Exam 6: John Locke Free Agents

In the reading, God says, "free will is not an 'extra'; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness." Do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.

Taylor says, "that there is an essential difference between my moving my finger, and my finger merely moving, and, hence, that 'I can move my finger' expresses not merely the idea that any motions of my finger are __________ contingent but, rather, that it is __________ contingent whether I produce them."

Sartre says, "Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it."

According to d'Holbach, "Society has been believed interested in this system; because an idea has gone abroad, that if all the actions of man were to be contemplated as ___________, the right of punishing those who injure their associates would no longer exist."

d'Holbach says, "It is, then, for want of recurring to the _________ that move him; for want of being able to analyze, from not being competent to decompose the complicated motion of his machine, that man believes himself a free agent: it is only upon his own ignorance that he founds the profound yet deceitful notion he has of his free agency; that he builds those opinions which he brings forward as a striking proof of his pretended freedom of action."

According to Sartre, what existentialists "have in common is simply the fact that they believe that _________ comes before ________, or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective."

Explain what Foot means when she says, "Assigning a motive to an action is not bringing it under any law; it is rather saying something about the kind of action it was, the direction in which it was tending, or what it was done as."

In the reading, when God says, "I will grant you a very, very special dispensation to sin as much as you like, and I give you my divine word of honor that I will never punish you for it in the least. Agreed?" To which the mortal responds that ...

Foot says, "We have now considered two suggestions: (1) that an undetermined action would not be one which could properly be attributed to an agent as something that he desires and (2) that an undetermined action would not be the action of a causal agent."

Foot relates that "an action which is not determined cannot properly be called an action at all, being something that happened to the agent rather than something he ..."

Locke says, "What is it determines the will? The true and proper answer is, intuition. For that which determines the general power of directing, to this or that particular direction, is nothing but the agent itself exercising the power it has that particular way."

Sartre says, "Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free."

According to Locke, "__________ consists in the dependence of the existence, or not existence of any action, upon our volition of it; and not in the dependence of any action, or its contrary, on our preference."

Foot considers the following idea: "if human action is subject to a universal law of causation [then] there will be for any action a set of sufficient conditions which can be traced back to factors outside the control of the agent." This is regarded as a definition of ...

According to Locke, "The power of perception is that which we call the ..."

Taylor says, "an intuitively contingent state or event is therefore one concerning which it is not known whether it occurred, or will occur, or not."

Spinoza says, "there is in the mind no absolute faculty of understanding, desiring, loving, etc. Whence it follows, that these and similar faculties are either entirely __________, or are merely abstract and general terms, such as we are accustomed to put together from particular things."

Foot says that she is interested in examining the argument that claims "that so far from being incompatible with determinism, free will actually requires it."

Foot says, "We hold responsible only a man who is a rational agent; if someone were always to do things out of the blue, without having any reason to do them, we should be inclined to count him as a lunatic, one who could not be held responsible for his actions, so that even if he did things he would do things for which he could not be held responsible." Do you agree with this claim? Explain your answer.

Explain what Locke means by the "Understanding." How does it differ from the "Will"? Do you agree with Locke's distinctions? Explain your answer.