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The Situationist Challenge to Free Will

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Free Will & Action

Part of the book series: Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action ((HSNA,volume 6))

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Abstract

The author discusses the Situationist Thesis, according to which human actions correlate more strongly with features of the immediate situation than with stable personality traits. He argues that whether we accept the original Situationist Thesis or the alternative related theses, the implications for free will are negative. That is, the implications are that we have less free will than we might otherwise have thought: certain types of situational factor can significantly reduce free will. The author discusses two types of approach to solving the problem, one of which (“nudge” or libertarian paternalism) will not solve it, and the other (being generally aware of situational interferences in freedom) will solve it only partly and unreliably. Finally, he outlines some general desiderata for any solutions to the problem. He argues that the tradition of positive liberty deserves reviving in light of the conclusions about free will reached in the discussion of the Situationist Thesis, and moreover that those conclusions suggest a new way of thinking about the difference between positive and negative liberty. This new way could help to overcome some of the reservations that liberal philosophers typically have about the idea of positive liberty, as well as helping us to think about what is needed to overcome the impediments to free will shown by the situationist literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other authors who have discussed the possible implications of Situationism for free will include Nelkin 2005, Nahmias 2007 and Vargas 2013.

  2. 2.

    I prefer to use the term “classical free will theory” rather than “libertarianism,” in part to avoid confusion with the political view known as libertarianism, which makes a brief appearance towards the end of this paper.

  3. 3.

    Note that this is not quite the same as the age-old philosophical conundrum of weakness of will. Weakness of will is characterised by someone choosing action y over action x even if they judge x to be rationally preferable. It is therefore consistent with weakness of will being a perfectly genuine phenomenon that in all such cases the person subjectively prefers y. One might, for example, subjectively prefer smoking to giving up smoking even though one believes that giving up is rationally preferable. In the situations I describe, however, people choose actions over ones that they prefer in every sense––rational-judgementally and subjectively.

  4. 4.

    Eddy Nahmias (2007) also argues, based on the situationist literature, that free will, or as he says “autonomy” comes in degrees.

  5. 5.

    In a similar vein, Manuel Vargas (2013) rejects what he calls ‘atomism’, “the view that free will is a nonrelational property of agents” (p. 333).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lancaster University, Lancashire, UK

    Brian Garvey

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  1. Brian Garvey
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Correspondence to Brian Garvey .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia

    Filip Grgić

  2. Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia

    Davor Pećnjak

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Garvey, B. (2018). The Situationist Challenge to Free Will. In: Grgić, F., Pećnjak, D. (eds) Free Will & Action. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99295-2_6

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