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."

Explain what Foot means when she says, "it looks as if a moral agent is a man whose actions are in general determined, if determinism is involved in having a motive for what he does."

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 eternal, or are merely abstract and general terms, such as we are accustomed to put together from particular things."

Locke says, "the idea of liberty is the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferred to the other." Do you agree with Locke's definition of "liberty"?

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

Sartre says "that we limit ourselves to a reliance upon that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the probabilities which render our action feasible. Whenever one wills anything, there are always these elements of probability." For Sartre, this defines the concept of ...

Locke says, "What is it determines the will? The true and proper answer is, __________. 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."

Locke says, "All the actions that we have any idea of reducing themselves, as has been said, to these two, namely, thinking and motion; so far as a man has power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man intuitive."

Taylor says that his examples show that "the relation expressed in the hypothetical 'I will move my finger if I want to' is, if the hypothetical is true at all, a __________ relationship between concepts, resting only on a conventional equivalence of meaning, and as such cannot be a causal relationship between states or events."