Peter Van Inwagen Summary

In The Powers of Rational Beings: Freedom of the Will, Peter van Inwagen states that those with either compatibilist or incompatibilist views must accept some mysteries. In this essay I will first explain the three views van Inwagen suggests and the mysteries that arise with each suggestion. Then, I will explain which position he agrees with most and why he does so. Following that, I will demonstrate my stance on the matter as well as show opposing viewpoints to my own. I think the most compelling stance is liberalism because the concept of free will is too complex to understand via general, universe-based principles as practiced by hard determinists and it is difficult to justify the lack of No Choice Principle as done by compatibilists.
The former implies that the universe is governed by exceptionaless, nonprobabilistic laws. In contrast, the latter claims that what occurs in the universe happens at random or the system in place makes some outcomes more likely to occur than others respectively. The author goes on to discuss three possible positions. These include compatibilists, libertarians, and hard determinists. A compatibilist argues that free will is compatible with determinism. These individuals distinguish between external and internal causal factors to argue that inner psychological states are compatible with determinism because these internal states are determined by the agent. van Inwagen disagrees with this statement because he claims that it is difficult to specify which futures are open to us and which are not. Additionally, compatibilists must deny the No Choice Principle because if an individual believes in a deterministic system, they cannot simultaneously accept that there is at least one instance where one event does not uniquely determine the next. To continue, libertarians believe that determinism is incompatible with free will but there is free will in the sense that individuals seem as though they could have acted differently. van Inwagen argues this view by giving an example in which an individual is faced with a choice in which if the pulse in their brain goes to the left of a fork, the individual will make one decision and if it goes to the right, the individual will make the opposite decision. He claims that the laws and present state of that individual’s brain would allow the pulse to go either way which would ultimately leave no prediction of what the pulse will do when it comes to making the decision. He goes on to say that there is no way for the individual to make the pulse go one way over another which makes it an undetermined event. He emphasizes that if human