptable: namely, that invariance necessarily precedes teleonomy. Or, to be more explicit;` the Darwinian idea that the initial appearance, evolution, and steady refinement of ever more intensely teleonomic structures are due to perturbations occurring in a structure which already possesses the property of invariance — hence is capable of (preserving the effects of chance and thereby submitting them to the play of natural selection.

Ranking teleonomy as a secondary property deriving from invariance — alone seen as primary — the selective theory is the only one so far proposed that is consistent with the postulate of objectivity. It is at the same time the only one not merely compatible with modern physics but based squarely upon it, without restrictions or additions. In short, the selective theory of evolution assures the epistemological coherence of biology and gives it its place among the sciences of “objective nature.”
(Chance and Necessity, pp.23-4)

Monod summarizes the history of philosophy more or less as we do (and as Karl Popper does), along the lines of the great division, or dualism, between idealists and materialists.

We see the distinction as between those who think information is an invariant and those who see it as constantly increasing. Monod’s focus on reproductive invariance may prevent him seeing the importance of novelty and creation of new information. Ever since its birth in the Ionian Islands almost three thousand years ago, Western philosophy has been divided between two seemingly opposed attitudes. According to one of them the authentic and ultimate truth of the world can reside only in perfectly immutable forms, by essence unvarying. According to the other, the only real truth resides in flux and evolution. From Plato to Whitehead and from Heraclitus to Hegel and Marx, it is clear that these metaphysical epistemologies were always closely bound up with their authors’ ethical and political biases. These ideological edifices, represented as self-evident to reason, were actually a posteriori constructions designed to justify preconceived ethico-political theories.
(Chance and Necessity, p.99)

Like many scientists, Monod regards the open search for knowledge and truth as of intrinsic value. Can he go on to make knowledge itself a value in the objective world of “value-free” science? Monod seeks an “ethic of knowledge.”

Must one adopt the position once and for all that objective truth and the theory of values constitute eternally separate, mutually impenetrable domains? This is the attitude taken by a great number of modern thinkers, whether writers, or philosophers, or indeed scientists. For the vast majority of men, whose anxiety it can only perpetuate and worsen, this attitude I believe will not do; I also believe it is absolutely mistaken, and for two essential reasons.First, and obviously, because values and knowledge are always and necessarily associated in action just as in discourse.

Second, and above all, because the very definition of “true” knowledge reposes in the final analysis upon an ethical postulate.

Each of these two points demands some brief clarification.

Ethics and knowledge are inevitably linked in and through action. Action brings knowledge and values simultaneously into play, or into question. All action signifies an ethic, serves or disserves certain values; or constitutes a choice of values, or pretends to. On the other hand, knowledge is necessarily implied in all action, while reciprocally, action is one of the two necessary sources of knowledge.

The moment one makes objectivity the conditio sine qua non of true knowledge, a radical distinction, indispensable to the very search for truth, is established between the domains of ethics and of knowledge. Knowledge in itself is exclusive of all value judgment (all save that of “epistemological value”) whereas ethics, in essence nonobjective, is forever barred from the sphere of knowledge.

The postulate of objectivity…prohibits any confusion of value judgments with judgments arrived at through knowledge. Yet the fact remains that these two categories inevitably unite in the form of action, discourse included. In order to abide by our principle we shall therefore take the position that no discourse or action is to be considered meaningful, authentic unless — or only insofar as — it makes explicit and preserves the distinction between the two categories it combines. Thus defined, the concept of authenticity becomes the common ground where ethics and knowledge meet again; where values and truth, associated but not interchangeable, reveal their full significance to the attentive man alive to their resonance.

In an objective system…any mingling of knowledge with values is unlawful, forbidden. But — and here is the crucial point, the logical link which at their core weds knowledge and values together — this prohibition, this “first commandment” which ensures the foundation of objective knowledge, is not itself objective. It cannot be objective: it is an ethical guideline, a rule for conduct. True knowledge is ignorant of values, but it cannot be grounded elsewhere than upon a value judgment, or rather upon an axiomatic value. It is obvious that the positing of the principle of objectivity as the condition of true knowledge constitutes an ethical choice and not a judgment arrived at from knowledge, since, according to the postulate’s own terms, there cannot have been any “true” knowledge prior to this arbitral choice. In order to establish the norm for knowledge the objectivity principle defines a value: that value is objective knowledge itself. Thus, assenting to the principle of objectivity one announces one’s adherence to the basic statement of an ethical system, one asserts the ethic of knowledge.

By the very loftiness of its ambition the ethic of knowledge might perhaps satisfy this urge in man to project toward something higher. It sets forth a transcendent value, true knowledge, and invites him not to use it self-servingly but henceforth to enter into its service from deliberate and conscious choice. At the same time it is also a humanism, for in man it respects the creator and repository of that transcendence.

The ethic of knowledge is also in a sense “knowledge of ethics,” a clear-sighted appreciation of the urges and passions, the requirements and limitations of the biological being. It is able to confront the animal in man, to view him not as absurd but strange, precious in his very strangeness: the creature who, belonging simultaneously to the animal kingdom and the kingdom of ideas, is simultaneously torn and enriched by this agonizing duality, alike expressed in art and poetry and in human love.

Conversely, the animist systems have to one degree or another preferred to ignore, to denigrate or bully biological man, and to instill in him an abhorrence or terror of certain traits inherent in his animal nature. The ethic of knowledge, on the other hand, encourages him to honor and assume this heritage, knowing the while how to dominate it when necessary. As for the highest human qualities, courage, altruism, generosity, creative ambition, the ethic of knowledge both recognizes their sociobiological origin and affirms their transcendent value in the service of the ideal it defines.
(Chance and Necessity, pp.173-9)

Monod took the title of his work from a statement by Democritus that he imagined or misremembered (an example of the Cogito Model for human creativity). He opens his book with this quotation,

Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity. Democritus

Unfortunately, Democritus made no such statement. As the founder of determinism, he and his mentor Leucippus were adamantly opposed to chance or randomness. Leucippus insisted on an absolute necessity which leaves no room in the cosmos for chance.

“Nothing occurs at random (maten), but everything for a reason (logos) and by necessity.”οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτηῳ γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης

Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. 150-210), the most famous commentator on Aristotle, wrote 500 years after Aristotle’s death, at a time when Aristotle and Plato were rather forgotten minor philosophers in the age of Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. He defended a view of moral responsibility we would call libertarianism today.

Greek philosophy had no precise term for “free will” as did Latin (liberum arbitrium or libera voluntas). The discussion was in terms of responsibility, what “depends on us” (in Greek ἐφ ἡμῖν). Alexander believed that Aristotle was not a strict determinist like the Stoics, and Alexander himself argued that some events do not have predetermined causes.

In particular, he held that man is responsible for self-caused decisions, and can choose to do or not to do something. This appears to be not very different from the Stoic Chrysippus‘ idea that one can assent or dissent to an action. Chrysippus said actions are pre-determined (fated) but not necessitated.

Alexander denied three things - necessity (ἀνάγκη), the foreknowledge of fated events that was part of the Stoic identification of God and Nature, and determinism in the sense of a sequence of causes that was laid down beforehand (προκαταβεβλημένος) or predetermined by antecedents (προηγουμένος).

Alexander says that the Stoic assent (συγκατάθεσις) requires a choice after deliberating (βουλεύεσθαι) among alternative possibilities. (De Fato, XIV, 184.13)

If Stoic pre-determinism is true and there was but a single choice, men would deliberate “for no reason” (μάτην). (De Fato, XI-XII)

Chrysippus calls assent a choice (προαίρεσισ). Perhaps inconsistently with his Stoic doctrine of fate, Chrysippus thinks alternatives are possible in some sense.

Alexander says that what gives man the power of a rational assent is the existence of new beginnings. He goes to the extreme of making this the essence of humanity (sounding very Hegelian),

To be rational (λογικῷ) is nothing other than to be the origin (ἀρχή) of one’s actions.
(De Fato, XIV, 184.15)For man is the origin (ἀρχή) and cause (αίτια) of actions that happen through him (δι’ αὐτοῦ)
(De Fato, XV, 185.11)

Alexander says that these origins allow agents to do otherwise in the same circumstances (τῶν αὐτῶν περιεστώτων) at another time (ἄλλοτε). (De Fato, XV, 185.8)

Doing otherwise requires the existence of real alternative possibilities. Unfortunately, Alexander does not see that the role of chance is merely to generate these possibilities, creating new causal chains which can be evaluated for the best choice of action.

(R. W. Sharples translation)

[The Stoics] say that this universe, which is one and contains in itself all that exists, and is organised by a Nature which is alive, rational and intelligent, possesses the organisation of the things that are, which is eternal and progresses according to a certain sequence and order; the things which come to be first are causes for those after them, and in this way all things are bound together with one another. Nothing comes to be in the universe in such a way that there is not something else which follows it with no alternative and is attached to it as to a cause; nor, on the other hand, can any of the things which come to be subsequently be disconnected from the things which have come to be previously, so as not to follow some one of them as if bound to it. But everything which has come to be is followed by something else which of necessity depends on it as a cause, and everything which comes to be has something preceding it to which it is connected as a cause. For nothing either is or comes to be in the universe without a cause, because there is nothing of the things in it that is separated and disconnected from all the things that have preceded.

a single uncaused event would make the universe collapse

For the universe would be torn apart and divided and not remain single for ever, organised according to a single order and organisation, if any causeless motion were introduced; and it would be introduced, if all the things that are and come to be did not have causes* which have come to be beforehand [and] which they follow of necessity. And they say that for something to come to be without a cause is similar to, and as impossible as, the coming to be of something from what is not. The organisation of the whole, which is like this, goes on from infinity to infinity evidently and unceasingly.
(De Fato, XXII, 191.32-192.18)

the famous “causal chain”

…all the things that are become causes of some of the things after them, and that in this way things are connected to one another by the later being attached to the earlier in the manner of a chain (ἄλυσις), this being what they propose as the essence as if it were of fate.
(De Fato, XXII, 193.5-193.8)

The present truth value of statements about the future was an important argument that occupied Aristotle (the “sea-battle” of de Int. IX), Epicurus, and the Stoics. It was thought by many to demonstrate the necessity of fate. But it is dismissed as mere words by some commentators, Carneades, for example. Alexander says those who make this argument are childish or joking, and do not know what they are talking about.

[The Stoics make] the argument that the proposition ‘there will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ can be true but not also necessary; for what is necessary is what is always true, but this [proposition] no longer remains true when the sea-battle comes to be; but if this is not necessary, neither is what is signified by it of necessity, [namely] that there will be a sea-battle. But if there will be a sea-battle, but not of necessity (since it is true that there will be a sea-battle, but not [true that there will be a sea-battle] of necessity), clearly [there will be a sea-battle] contingently; and if contingently, the coming-to-be of some things contingently is not done away with by the coming-to-be of all things in accordance with fate.But this [is an argument] of those who both jest and do not know what they are talking about. For neither is everything that comes to be of necessity necessary, if what is necessary is the eternal, but what comes to be of necessity has been prevented from being like this by its very coming-to-be; nor is the proposition that asserts this [sc. what comes to be of necessity] necessary, if what is signified by it is not of this sort [sc. necessary]. (For we do not describe every proposition, in which what is necessary is contained, as ipso facto] necessary; for it is not in this way that it is judged that a proposition is necessary, but by its not being able to change from being true to being false.)

If then [the proposition that asserts what comes to be of necessity] is not necessary, it has not at all been prevented from being true, just as ‘there will be a sea-battle tomorrow’. For, [even] if [when] stated as [something] necessary it is not true because of the addition of the necessary, if it does not become necessary by the addition of ‘of necessity’ it will still be true in the same way as [the proposition] uttered without this addition. But if this is true, when the next day arrives the proposition that ‘a sea-battle came to be of necessity’ will be true; and if of necessity, not contingently.

And indeed, if ‘there will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is true, it will always be the case that a sea-battle came to be in accordance with fate, if indeed all the things that come to be are in accordance with fate. But if in accordance with fate, unalterably, and if unalterably, it cannot not come to be, and it is impossible for that not to come to be which cannot come to be; and how can we say that that for which it is impossible not to come to be can also not come to be, since it is necessary for that to come to be for which it is impossible not to come to be? So all the things that come to be in accordance with fate will be of necessity, according to them, and not also contingently, as they say in jest.
(De Fato, X, 177.7-178.8)

In his 1983 thesis, “Lucretius on the Clinamen and ‘Free Will’,” Fowler criticized the Sedley and Furley limits on the swerve and defended the ancient - but seriously mistaken - claim that Epicurus proposed random swerves as directly causing our actions. This mistaken claim has become common in current interpretations of Epicurus.

[The discussion of the swerve in Book II of De rerum natura] has received brilliant treatment from D. J. Furley in a work which is in many ways a model for the analysis of ancient philosophical texts. Yet it still seems to me that there is more to be said. I want here to try briefly to offer a fresh analysis of the argument of the vital paragraph 251-93, and to situate it within an Epicurean context. Inevitably this will involve criticism of Furley; let me state again at the outset my admiration of his work.

(”Lucretius on the Clinamen and ‘Free Will’”, Συζήτησισ: Studi sull’epicureismo greco e romano offerti a Marcello Gigante, (Naples, 1983), p.330)

(The thesis is reprinted as Appendix A in Lucretius on Atomic Motion, 2002, p.407)

I turn to the overall interpretation. Lucretius is arguing from the existence of voluntas to the existence of the clinamen; nothing comes to be out of nothing, therefore voluntas must have a cause at the atomic level, viz. the clinamen.

This is not an interpretation that would have been acceptable to Epicurus

The most natural interpretation of this is that every act of voluntas is caused by a swerve in the atoms of the animal’s mind. The σημείωσις of L. 2. 125-41 is exactly parallel; the visible motions of the dust-particles are a σημεῖον [ἀπὸ τῶν φαινομένον] (128 significant) for the invisible atomic motions which are their cause. There is a close causal, physical relationship between the macroscopic and the atomic. Furley, however, argued that the relationship between voluntas and the clinamen was very different; not every act of volition was accompanied by a swerve in the soul-atoms, but the clinamen was only an occasional event which broke the chain of causation between the σύστασις of our mind at birth and the ‘engendered’ state (τὸ ἀπογεγεννημένον) which determines our actions.

Epicurus would not want actions that are “up to us” to be randomly caused

Its role in Epicureanism is merely to make a formal break with physical determinism, and it has no real effect on the outcome of particular actions.
(p.338)

For Furley, both of these accounts are essentially ones of stimulus and response; action follows automatically upon perception, and the nature of the action is determined by our constitution, the sort of person we are. In accordance with this, he analyses the passage from De rerum natura Book 4 as follows:

(1) Simulacra meandi must strike our minds, among the innumerable other simulacra which are always abroad in the air (881-885).

(2) The mind must be focussed, as it were, on walking, so that these simulacra form an image while others do not (882-886).

(3) Voluntas fit . . . animus sese ita commovet ut velit ire (883, 886). (4) The mind transmits motion to the limbs, bit by bit (887-891).

Here the occurrence of voluntas is consequent on the focusing of the mind. But that is not what Lucretius says; a more accurate analysis of the paragraph would be:

(1) 881-2. First simulacra strike the mind, as explained previously.

(2) 883-5. Next voluntas occurs; for the mind does not begin any action before the process of ‘prevision’ has taken place. An imago is formed of what the mind anticipates.

(3) 886-90. Therefore, when the animus moves itself in such a
way as to want to go, straight away it transmits its motion to the anima. Then the anima strikes the body . . .

Lucretius is concerned in this passage with how we move when we wish to, not with how we come to wish to move; hence there is no explanation of how voluntas occurs. But there is certainly no evidence for the idea that voluntas is caused by sense perception directly, and hence that there is no room for the occurrence of a clinamen in the soul-atoms. Simulacra are striking our mind all the time, but we do not ’see’ them unless we concentrate on them in an ἐπιβολή τῆσ διανοίας, as Lucretius explains in 4. 802-17. What we concentrate on depends on our voluntas. Once the image is clearly visualized — once we have a φαντασία — then indeed the bodily reactions proceed from that automatically. But voluntas comes before, not after, the production of the image; as K. Kleve remarks, ‘wir können selbst wählen, welche Bilder wir bemerken wollen, d.h. auf welche Bilder wir unsere Aufmerksamkeit (ἐπιβολή) richten wollen’. Furley argues that we cannot situate voluntas at this stage ‘because Lucretius goes to great lengths to give a causal explanation of why the mind focuses on some things rather than others’. The passage
referred to is 4. 962-1036, and in particular 973-83. But Lucretius is clearly there describing an exceptional and involuntary experience which offers an analogy for the phenomenon of dreaming. There is no suggestion that that is what ordinary perception and thought, still less action, are like.

For Furley, Epicurus’ clinamen is only an occasional event which breaks the chain of causation. So voluntas might be an agent-causal will that is “up to us“.

There is therefore no reason to doubt that in 4. 881-90 Lucretius situates voluntas before the act of ἐπιβολή and therefore no reason to see voluntas as causally conditioned by perception. Ample room is left for the clinamen to fill; and indeed what else could fill it?

(p.341)

For Lucretius, voluntas takes place in the mind, the animus, but it is also a purely
physical occurrence. There is no disembodied faculty of the will separate from the physical constitution of the animal.” Voluntas is not, moreover, in Lucretius’ view merely the object of introspection; we can see it occurring in others. It takes place when the mind decides to focus on certain simulacra in an ἐπιβολή τῆσ διανοίας, and is thus situated between sense perception and the formation of a specific φαντασία which leads to action. It is caused by a random swerve in the downward motion of an atom or atoms in the ‘fourth substance’ of the animus, which causes an alteration in the atomic motions which eventually leads to a specific action. What action, if any, a swerve issues in is determined by which atoms swerve and by the constitution of the animus. On any particular occasion, what action the animal will take is unpredictable, but over a series of actions his reactions to the external world will be broadly consistent with the sort of being he is. This theory has usually been greeted with contempt, in ancient and modern times. And its special problems are undoubtedly immense, quite apart from those which face any traditional account of the will as a distinct psychological phenomenon. But it is also a bold imaginative scheme, and an attempt to produce a precise physical account of puzzling psychological problems; it is surely, other considerations apart, a more interesting theory than a mere rehash of Aristotelianism would have been, however philosophically more respectable. It was not the whole of Epicurus’ answer to the problems of human freedom; I have not touched at all on Epicurus’ denial of a truth-value to statements about the future, which was designed to refute logical determinism as the clinamen did physical. The relationship between this move and the introduction of the clinamen is not clear, and requires further study. But I hope I have shown that the theory of the clinamen as presented by Lucretius is a self-consistent, reasoned theory
in itself, firmly embedded in the Epicurean system as a whole and designed to answer real philosophical problems, rather than merely an awkward embarrassment.

(p.351-2)

(Don Fowler, “Lucretius on the Clinamen and ‘Free Will’”, Συζήτησισ: Studi sull’epicureismo greco e romano offerti a Marcello Gigante, (Naples, 1983) 329-52)

Sorabji’s 1980 Necessity, Cause, and Blame surveyed Aristotle’s positions on causation and necessity, comparing them to his predecessors and successors, especially the Stoics and Epicurus. Sorabji argues that Aristotle was an indeterminist, that real chance and uncaused events exist, but never that human actions are uncaused in the extreme libertarian sense that some commentators mistakenly attribute to Epicurus.

Aristotle accepted the past as fixed, in the sense that past events were irrevocable. But future events cannot be necessitated by claims about the present truth value of statements about the future. Aristotle does not deny the excluded middle (either p or not p), only that the truth value of p does not exist yet. Indeed, although the past is fixed, the truth value of past statements about the future can be changed by the outcome of future events.

This book centres on Aristotle’s treatment of determinism and culpability. One of the advantages of studying Aristotle’s treatment of determinism is that we get a sense of what a multiform thesis it is. Arguments from causation are by no means the only ones that have been used to support it, and Aristotle is the grandfather, even if not the father, of many of these arguments. I am not myself convinced by any of the arguments for determinism, nor by the arguments that it would be compatible with moral responsibility. But in order to discuss the question, I shall have to consider some very diverse topics: cause, explanation, time, necessity, essence and purpose in nature.

These are all subjects of intense controversy today, and time and again Aristotle’s discussions are intimately bound up with modern ones. Often, I believe and shall argue, we can benefit from going back to the views of another period, views which are sometimes refreshingly different from our own. I shall try to explain, when necessary, where those differences lie. The discussion will not be confined to Aristotle. I shall try to supply a historical perspective and a sense of continuity, by seeing how the views of his successors and predecessors fit on to his own. But at the same time it will remain a central aim to build up a picture of Aristotle’s own position on determinism and culpability, by tracing it through the many areas of his thought.

By determinism I shall mean the view that whatever happens has all along been necessary, that is, fixed or inevitable. I say ‘whatever happens’, meaning to cover not merely every event, but every aspect of every event — every state of affairs, one might say. I shall make no further attempt to define necessity, although various kinds of necessity will come to be distinguished as we go along. I have deliberately defined determinism by reference, not to causation, but to necessity. I have not defined determinism as a view which denies us moral responsibility. The latter idea, often known as `hard’ determinism is comparatively rare, and was rarer still in antiquity. Many determinists have tried to argue that it is not a consequence of their position. I believe that it is a consequence, but not usually an intended one. I have spoken of things as having ‘all along’ been necessary, because there would be little moral interest in a view which declared that things became necessary at the last moment, or irrevocable once they had happened. Indeed, Aristotle admits the point about irrevocability; what he denies is that everything has been necessary all along.

I shall be representing Aristotle as an indeterminist; but opinions on
this issue have been diverse since the earliest times…

It is not always recognised that Aristotle gave any consideration to causal determinism, that is, to determinism based on causal considerations. But I shall argue that in a little-understood passage he maintains that coincidences 1ack causes. To understand why he thinks so; we must recall his view that a cause is one of four kinds of explanation. On both counts, I think he is right. His account of cause, I believe, is more promising than any of those current today, and also justifies the denial that coincidences have causes.

There is another strut in the causal determinist’s case. Besides the view that everything has a cause, he holds that whatever is caused or explicable is necessitated. If this idea is once accepted, he has a powerful argument, already wielded by the Stoics, against the indeterminist: any action that is not necessitated becomes causeless, inexplicable and hence a thing for which no one can be held responsible. On this issue, regrettably, Aristotle is less firm; he wavers on whether what is caused is necessitated. But insofar as he sometimes implies that it is not, we will be better placed, later in the book, to understand the argument of Nicomachean Ethics III 5. In denying that voluntary actions have been necessary all along, Aristotle need not be implying that something is uncaused.

The best-known arguments in Aristotle on determinism have to do with time rather than cause. In Int. 9, he tries to reply to the deterministic ’sea battle’ argument which is based on considerations of time and truth…I shall distinguish certain further deterministic arguments based on the necessity of the past, or on divine foreknowledge. The only one of these arguments articulated by Aristotle (and opposed by him) is the sea battle argument. But he is a more or less remote ancestor of many of the others, and of some of the answers to them.

I shall have shown by the end of Chapter Eight why I think Aristotle an indeterminist. I do not believe that he came close to the determinism of Diodorus Cronus, or of the author of the sea battle, nor that he treated coincidences as necessary. In a later chapter (Fourteen), I shall further deny that he treated all human action as necessary. But it will be time in Chapter Nine to guard against the ascription to him of too extreme an indeterminism. His occasional denials that natural events can ever occur of necessity seem to be contradicted elsewhere. Certainly, his belief that there is purpose in nature does not require, and is not thought by to require, the denial of causal necessitation. To show why such a denial is not required, I shall have to try to show how Aristotle’s purposive explanations in biology work. It will be argued that they work in several different ways, and that most of these ways leave Aristotle immune to modern criticisms of purposive explanation in biology. Criticism of Aristotle here has been widepread and vitriolic; I hope to show that it is largely mistaken.
(Necessity, Cause, and Blame, pp. ix-xii)

Sorabji claims that he can separate necessity from causality, with implications for causal determinism. In particular, he defends indeterminists against the charge that libertarian decisions are unintelligible.

[If] some of our decisions are not necessitated, it by no means follows that they are uncaused or inexplicable. If this is correct, it should answer the causal determinist’s argument that, if some of our decisions are not necessary in advance, they will be inexplicable and mysterious happenings of which we cannot be held responsible. The answer suggested here is that from our decisions being unnecessitated it would not follow that they were inexplicable, or uncaused.

The above reflections have implications not only for the common charge against the indeterminist - that he renders decisions inexplicable, but also for some of the premises that are typically used for establishing the determinist’s case. For we have been led to doubt the premises that every state of affairs has a cause and that whatever is caused is necessitated.

Even these two premises together would not be enough to yield the determinist’s view that whatever happens is necessary in advance. To obtain that result, he may appeal to the idea of a sequence of causes: each state of affairs has a prior state of affairs as its cause. If this seems implausible, because the dent in a springy cushion is caused by the contemporary presence of a weight, it will suffice if in any causal chain a proportion of the causes are prior. On the other hand, if the determinist allows that a cause is only a part of some necessitating conditions, he will have to be willing to argue that the complete set of necessitating conditions commonly exists in advance of its effect.

(p. 32)

Sorabji considers the suggestions that quantum uncertainty disproves determinism, and he finds that Aristotle described “starting points” (ἄρχαι) for new causal chains that resemble probabilistic quantum events.

The appeal to the totality of laws and of initial conditions brings us closer to the classic formulation of causal determinism by Laplace.

[But], the current state of physics no longer offers the encouragement that was once expected. By an ambitious extrapolation from the successes of Newtonian mechanics in the field of astronomy, Laplace was able to think of science as on the determinist’s side. But the majority” of quantum physicists now maintain that their science actually contradicts determinism. or certain micro-events are not made necessary in advance of their occurrence. Sometimes an attempt is made to admit this conclusion, but reduce its interest, by maintaining that indeterminacy at the level of micro-events will not lead to indeterminacy at the level of the large-scale events that concern us in real life. But against this we have already noticed examples of a small-scale indeterminacy being amplified into a large-scale indeterminacy through radio-active material being connected to a bomb or a living organ.
(pp. 35-6)

None of this is intended to rule out the causal determinst’s view as possible. I do not know how to do that. But it is meant to place an onus on him to argue for his case, if he wants it to seem at all plausible. I cannot say that I think of it at the moment as having any plausibility.
And I should certainly hope that it was false. For I believe it is determinism that rules out moral responsibility and other things we believe in. I believe it is a necessary, though a sufficient, condition of our being morally responsible agents that actions should not all along have been necessary. I do not think the indeterminacies of quantum physics help in any direct way to preserve moral responsibility. What is important is that, in the different sphere of
human conduct, there should be actions which are explicable without being necessitated.
(pp. 37)

Finally, although he thinks Aristotle was not aware of the “problem” of free will vis-a-vis determinism (as first described by Epicurus), Sorabji thinks Aristotle’s position on the question is clear enough. Voluntariness is too important to fall before theoretical arguments about necessity and determinism.

I come now to the question of how determinism is related to involuntariness. Many commentators nowadays hold one or more parts of the following view. Determinism creates a problem for belief in the voluntariness of actions. Regrettably, but inevitably, Aristotle was unaware of this problem, and so failed to cope with it. Indeed, the problem was not discovered until Hellenistic times, perhaps by Epicurus, who was over forty years junior to Aristotle, and who reached Athens just too late to hear his lectures. In Aristotle’s time no one had yet propounded a universal determinism, so that he knew of no such theory. His inevitable failure to see the threat to voluntariness is all the more regrettable in that he himself entertained a deterministic account of actions, which exacerbated the problem of how any could be voluntary. I shall argue that this account misrepresents the situation.

First, Aristotle is aware of the idea that everything is determined, whether causally or non-causally. He considers a non-causal determinism in Int. 9, and a causal determinism not only in Metaph. VI 3, but also in Phys. II 4, where he remarks that some people had denied that there was such a thing as chance, on the grounds that a cause could always be found for everything (195b36 — 196a11). Admittedly, he takes the falsity of determinism as fairly obvious in Metaph. VI 3, and feels little need to discuss it in NE III, or in GC II 11. Indeed, in the last passage he asks whether all coming to be is necessary, but whether any is. None the less, he does sometimes produce arguments against determinism (Int. 9, 18b26 — 19a22; Phys. II 5, 196b14; GC II 11, 337b3-7). And he also thinks that in the light of its falsity, he needs to do some explaining, and to show how there can be events without a cause (accidental conjunctions, Metaph. VI 3), or how some predictions can avoid being already true
(Int. 9, 19a22—b4, on the traditional interpretation).

What Aristotle failed to discuss was not determinism, but something that William James was later to call ‘hard’ determinism,’ the view not only is determinism true, but that also, because of it, there is no thing as moral responsibility or voluntary action. The commentators mentioned above are right insofar as they only want to say this. But what is debatable is whether we should see Aristotle’s silence about `hard’ determinism as simply a failure to see a problem, and how far the subsequent Hellenistic period differed from Aristotle in their readiness to discuss ‘hard’ determinism. Determinists in antiquity did not make it a triumphant conclusion that all actions are involuntary. Rather, they would have thought it an objection to their view, if they had to banish voluntariness. There is a whole battery of arguments, which turn up in treatise after treatise, urging against determinism, that it would do away with many of our conceptions about conduct and morality. In the De Fato of Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. A.D. 200), where many of these arguments are used, it becomes clear that the Stoics, against whom they were directed, replied not by conceding the point, but by urging that fate did not exclude the standard moral concepts (chs 13-14, 33, 35-8 Occasionally, they seem to have gone over to the offensive, and argued like certain modern philosophers,5 that the standard moral concepts actually presuppose determinism. But… they felt little attraction towards ‘hard’ determinism, even if their founder Zeno (fl c. 300 B. C.) deployed an argument in an ad hominem way which is used also by hard determinists, that our moral practices are inevitable, whether justifiable, or not (Diogenes Laertius 7 1 23). Most ancients would have said, and so would Aristotle, that, if there is a genuine incompatibility between determinism and voluntariness, this is so much the worse for determinism, not for voluntariness; and even in modern times, ‘hard’ determinism is much rarer than ’soft’.

Aristotle himself, so far from failing to observe any incompatibility between determinism and our ordinary ways of thinking about conduct, actually tended to see such incompatibilities too readily. Moreover, so far from his successors starting a new tradition, they are often simply echoing Aristotle’s own comments, when they argue that there is an incompatibility, and that it counts against determinism. We have seen that Aristotle thinks voluntariness incompatible with an action’s having all along been necessary, and further that he goes so far as to argue (wrongly) against determinism that it is incompatible with the efficacy of effort or deliberation (Int. 9, 18b31-3, 19a7-8). This latter was echoed in one of the famous named arguments of antiquity, the Lazy Argument, according to which belief in determinism would make us lazy. A related argument, which we have already noticed, appears in NE II 5 (1113b21-30), where Aristotle claims (again wrongly) that since punishment and honours influence conduct, good and bad conduct must be up to us. Aristotle may here have been ignoring, rather than answering, the idea that wicked conduct is determined, and may have been concentrating instead on the point that our conduct is in some way dependent on us. But his successors used arguments like this one in order to attack determinism, and he too might have been willing to use the argument against a determinist, if he had felt himself to be confronted by one. Aristotle often repeats that we do not deliberate about what is necessary (NE III 3, 1112a21-6; VI 1, 1139a13; VI 2, 113967-9; VI 5, 1140a 31—b1; VI 7, 1141b10-11; III 3, 1112a30-1 with III 5, 1113b7-8; EE II 10, 1226a20-30; Rhet. I 2, 1357a8), and only once comes at all close to adding the desirable qualification ‘unless we do not realise that such and such a course is necessary’. If determinism is incompatible with deliberation, it will also be incompatible with praxis, the distinctively human kind of action, and with moral virtue, both of which presuppose deliberation. Similar views on the relation of deliberation to determinism reappeared among Aristotle’s ancient and modern successors. And they also turned against determinism the comment, which Aristotle makes in another context, that we cannot bestow praise and blame for what happens of necessity (NE III 5, 1114a23-9; EE II 6, 1223a10; II 11 1228a5), although we can bestow honour, e.g. on the gods (NE 1101b10 — 1102a4).

Those who think that determinism endangers voluntariness have every right to disagree with Aristotle’s view that our ways of thinking about conduct endanger determinism. But they should recognise it as an alternative view. It misrepresents the situation to suggest that Aristotle was merely not yet in a position to appreciate the problem; he would not have agreed that the problem was one for believers in voluntariness. And the succeeding age would have supported him.
(pp. 243-6)

In their great 1987 work The Hellenistic Philosophers (dedicated to David Furley), Long and Sedley discussed Epicurus and the free will problem at length, with references to the principal original Greek and Latin sources. (Long and Sedley did for the Hellenistic philosophers what Diels Kranz did for the Pre-Socratics. Letter references below are to the fragments in Long and Sedley volume 2. Number references are to sections of volume 1.)

Long and Sedley speculate that the randomness in the laws of quantum physics leave open alternative possibilities for the mind to choose from.

Epicurus’ problem is this: if it has been necessary all along that we should act as we do, it cannot be up to us, with the result that we would not be morally responsible for our actions at all (especially A, E 3, F 1, G). Thus posing the problem of determinism he becomes arguably the first philosopher to recognize the philosophical centrality of what we know as the Free Will Question. His strongly libertarian approach to it can be usefully contrasted with the Stoics’ acceptance of determinism (see 62). Epicurus certainly saw the Democritean atomism which he had inherited as vulnerable to such a challenge, since it made all phenomena, including human behaviour, fully accountable in terms of rigid physical laws of atomic motion, and hence necessary: see A 2, C 13-14, E 3, G. It is perhaps the most widely known fact about Epicurus that he for this reason modified the deterministic Democritean system by introducing a slight element ofindeterminacy to atomic motion, the ’swerve’ (on which see also 11H with commentary): E 2-3, F, G. But taken in isolation such a solution is notoriously unsatisfactory. It promises to liberate us from rigid necessity only to substitute an alternative human mechanism, perhaps more undependable and eccentric but hardly more autonomous. Epicurus’ remarks in A 1, where ‘that which depends on us’ (or `that which is up to us’) is contrasted with unstable fortune as well as with necessity, suggest that he meant to avoid this trap. In order to see how, we must defer discussion of the swerve for now..

The swerve is not even mentioned in the surviving papyrus fragments [B,C] of Epicurus’ book on the issue of responsibility from which B and C are drawn But the book still sheds abundant light on the question. In C he conducts a running debate with a Democritean determinist. Democritus himself, we are told, simply failed to see the implications of his determinism for human action (C 13-14). Epicurus’ principal target in C 2-12, on the other hand, is someone who consciously applies mechanistic determinism to all human behaviour, including his own. He probably has in mind such fourth-century Democriteans as his own reviled teacher Nausiphanes — the heirs of Democritus derided C 13, as perhaps also implicitly in G. (The early Stoics have sometimes been identified as his target, but cf. 62 with commentary; ‘natural philosophers’, A 2. would not normally be used of Stoics, in any case.)

In C 1 Epicurus is arguing that since we start with a wide range of potentials (’seeds’) for character development our actual direction of development is not physically predetermined but ‘up to us‘. There are physical influences, but we can control them (cf. 15D 7-8). If it were they that controlled us, our moral and critical attitudes to each other would make no sense (C 2). This leads him into his anti-determinist digression, which continues until its express conclusion at C 15. The determinist may simply regard these attitudes as themselves necessitated (C 3). But this does not save him from the charge of self-refutation (C 5, and perhaps already in the very fragmentary C 4): his own critical attitude in this very debate still implies what he wishes to deny, that the parties to the debate are responsible for their own views. The determinist will resort to the defence that he is compelled to behave in this way; when challenged once again for continuing to argue, will repeat the defence; and so on ad infinitum. Epicurus’ objection to this infinite regress (C 6) is not that it is in itself vicious, but rather that it leaves the inconsistency untouched: at every stage of the regress the determinist’s behaviour in continuing to argue his case as if with a responsible agent contradicts his thesis that everything, including our beliefs, is mechanically necessitated.

In the second stage of the digression, C 8-12, Epicurus suggests that determinism cannot amount to a substantive thesis about the world, and that its application of ‘necessity’ to human agency will turn out to be no more than a change of terminology. First (C comes an appeal to ‘preconception’ (on which as a criterion, see 17 above). We all share a preconception of our own agency as that which is responsible for our behaviour: to defuse the evidential force of this, the determinist would have to show how the alleged preconception has come to embody a faulty ‘delineation’ (cf. 17E 2, 5) of the facts. (Compare Epicurus’ own grounds for dismissing the alleged preconception of the gods as provident, 23B—C below.) If he cannot, the preconception remains valid and the determinist’s contribution is merely a new name for it. Second (C 9), his thesis is pragmatically empty. Since he denies us an internal source of self-determination (an ‘auxiliary element or impulse in us’) he can never expect his arguments to dissuade us from any action. In this Epicurus contrasts him with someone who has a proper grasp (as recommended in A 1) of the difference between the necessitated and the unnecessitated, and who consequently can expect to dissuade us from actions which would involve resisting necessity (C to) perhaps, for example, dissuade us from a vain desire to evade the inevitability of death, because unlike the determinist he can appreciate that while death is necessary our wishes are up to us. Third (C II), the determinist leaves himself no tools for analysing ‘mixed’ actions (as they are called by Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics in. I), those performed freely but reluctantly in avoidance of a greater evil, since he is unable to distinguish the voluntary from the necessitated elements in them.

The final stage of the argument, C 13-14, is pragmatic, appealing to the disastrous practical consequences that would have ensued had Democritus remembered to apply his thesis of universal necessitation to himself. No illustration is given, but one easy example would be the abandonment of decision-making (cf. 55S). It is remarkable how closely the internal structure of this anti-determinist argument matches that of 16A’s anti-sceptic argument, with the sequence of a self-refutation challenge (C 3-7; cf. 16A 1), an appeal to preconception and word-meaning (C 8-12; cf. 16A 2-3), and a pragmatic argument (C 13-14; cf. 16A 9-10). So too its function as a digression added late in the book to justify the preceding positive account of psychological causation matches the role of 16A in relation to Lucretius’ preceding positive account of sense-perception. None of this is likely to be mere coincidence. For scepticism and the kind of mechanistic determinism envisaged here were seen as joint consequences of Democritus’ reductionist atomism. If phenomenal properties were reducible to mere configurations of atoms and void, it seemed to follow that the atoms and void alone were real while the sensible properties were arbitrary constructions placed upon them by our cognitive organs. The result was scepticism about the sensible world, which had become the characteristic stance of most fourth-century Democriteans (see further, 1 and 16). Similarly, if the ’self’ and its volitions were reducible to mere sequences of atomic motion in the soul, human action would easily appear to be mechanistic, fully explicable in terms of primary physical laws, with no additional explanatory or descriptive role left for such psychological entities as belief and volition. And that is just the kind of theory under attack in C (cf. especially C 2, 9).

Given the extent of this parallelism between scepticism and determinism, and between Epicurus’ respective refutations of them, we might expect his own positive alternatives to them to be similarly comparable. And so they are.

Epicurus’s reaction to skepticism is similar toDavid Hume’s “naturalism” or “realism.”

Just as his answer to scepticism is to affirm the reality of phenomenal properties and the truth of sense-impressions of them (see on 7 and 16), so too his answer to mechanism is to affirm the reality and causal efficacy of the self and its volitions as something over and above the underlying patterns of atomic motion. This plainly emerges from B, despite the lack of context and certain difficulties of interpretation. Epicurus is speaking of self-determining animals. (Volitional autonomy is not restricted to human beings, cf. F 1-2; but elsewhere in the book, j in vol. 2, wild animals seem to be excluded, as lacking self-determination and hence as exempt from moral criticism, though not from hate.) Their misbehaviour is quite explicitly said (B 1-4) to be attributable not to their atoms but to their selves and their ‘developments’. The latter term, which is crucial to the entire book’s discussion, is explicated at B 5. The kind of ‘development’ which contributes psychological autonomy is one which is distinct from the underlying atoms in a ‘differential’ way (’transcendent’ would be a tempting translation of the Greek word) — a way more radical than ‘the way which is like viewing from a different distance’. The point is apparently that all bodies have certain properties, e.g. colour, over and above their constituent atoms, but that there the main difference is one of scale, one between macroscopic and microscopic analysis; whereas the ‘developments’ which supply autonomy differ from the atoms in a much more fundamental way. The fragmentary state of the text leaves us to guess at the nature of this difference, although it is hard to doubt that it includes the intentional properties associated with consciousness. How do these psychological entities relate metaphysically and causally to the mind’s atoms? They can only be, technically speaking, ‘accidental attributes’ of those atoms (cf. 7). But they are not mere epiphenomena, supervenient on atomic motions and causally determined by them. For Epicurus is quite explicit in attributing to them a causal efficacy distinct from that of the atoms. Hence, although atomic make-up may be responsible for disorderly motions of the mind-atoms (B 4), it does not follow that we cannot make decisions which override those motions, and according to B 6 psychological causation actually operates on our component atoms. This throws immediate light on Lucretius’ insistence at 14D 5 that although atomic composition of the soul determines our natural temperament, we can learn through reason to overcome that temperament. Perhaps, for instance, a natural coward can learn courage through rational reflection. His disorderly motions of soul atoms may then be stabilized, so that he ceases to suffer even the physical sensations of fear.By now the familiar ‘materialist’ label is beginning to fit Epicurus less neatly. Although he holds prima facie an Identity Theory of mind (see 14), he does not regard mental states as capable of straightforward physical analysis, for although properties of the corporeal mind they are not mere physical states of it. We have here, then, an interactionist dualism of the mental and the physical. But there is no hint of Cartesian dualism. A better comparison would be with the modern notion of Emergence. In Epicurus’ view, matter in certain complex states can take on non-physical properties, which in turn bring entirely new causal laws into operation.

B 7 emphasizes that the distinction between physical and psychological causation is crucial to an understanding of responsibility. And certainly it does constitute at least the beginning of an answer to determinism. The ’self’ which is responsible for our actions is, Epicurus will say, more than a mere bundle of atoms, and therefore is not reducible to a link in a physical causal chain. Indeed Carneades, in defending Epicurean libertarianism for his own dialectical purposes (see 70G and commentary), suggested that this was already a sufficient answer to determinism: E 4-7. But how, it will be asked, can this emergent property of the corporeal mind so effectively take control of the soul, and through it of the body, as to move their atoms in ways in which according to the laws of physics alone they should not have moved? If the laws of physics are sufficient to determine the precise trajectory of every atom in us, how can the self be anything more than a helpless spectator of the body’s actions?

Here at last a significant role for the swerve leaps to the eye. For it is to answer just this question, according to Cicero at E 3, that the swerve was introduced. The evident power of the self and its volitions to intervene in the physical processes of soul and body would be inexplicable if physical laws alone were sufficient to determine the precise trajectory of every atom. Therefore physical laws are not sufficient to determine the precise trajectory of every atom. There is a minimal degree of physical indeterminism — the swerve. An unimpeded atom may at any given moment continue its present trajectory, but equally may `swerve’ into one of the adjacent parallel trajectories (see commentary on 11H).

As far as physics is concerned there is simply no reason for its following one rather than another of these trajectories. Normally, then, the result will be, in this minimal degree, random. But in the special case of the mind there is also a non-physical cause, volition, which can affect the atoms of which it is a property.

Long and Sedley here arrive at our Cogito model, speculating that randomness provides thealternative possibilitiesfrom which anadequately determined volition can choose

It does so, we may speculate, not by overriding the laws of physics, but by choosing between the alternative possibilities which the laws of physics leave open. In this way a large group of soul atoms might simultaneously be diverted into a new pattern of motion, and thus radically redirect the motion of the body. Such an event, requiring as it does the coincidence of numerous swerves, would be statistically most improbable according to the laws of physics alone. But it is still, on the swerve theory, an intrinsically possible one, which volition might therefore be held to bring about. For a very similar thesis relating free will to modern quantum indeterminism, see A. S. Eddington, The nature of the physical world (1928). (It may be objected that swerves are meant to be entirely uncaused; but, as E 2 shows, that was only an inference by Epicurus’ critics, made plausible by concentrating on the swerve’s cosmogonic function, cf. 11H, for there it must indeed occur at random and without the intervention of volition.)

Sedley here assumes a non-physical (metaphysical) ability of the volition to affect the atoms, which is implausible. But the idea that the volition chooses (consistent with and adequately determined by its character and values and its desires and feelings - from among alternative possibilities provided randomly by the atoms - is quite plausible.

Lucretius’ evidence in F does not explicitly state the swerve’s relation to volition, although numerous attempts have been made to discover it there. But if the above account of Epicurus’ theory is justified by the other testimonia, it becomes clear that F is, at least, fully consistent with it. For the dominant theme of F 1-3 is precisely the evident power of volition to redirect the bodily mass in defiance of its purely mechanical patterns of motion. This is said, in F 1 and 4, to be explicable only if there is an undetermined swerve of atoms, since if impact and weight were the only causes of atomic motion the mind’s behaviour would be rigidly mechanistic. Some have also seen in F 1 the further implication that the initiation of every new course of action directly involves the swerve. All this fits the above account comfortably enough. What is missing, of course, is an explanation of the non-physical character of psychological causation — not surprisingly, given that Lucretius’ poem is about physics and that his sole object in the context is to complete his account of the laws of atomic motion (cf. 11).One further dimension to the debate emerges from E 1, H and I. Epicurus saw the threat of universal necessitation not only in unbreakable chains of physical causation, but also in the logical principle of bivalence according to which every proposition is either true or false, including those about the future. His solution of denying the principle as far as certain future-tensed propositions are concerned (the denial is slightly garbled in I’s version, where ‘one or the other is necessary’ ought to read ‘one or the other is true’; but the example is clearly authentic — Hermarchus was Epicurus’ pupil and successor) was essentially that of Aristotle, according to the traditional reading of his celebrated Sea Battle discussion at De interpretatione 9. But Epicurus, like the Stoic with whom he is contrasted in E I (see further, 38G), saw physical and logical determinism as two aspects of a single thesis. The two formulations of determinism tend to be treated as interchangeable, as do the two respective solutions, the swerve and the denial of bivalence (cf. Cicero, On fate 18-19, and perhaps E 1-3). This conflation seems to rest on the assumed equivalence of ‘true in advance’ with ‘determined by pre-existing causes’; cf. also the telling comment at the end of I.

The interpretation of the swerve theory adopted above may help explain how it could be thought interchangeable with the denial of bivalance. Neither doctrine is involved in analysing the nature of volition itself (as many have thought the swerve to be). Their shared function is to guarantee the efficacy of volition, by keeping alternative possibilities genuinely open.
(Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, section 20, “Free Will,” pp.107-112)

In his 1967 Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, David Furley examined the ideas of Carlo Giussani (Studi lucreziani, 1896) and Cyril Bailey (The Greek Atomists and Lucretius, 1928). Furley de-emphasized the importance of the swerve in both Epicurus and Lucretius so as to defend Epicurus from the “extreme” libertarian view that our actions are caused directly by random swerves. (Bailey had also denied this “traditional interpretation.”)

Furley argues for a strong connection between the ideas of Aristotle and Epicurus on autonomous actions that are “up to us.” Both Aristotle and Epicurus had identified three basic kinds of causes, necessity (άνάyκη), chance (τυχῆ), and agent causes (ἐφ’ ἡμῖν or παρ’ ῆμᾶς).

If we now put together the introduction to Lucretius’ passage on voluntas and Aristotle’s theory of the voluntary, we can see how the swerve of atoms was supposed to do its work. Aristotle’s criterion of the voluntary was a negative one: the source of the voluntary action is in the agent himself, in the sense that it cannot be traced back beyond or outside the agent himself. Lucretius says that voluntas must be saved from a succession of causes which can be traced back to infinity. All he needs to satisfy the Aristotelian criterion is a break in the succession of causes, so that the source of an action cannot be traced back to something occurring before the birth of the agent. A single swerve of a single atom in the individual’s psyche would be enough for this purpose, if all actions are to be referred to the whole of the psyche.

Multiple random events can average out to produce anadequate determinism

But there is no evidence about the number of swerves. One would be enough, and there must not be so many that the psyche exhibits no order at all; between these limits any number would satisfy the requirements of the theory.The swerve, then, plays a purely negative part in Epicurean psychology. It saves voluntas from necessity, as Lucretius says it does, but it does not feature in every act of voluntas. There is no need to scrutinize the psychology of a voluntary action to find an uncaused or spontaneous element in it. The peculiar vulnerability of Epicurean freedom — that it seemed to fit random actions, rather than deliberate and purposive ones — is a myth, if this explanation is correct.

We can now understand why the swerve gets no mention in Lucretius’ account of voluntary action. It gets no mention because it plays no direct part in it. The theory of the swerve asserts merely that our actions are not caused conjointly by the environment and our parentage. There was no need for Lucretius to mention this in his account of the psychology of action, any more than there was for Aristotle to insist on his negative criterion of the voluntary in De Motu Animalium.

It may be objected that a swerve in the psyche must have been supposed to produce some observable effect. But not even this is true. We have already glanced at Lucretius’ doctrine that the mind has before it innumerable simulacrawhich never reach the level of consciousness, because the time interval during which they are present is imperceptibly small. But if the impact of those complicated atomic configurations which constitute simulacra could have no observable effect, it is a safe inference that the minute swerve of a single atom would be undetectable. So we can, after all, make use of the Epicurean concept of the concilium in our explanation. I argued previously against Bailey’s use of it in saying that “what in the individual atom is a matter of chance, in the conscious complex of the animus is ‘conscious chance.’” It is impossible to see how the random motion of an individual atom can by itself account for the end-directed motions of the complex of which it is a part. It is perfectly reasonable, however, that the random motion of a single atom should be concealed by the fact that it is just one element in a complex.

The Epicurean psychology of action, if I am right, was in outline as follows.

Each person is born with a psyche of a particular character, determined by the proportions of atoms of the four different kinds which constitute a psyche. From the beginning of life, reactions occur between the psyche and the external world, through the medium of atomic eidola which flow from all objects and may reach the psyche through the sense organs and the mind. From the beginning, the child experiences feelings of pleasure and pain; in atomic terms, pain is a disturbance of the motions of the psyche atoms caused by a lack of something, and pleasure is either the restoration of the undisturbed motions which constitute tranquillity, or else the state of tranquillity itself. The child learns to associate external objects with one or other of these feelings. A feeling of something lacking constitutes a motive to make good the lack, and so creates an impulse towards an object in the external world which the child has learned will supply the deficiency.

A person’s feelings, and therefore his motives and his behavior, are to some extent determined by his genetic inheritance of a psyche of such and such a constitution.

Swerves allow psychological character development (cf.Robert Kane’s “self-forming actions”)

But the motions of the psyche (and it is in its motions that all its character and action consists) are not determined ab initio, because a discontinuity is brought about by the atomic swerve. The swerve of an atom or atoms in thepsyche means that the inherited motions are disturbed, and this allows new patterns of motion to be established which cannot be explained by the initial constitution of the psyche.There is both continuity and discontinuity. The character of the person is to some extent still determined by the initial constitution of his psyche, because the proportions of atoms of different types in it remain the same. But to a much greater extent his character is adaptable, because the motions of the atoms are not determined and can be changed by learning.

A person learns by experience. He learns what desires must be satisfied, and what objects satisfy them, simply by constant repetition of the experience of desire and satisfaction. He can learn by individual trial and error, or by precept and example from others. If he is indoctrinated in the Epicurean philosophy, he learns to distinguish desires which arise from nature and must be satisfied from those which arise from nature but need not be satisfied and from those which do not arise from nature and are best eliminated. He learns that the limit of pleasure is the absence of pain, and so ceases to feel pain through desire for some extra pleasure. His feelings become disciplined, so that an improper object—one that brings more pain than pleasure in the long run—no longer arouses desire in him. He learns not so much to reject some of the things he desires as to cease to desire the things he ought to reject.

The wise Epicurean is not to be pictured as asserting himself by repeated “acts of volition” against the temptations of the world, but as having learned not to be tempted. His “freedom” does not consist in being presented with possible alternatives, and in choosing one when he might have chosen the other. It consists rather in the fact that his psyche is the product of his own actions and is not unalterably shaped by some “destiny” from the time before his birth.

The weakness of this theory of “freedom,” both in its Epicurean and in its Aristotelian form, is to be found chiefly in its refusal to consider the processes of character formation. When Aristotle says that children should be brought up from the beginning to feel pleasure and pain in the right objects, he obviously does not consider such education to be equivalent to compulsion. He stresses that educators and lawgivers use punishments and other incentives to make people behave in the right way, and at the same time insists that the acts which create virtuous dispositions are not to be referred to causes outside ourselves.” It is curious that he does not see this as a problem, since it was clearly raised by Gorgias in his Praise of Helen, almost a century before, when he offered as one of his excuses for Helen’s behavior the possibility that she was persuaded by argument. It might well have arisen, too, from a consideration of Democritus’ ethical opinions. Part of the explanation is probably that persuasion was commonly seen as an antithesis to compulsion? But Aristotle should have seen the need to reestablish this antithesis, since he had to some extent broken it down himself in talking of a class of actions which were a mixture of the voluntary and the involuntary.

If Aristotle had seriously examined the reasons why he took the results of education to be “in our own power,” he would have been compelled to specify more exactly what he meant by saying “the source is in us.” He might then have been led to say that the criterion of morality (that is to say, the criterion that determines whether an action is liable to moral appraisal or not) is to be found precisely in our ability to be influenced by persuasion as opposed to force. If he had stressed this, then I think Epicurus might after all have thought the swerve unnecessary (unnecessary, that is to say, in his psychology; it was still needed in his cosmology). For in his theory, the effects of persuasion would be similarly explained whether the swerve were there or not. Persuasion is by words, and words, in the crude atomism of the time, do their work by collisions, through the medium of the sense organs. The swerve is not needed for them to have this effect.

In his conclusion, Furley seems comfortable with modern compatibilism

I leave it to others to decide whether the Epicurean theory, without the swerve, would have been “determinist” as opposed to “libertarian,” because I do not yet see how to define this particular antithesis. But if it would be determinist, I think it would be a sort of determinism that is compatible with morality.
(Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, pp.232-236)

For more, see Free Will in Antiquity.

Cyril Bailey’s 1928 study of The Greek Atomists and Epicurus is a landmark in the history of Free Will in Antiquity. Bailey agreed with Carlo Giussani’s 1896 thesis in his Studi lucreziani (p.126) that the atoms of the mind-soul provide a break in the continuity of atomic motions, otherwise actions would be necessitated.

But Bailey imagined complexes of mind-atoms that work together to form a consciousness that is not determined, but also not susceptible to the pure randomness of individual atomic swerves, something that could constitute Epicurus’ idea of actions being “up to us” (πὰρ’ ἡμάς).

It is a commonplace to state that Epicurus, like his follower Lucretius, intended primarily to combat the ‘myths’ of the orthodox religion, to show by his demonstration of the unfailing laws of nature the falseness of the old notions of the arbitrary action of the gods and so to relieve humanity from the terrors of superstition. But it is sometimes forgotten that Epicurus viewed with almost greater horror the conception of irresistible ‘destiny’ or ‘necessity’, which is the logical outcome of the notion of natural law pressed to its conclusion. This conclusion had been accepted in its fulness by Democritus, but Epicurus conspicuously broke away from him: ‘it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the “destiny” of the natural philosophers: for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation’. Diogenes of Oenoanda brings out the close connexion with moral teaching: ‘if destiny be believed in, then all advice and rebuke is annihilated’. If any ethical system is to be effective it must postulate the freedom of the will. If in the sphere of human action too ‘destiny’ is master, if every action is the direct and inevitable outcome of all preceding conditions and man’s belief in his own freedom of choice is a mere delusion, then a moral system is useless: it is futile to tell a man what he ought or ought not to do, if he is not at liberty to do it. Here at all events ‘destiny’ must be eliminated. It is a more fatal enemy than superstition, for it means complete paralysis: spontaneity — voluntas— must be at all costs maintained.But why, in order to secure this very remote object, should a protest against ‘inexorable necessity’ be made at this point in the physical system? It would have been easy, one might think, to accomplish the immediate purpose of securing the meeting of the atoms in their fall through space by some device, such as the Stoic notion that all things tend to the centre,’ which should not be a breach of the fundamental law of causality, instead of this sporadic spontaneous deviation. And in what sense can this ’swerve’ be said to be vital for the freedom of the will, with which Lucretius so emphatically connects it? The answer must be looked for in the very material notions of Epicurus’ psychology, which may be briefly anticipated here. The mind (νοῦς) is a concentration in the breast of an aggregate of very fine atoms, the same in character as those which, distributed all over the body and intermingling with the body atoms, form the vital principle (ψυχή). This aggregation of atoms may be set in motion by images, whether coming directly from external things or stored up as an ‘anticipation’ (πρόληχις) in the mind itself. Suppose, for instance, that in this way there comes before my mind the image of myself walking: ultimately the atoms of the mind being themselves stirred, will set in motion the atoms of the vital principle: they in turn will stir the atoms of body, the limbs will be moved and I shall walk. But before this can happen another process must take place, the process of volitional choice.

We can choose to do otherwise

When the image is presented to the mind it does not of itself immediately and inevitably start the chain of motions which results in the physical movement; I can at will either accept or reject the idea which it suggests, I can decide either to walk or not to walk. This is a matter of universal experience and it must I not be denied or rejected.

Bailey identifies one swerve with volition

But how is this process of choice to be explained on purely material lines? It is due, said Epicurus, to the spontaneous swerving of the atoms: the act of volition is neither more nor less than the ’swerve’ of the fine atoms which compose the mind. The fortuitous indeterminate movement of the individual atoms in the void ‘is in the conscious complex (concilium) of the mind transformed into an act of deliberate will. The vital connexion, indeed the identity of the two processes is clearly brought out by Lucretius at the close of his exposition of the theory: ‘but that the very mind feels not some necessity within in doing all things, and is not constrained like a conquered thing to bear and suffer, this is brought about by the tiny swerve of the first-beginnings in no determined direction of place and at no determined time’. It is not merely, as has been suggested, that Epicurus decided to get over two difficult problems in his system economically by adopting a single solution, but that he perceived an essential connexion between them: if freedom is to be preserved, it must be asserted at the very basis of the physical world.The ’swerve’ of the atoms is, no doubt, as the critics have always pointed out, a breach of the fundamental laws of cause and effect, for it is the assertion of a force for which no cause can be given and no explanation offered. For if it be said that the atom swerves because it is its nature to do so, that is merely to put ‘nature’ as a deus ex machina on a level with ‘necessity’ as it was conceived by some of the early physicists, a force which came in to do what could not otherwise be explained. But it was no slip or oversight on Epicurus’ part which a more careful consideration of his principles might have rectified. On the contrary it was a very deliberate breach in the creed of ‘necessity’ and is in a sense the hinge on which the whole of his system turns. He wished to secure ‘freedom’ as an occasional breach of ‘natural law’. If criticism is to be brought against him, it must not be on the technical ground of inconsistency in this detail, but on the broader ground that in his system as a whole he was attempting the impossible. To escape from the old notion of the divine guidance of the world, the Atomists had set up a materialist philosophy directed solely by uniform laws of cause and effect. Democritus saw that this, if pursued to its logical conclusion, must lead to an unflinching determinism, which with more scientific insight perhaps, but less care for his ethical precepts, he had wholly accepted. Epicurus, unwilling in this way to risk his moral system, tried to escape from the impasse without abandoning a materialist position.

Bailey says some metaphysical agency is necessary to explain freedom

Such a compromise is in reality impossible: a wholly materialist view of the world, which excludes altogether the spiritual and the supernatural, must lead to determinism, and there is no real path of escape, except in the acknowledgement of other than material conditions and causes. From the point of view of ultimate consistency, the ’swerve’ is a flaw in Epicureanism, but it is not to be treated as a petty expedient to get over a temporary difficulty, or an unintelligent mistake which betrays the superficial thinker.It may not be uninteresting to notice that a parallel difficulty arises for modern thinkers and that a solution not unlike that of Epicurus’ atomic swerve has sometimes been propounded.
(Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, pp. 318-321)

In a single atom the swerve is merely random chance

Of what nature then is this self-initiated movement? In the individual atom it is automatic, spontaneous, and wholly undetermined in occasion or direction. Is the movement of the mind in will merely the result of such a movement in one of its component atoms, or even the sum of many such movements? If so it too must be automatic and undetermined. When the image of action is presented to the mind, it is impossible to foretell in what way the movement will occur, or even whether it will occur at all. In other words the mind is not really self-determined, but is at the mercy of wholly undetermined movements inside itself, and freewill after all its careful preservation turns out to be nothing better than chance. This is indeed the conclusion reached by one modern critic, and it is not to be wondered at that he is unwilling to believe that Epicurus himself can have rested the claim for freewill on the atomic ’swerve’. But the solution of this difficulty lies once again to the Epicurean conception of a compound body (concilium, conciliatus).

In a large number of atoms compounded as a “mind,” the swerve of many atoms becomes the free volition of an undetermined consciousness.

The compound is more than a mere aggregate of independent atoms: it is their union in a complex, which has a new individuality of its own in which it may acquire qualities and even powers which are not possessed by the individual component atoms. The soul or mind is a compound body of such peculiar constitution in the nature of its component atoms and their motions among themselves, that it acquires the power of sensation or consciousness. The automatic swerve of the individual atoms then is translated in the complex of the mind into a consciously spontaneous movement, in other words into a movement of volition.

Giussani’s two elements look like a temporal sequence - free spontaneous thoughts illuminate the subsequent decision of the will to act

‘The complete conception of the will according to Epicurus, Giussani argues in an admirable summary of his position, ‘comprises two elements, a complex atomic movement which has the characteristic of spontaneity, that is, is withdrawn from the necessity of mechanical causation: and then the sensus, or self-consciousness in virtue of which the will, illuminated by previous movements of sensation, thought, and emotion, profits by the peculiar liberty or spontaneity of the atomic motions, to direct or not to direct these in a direction seen or selected.’ In other words the blind primitive ’swerve’ of the atom has become the conscious psychic act. It may be that this account presses the Epicurean doctrine slightly beyond the point to which the master had thought it out for himself, but it is a direct deduction from undoubted Epicurean conceptions and is a satisfactory explanation of what Epicurus meant:

Epicurus did not identify freedom of the will with chance

that he should have thought that the freedom of the will was chance, and fought hard to maintain it as chance and no more, is inconceivable.And if the further question is asked how can a complex of blind spontaneous movements of atoms become the conscious act of volition of the mind, we are only thrown back once more on the ultimate difficulty, which has made itself felt all through this account of the soul. For indeed, if we look back over it, we find that here and there crudities of thought or incoherences in the connexion of ideas have been noted, yet as a whole the general theory is self-consistent and complete; but at the back of it always lies the difficulty which must beset Epicureanism or any other form of materialism: can the movement of insensible particles produce or account for consciousness? That all forms of consciousness have their physical counterpart, that sensation, thought, will are accompanied by material movements of parts of the physical organism is credible, and indeed scientific investigation seems to be revealing this parallelism more and more clearly to us. The more material thinkers of our own time are content to say that consciousness ’supervenes’ as an ‘epiphenomenon’ on the movements of matter: Epicurus went the step farther and was prepared to say that consciousness, sensation, thought, and will are the movements of the soul-atoms. Such an idea is to most modern minds, as it was to the majority of philosophers in Epicurus’ day, unthinkable: between the one set of facts and the other there is a great gulf fixed: nothing can bridge the gulf that lies between the most elementary sensation and the atomic vibrations which accompany and condition it. If we accept a purely materialistic system in any form, its conclusions will have to be mutatis mutandis something like those of Epicurus: but he has done nothing to bridge over the abyss or to make the gulf seem less wide. Consequitur sensus, inde voluntas fit, his pupil says glibly, but each time rouses in us the same feeling that this is just what can never be understood.

And if it is impossible to accept his account of the nature of the soul and its workings, so the inference from it cannot be admitted. If the soul is a mere atomic complex, a ‘body’, then no doubt like the body it perishes and cannot have any sort of existence after death. But if that account be unsatisfactory, then the problem of survival remains open: the soul may or may not survive bodily death, but the question cannot be decided on the basis of a purely material analysis.

It is impossible in dealing with a material system to refrain from pointing out its fundamental weakness, but in an attempt to estimate Epicurus as a thinker, it is less profitable to quarrel with his base-principles than to think of the superstructure he has built upon them. And once again in examining the account of the soul, for all its weaknesses, we are conscious of the workings of a great mind, capable of grasping alike broad ideas and minute details of elaboration. We are certainly not left with the picture of a moral teacher, who merely patched together any kind of physics and metaphysics to back up his ethical preaching.
(Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, pp. 435-37)

Philippa Foot is an Oxford-trained philosopher who argued for a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics as opposed to deontology, utilitarianism, or consequentialism in ethics.

Foot created the famous moral thought experiment known as the trolley problem.

In 1957 she wrote an article in Mind entitled “Free Will As Involving Determinism.” Foot criticized arguments that free will requires determinism, and in particular the idea that one could not be held responsible for “chance” actions chosen for no particular reason.

Her article begins with the observation that determinism has become widely accepted as compatible with free will.

The idea that free will can be reconciled with the strictest determinism is now very widely accepted. To say that a man acted freely is, it is often suggested, to say that he was not constrained, or that he could have done otherwise if he had chosen, or something else of that kind; and since these things could be true even if his action was determined it seems that there could be room for free will even within a universe completely subject to causal laws. (Mind, vol LXVI, (1957), p.439)

Foot’s estimate of the wide acceptance of determinism is correct, but hard to reconcile with quantum indeterminacy in modern physics, as Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out a few years later in her inaugural lecture at Cambridge.

It has taken the inventions of indeterministic physics to shake the rather common dogmatic conviction that determinism is a presupposition or perhaps a conclusion, of scientific knowledge. Not that that conviction has been very much shaken even so…I find deterministic assumptions more common now among people at large, and among philosophers, than when I was an undergraduate. (Causality and Determination, 1971, p.28)

Foot examines arguments by David Hume, R. E. Hobart (the pseudonym of Dickinson S. Miller, a student and later colleague of William James), P. H. Nowell-Smith, Gilbert Ryle, and A. J. Ayer.

Foot doubted that the ordinary language meaning of saying our actions are “determined” by motives has the same meaning as strict physical determinism, which assumes a causal law that determines every event in the future of the universe. She cites Bertrand Russell’s view of causal determinism:

The law of universal causation . . . may be enunciated as follows:…given the state of the whole universe,…every previous and subsequent event can theoretically be determined.

Foot is also skeptical of the simple logical argument that everything happens either by chance or because it is causally determined. This is the standard argument against free will that makes indeterminism and determinism the two horns of a logical dilemma.

Foot notes that our normal use of “determined” does not imply universal determinism.

For instance, an action said to be determined by the desires of the man who does it is not necessarily an action for which there is supposed to be a sufficient condition. In saying that it is determined by his desires we may mean merely that he is doing something that he wants to do, or that he is doing it for the sake of something else that he wants. There is nothing in this to suggest determinism in Russell’s sense. (p.441)

And when we do something “by chance” it may not mean physically undetermined, and may not be used to deny responsibility.

It is not at all clear that when actions or choices are called “chance” or “accidental” this has anything to do with the absence of causes… Ayer says, “Either it is an accident that I choose to act as I do, or it is not.” The notion of choosing by accident to do something is on the face of it puzzling; for usually choosing to do something is opposed to doing it by accident. What does it mean to say that the choice itself was accidental? (p.449-50)If I say that it was a matter of chance that I chose to do something,…I do not imply that there was no reason for my doing what I did, and I say nothing whatsoever about my choice being undetermined. If we use “chance” and “accident” as Ayer wants to use them, to signify the absence of causes, we shall have moved over to a totally different sense of the words, and “I chose it by chance” can no longer be used to disclaim responsibility. (p.450)

Foot does not see that the role of chance and indeterminism might simply be to provide “free” alternative possibilities for action, to be deliberated upon and used as causes or reasons behind motives of our “will” as we choose to act.

She also does not seem to know that Hobart’s 1934 article was entitled “Free Will As Involving Determination And Inconceivable Without It.” In her reference (note 5), she thinks Hobart’s article has the same title she is using - “Free Will As Involving Determinism“.

In 2004, Mark Balaguer wrote A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will (NOÛS 38:3 (2004) 379–406).

In it he developed some ideas of Robert Kane into what Balaguer calls “L-freedom” in “torn decisions.”

These are decisions that require significant “effort” (C.A.Campbell) or what Kane called “self-forming actions” (SFAs).

Kane’s model combines free will and values. Kane claimed his free choice is moral and made in accord with Kant’s concept of duty versus one’s self-interest or desires. This is the ethical fallacy. Freedom is merely a prerequisite for responsibility.

Balaguer’s model and Kane’s model are “restrictive,” a term coined by John Martin Fischer to describe Peter van Inwagen’s claim that only a tiny fraction of our decisions and actions could be free actions. For van Inwagen, it is those which have closely balanced alternatives (the ancient problem of the liberty of indifference. For Kane, it is those rare and difficult decisions that are deeply moral. They are those moments in which are character is formed. Later decisions made consistent with our character and values can then be traced back to these “self-forming actions.” This provides us with what Kane calls ultimate responsibility or UR.

Balaguer also focuses on alternatives where reasons are closely balanced. The ancients called freedom in such cases liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. To prove that only humans had such a freedom, they denied it to animals in the classic example of Buridan’s Ass.

Balaguer says,

A torn decision is a decision in which the person in question (a) has reasons for two or more options and feels torn as to which set of reasons is strongest, i.e., has no conscious belief as to which option is best, given her reasons; and (b) decides without resolving this conflict—i.e., the person has the experience of “just choosing”. (p.382)

He defines L-freedom, in the case of these torn decisions, in terms of “appropriate non-randomness” and authorship and control as follows:

L-freedom is defined as the ability to make decisions that are simultaneously (a) undetermined and (b) appropriately non-random. Much needs to be said about what appropriate non-randomness amounts to, but for now, let me just say that the central requirement that a decision needs to satisfy in order to count as appropriately non-random is that of having been authored and controlled by the person in question; i.e., it has to have been her decision, and she has to have controlled which option was chosen. (p.382)

Balaguer expands the definition of appropriate non-randomness in terms of indeterminacy. He differs from most compatibilists and determinists who think that the laws of nature and the fixed past require our choice to be determined. He entertains the idea of quantum events in the brain just prior to choice, but if they are the direct cause of the choice then it is not L-freedom.

when I say that if a torn decision is undetermined, then it is appropriately non-random, what I mean is that if it’s undetermined at the moment of choice, then it’s appropriately non-random. Thus, if I say that a decision was determined, that does not mean it was determined prior to the agent’s birth, or any such thing; if an undetermined quantum event occurs in my head two seconds prior to a decision, and if this event (together with physical laws and other circumstances) causally determines my decision, then on my usage, the decision counts as determined. (p.383)

Balaguer then concludes that

if our torn decisions are undetermined at the moment of choice, then we author and control them. And I would like to point out here that this conclusion is introspectively satisfying. To appreciate this, suppose that a race of super-intelligent neuro-cognitive scientists studied your brain and told you that, in fact, your own torn decisions are undetermined at the moment of choice, so that when you make these decisions, nothing external to you makes you choose as you do. Would you conclude from this that you do not author or control these decisions? It seems to me that it would be downright bizarre to draw that conclusion. Indeed, if I found out that when I make my torn decisions, nothing external to me causally influences how I choose, I would conclude from this (together with what I already know about these decisions, namely, that they’re conscious, purposeful, intentional, and so on) that I do author and control these decisions. And this suggests to me that the intuitive notions of authorship and control do apply here, and hence, that if my torn decisions are undetermined at the moment of choice, then I author and control them. (p.393)

Balaguer realizes that he is trying to balance some indeterminacy with the control needed for us to be the authors and originators of our actions, that they are “up to us” (Aristotole’s ἐφ’ ἡμῖν).

He describes the standard two-horn dilemma argument against free will as randomness vs appropriate non-randomness.

Any event that’s undetermined is uncaused and, hence, accidental. That is, it just happens; i.e., happens randomly. Thus, if our decisions are undetermined, then they are random, and so they couldn’t possibly be “appropriately non-random”. Or to put the point the other way around, if our decisions are appropriately non-random, then they are authored and controlled by us; that is, we determine what we choose and what we don’t choose, presumably for rational reasons. Thus, if our decisions are appropriately non-random, then they couldn’t possibly be undetermined. Therefore, libertarianism is simply incoherent: it is not possible for a decision to be undetermined and appropriately non-random at the same time. (p.379)

Balaguer thinks his L-freedom might be extended to obtain even in the case where there is no imbalance of reasons, i.e., where sufficient reasons to make a choice already exist.

I would like to say a few words about cases in which the agent’s reasons pick out a unique best option and perhaps even causally determine the agent’s decision. I think that decisions like this can be free in the ordinary sense of the term, and I think that libertarians ought to allow that they can be L-free. (p.401)

Is Balaguer wrong to say these decisions are causally and strictly determined? In our view, they are merely “adequately determined” by our own reasons and desires. He knows that for large numbers quantum indeterminacy approaches classical determinacy.

it may be that these decisions are determined for all practical purposes; e.g., it may be that the neural events…are composed of large numbers of indeterministic quantum events that “cancel each other out.”

In two-stage models of free will, quantum events may allow random alternative possibilities in the first “free” stage. But in the second “will” stage, Balaguer is right that the conscious will is adequately “determined for all practical purposes“.

What would Balaguer’s race of super-intelligent neuro-cognitive scientists conclude about choices we make for good an sufficient reasons consistent with our character and values, with our habits, and with our current desires? As he said earlier,

“when you make these decisions, nothing external to you makes you choose as you do. Would you conclude from this that you do not author or control these decisions?…It seems to me that it would be downright bizarre to draw that conclusion.”