WHAT IS FREEDOM?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 509, 25 March 1949, Page 10

WHAT IS FREEDOM?

‘ON HUMAN FREEDOM. By John Laird. George Allen and Unwin. 7/6 net. PROFESSOR LAIRD (who died while these six lectures were being printed) had a certain connection with this country. In the days when the more advanced examinations of the University of New Zealand were set and marked overseas,

he was one of our examiners in PKilosophy. He was only one of the minor stars in the twentieth-century philosophical firmament, but his writings, while easy and colloquial in style, and a little rambling in form, were far from careless in thought. He wrote the Home University Library volume on Contemporary Philosophy. The fourth and sixth of the present series of lectures are hardly up to his best standard, but the others are. His subject here is not (except at one or two points incidentally) any of the "four freedoms" of which we used to hear sometimes during the war, but freedom of the will..The position defended is "undogmatic voluntaristic determinism." All events, including human choices, are said to take place according to unalterable laws; but this finding is subject to correction. Professor Laird’s main ground for it is that "it is desperately hard to deny causes anywhere without denying them everywhere," and no one in his senses would do thé latter. He calls his determinism "voluntaristic’ because he doés not wish to deny that men may do as they choose, or at all events that how they choosa makes a difference to what happens, and sometimes a crucial one; that is, he is not a fatalist; but how men choose is predetermined, by such things as their "character." "There is no such thing as an uncaused volition. If, per impossible, there were such a volition it would be a casual vagrant upsetting and not supporting moral responsibility. It would be freakish, incalculable, lonely and sporadic." I am not sure-Professor Laird is not sure himself-that he fully understands the position he is opposing. A cautious non-determinist would agree that a reason can always be given for a man’s having acted as he did. It may be "Because he thought it his duty" (though he would rather have done something else), or it may be "Because he wanted to" (though he ought to have done something else), or it may be both. But whether a man will act from duty or from preference is not (on this view) always predetermined. This is a hackneyed theme; the position Professor Laird defends-is not new, nor are his arguments for it. But he has a flair for drawing out the implications of both common speech and the slogans

of philosophers, and exposes many of the minor sophistries which are apt to trick us when Freedom is our subject.

Arthur N.

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