Reference no: EM133318511

Questions

1. A person's will is the total collection of all their desires. We can say, then, that: a person's will is effective (at bringing about their actions) whenever i. that person does what they do because of the desires they have, and ii. if that person had had different desires, they would have done something different. Explain why your will fails to be effective in cases where something simply happens to you. (You should use an example to illustrate your point.)

2. We can think of the descision making (or delibrative) process as a system that takes our reasons and circumstances as inputs and yields decisions as outputs. Why, if we are to think of this process as indeterministic, should we take the objective probabilities of our decisions to be between 0 and 1? And why should we, as aspiring standard libertarians, take these probabilities to reflect the strength of our reasons?

3. The Libet experiment is sometimes thought to show that standard libertarianism is not true. How did this argument go? What reason did we give for thinking that this argument doesn't actually succeed?

4. What was the strange case of John? Why might this case be taken to pose a problem for the standard libertarian?

5. John Locke asks us to suppose a Man be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a Room, where is a Person he longs to see and speak with; and be there locked fast in, beyond his Power to get out: he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable Company, which he stays willingly in, i.e. prefers his stay to going away. (II.xxi.10)

Explain how the case of Locke's locked room illustrates the need for the second clause in the above account of effective will; that is, explain how it shows that a person's will is not effective at bringing about their actions unless those actions are properly sensitive to that person's desires.