Even though I think one of the biggest challenges to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is the feeling that something is unexplained in the case of free actions. I think this can be answered: see Section 4 here. But in this post I want to make a very small and simple point that just occurred to me.
The puzzle of free actions is not the lack of reasons. It is a surfeit of reasons. Suppose I eat a donut rather than an apple. It is easy to give a reason: the donut is more delicious. If that’s all we had, there would be no felt difficulty about the explanation. But the felt difficulty comes from the fact that while the donut is more delicious, the apple is more nutritious, and hence while I have a reason for eating the donut rather than the apple, I also have a reason for eating the apple rather than the donut.
But while a shortage of reasons would be a problem for a principle like the PSR that affirms the existence of reasons, a surfeit of reasons is not a problem for it!
So whatever one might say about the puzzle of free will, it is not problem for the PSR.
11 comments:
So if there is no reasons, the psr is false.
And if there is reasons there in no FREE will as this is just a neurological response to various levels of stimulus...
Is there a reason why one reason (delicious) led to action rather than the other (healthy)? Maybe that's where there's a challenge for the PSR.
Because deliciousness supports eating the donut? :-)
I'm not sure that's a good response. Both reasons support the eating of the donut. Why did one action and not the other lead to action? What is the reason for that?
What you're saying suggests the following: The very reason that led to action (deliciousness) is the reason that one action and not the other led to action.
I'm not satisfied with that, but I do think there are other reasons available so that the PSR isn't threatened. For instance, we might say that the person is weak-willed, or cares more about taste than health, or whatever.
Well, as Hume said, once you've given cause of something, you've explained it. Deliciousness is the cause.
I still am made almost equally uneasy by an excess of reasons, because then there are the propositions about which reasons end up explaining the events which need explaining.
Dr. Pruss, what’s your opinion on hierarchical series arguments such as those defended by people like Ed Feser.
It's not hard to explain why a reason ends up explaining an event. For instance, the reason why deliciousness explains my eating the donut is that deliciousness is a good thing and we are attracted to the good.
It may be a reason, but is it a sufficient reason?
"It may be a reason, but is it a sufficient reason?"
It's only non-sufficient if you insist that it must not only explain the action X over Y, but determine action X over Y. But that would beg the question.
What if we framed the question in terms of two possible worlds, world A where I did choose to eat the donut and world B where I didn't, given the assumption of libertarian free will that both worlds were identical prior to the moment of choice? In that case, what is the reason that A actually occurred and B did not? If you appeal to various motives I had prior the moment of choice, the problem is that exactly the same motives would have been present in world B. Doesn't the "sufficient" in PSR mean that whatever reasons are given must be enough to infer the fact in question with certainty? To pick an analogy not involving free will, if I ask why my eyes are blue, and someone points to the presence of a particular gene as the "reason" for it, but I observe that there are at least some people with the same gene that have brown eyes, then that gene alone cannot be the "sufficient reason" for my eye color, can it?
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