Quidquid Movetur, Ab Alio MoveturOn the Insufficiency of Strawson's Basic Argument to Invalidate the

Thomistic Recognition of Moral Responsibility

By Thomas Sundaram

05/18/11

Fr. Anselm Ramelow

Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology

PHST-4810 Do We Have Free Will?

Spring 2011

2The Practical Connection between Moral Responsibility and Free Will

Questions of whether human beings have free will are always accompanied closely by questions of

how they ought to use it. Moreover, the ought is practically broader than the whether: if there is no

moral responsibility, no greater schema according to which one has a meaningful role or ownership in

ordering one's own actions to a higher good, the question do we have free will? is significantly less

relevant to human life in any conclusion it may reach. Moreover, the great degree to which Catholic

conceptions of free will are dependent on moral responsibility and vice versa indicates that to address

one is to address the other. Thus, it is easy to see the importance of engaging new and popular

arguments against free will and moral responsibility on pragmatic grounds. Moreover, such specific

arguments, being as they are so deeply connected to our identity as human persons, give us inroads into

a deeper and more integral understanding of ourselves when we attempt to answer them.

The Argument Itself

One recent and engaging argument against human responsibility for action in general has been

put forward by Galen Strawson, son of the philosopher P.F. Strawson and Professor at the University of

Reading. Prof. Strawson's Basic Argument is a variation on an older form of the same argument,

based on the notion of the absurdity of the causa sui:

1. Nothing can be causa sui nothing can be the cause of itself.

2. In order to be truly morally responsible for ones actions one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial

mental respects.

3. Therefore nothing can be truly morally responsible.

This argument is not really hashed out in this form, and so Strawson himself expands it in his more

cumbersome version:

1. Interested in free action, we are particularly interested in actions that are performed for a reason (as opposed to

'reflex' actions or mindlessly habitual actions).

32. When one acts for a reason, what one does is a function of how one is, mentally speaking. (It is also a function of

one's height, one's strength, one's place and time, and so on. But the mental factors are crucial when moral

responsibility is in question.)

3. So if one is to be truly responsible for how one acts, one must be truly responsible for how one is, mentally

speaking at least in certain respects.

4. But to be truly responsible for how one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects, one must have brought it about

that one is the way one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects. And it is not merely that one must have caused

oneself to be the way one is, mentally speaking. One must have consciously and explicitly chosen to be the way

one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects, and one must have succeeded in bringing it about that one is that

way.

5. But one cannot really be said to choose, in a conscious, reasoned fashion, to be the way one is mentally speaking,

in any respect at all, unless one already exists, mentally speaking, already equipped with some principles of choice,

'P1' preferences, values, pro-attitudes, ideals in the light of which one chooses how to be.

6. But then to be truly responsible, on account of having chosen to be the way one is, mentally speaking, in certain

respects, one must be truly responsible for one's having the principles of choice P1 in the light of which one chose

how to be.

7. But for this to be so one must have chosen P1, in a reasoned, conscious, intentional fashion.

8. But for this, i.e. (7), to be so one must already have had some principles of choice P2 in the light of which one

chose P1.

9. And so on. Here we are setting out on a regress that we cannot stop. True self-determination is impossible because

it requires the actual completion of an infinite series of choices of principles of choice.

10. So true moral responsibility is impossible, because it requires true self-determination.

I have reproduced the argument here as Strawson put it in his paper on the Impossibility of Moral

Responsibility.1

Explanation of the Argument I: Praeambula

So what, as they say, is the damage? There is obviously a lot to unpack about this argument, but

1 Strawson, Galen. The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 75, no. 1/2 (1994): 6-7.

4before one may begin to do so, one must observe a few things. First, the crucial thing about the

argument, and something which cripples many who are already familiar with Strawson's own agnostic

materialism,2 is that he professes to require no set metaphysical presumption of the sort for his

argument to work. Determinism or indeterminism, he believes,3 is largely irrelevant to the point, as I

will discuss later. And in any case, as a Thomist, I have the strong suspicion that the argument is more

easily pierced on other points, which I will address more immediately. Moreover, one may not simply

cite the immateriality of the soul in which the will is to make the case for the human person's causal

independence from heredity, as one must first make the case that the way the soul works is not part of

that heredity. In other words, the argument can very easily attain the advantage of forcing the one who

addresses it to prove first the exemption of the ways by which a human person determines his or her

action from what is, so to speak, already determined.

Moreover, there are several areas of fuzziness in the argument's terms. We are told ahead of

time that one need only be causa sui in certain respects. What these are is left unstated deliberately,

as the argument is supposed to be flexible, and there are differing opinions about mental reality (the

notion of the immaterial soul, Cartesian dualism, Leibniz's windowless monads and their parallelism,

etc.) Yet there is a question of whether one can lump together so many different epistemological and

ontological opinions without any qualification of the argument into different species. Some might

object to the way he seems to do so in the argument, which I will discuss below alongside the question

of indeterminism and determinism. In both of the provisos listed here, the fuzziness of terms and the

intended metaphysical independence, there is a practical assertion about the argument intended by

Strawson and his supporters, that the argument is in its most basic form and needs no further

specification or qualification. This may not be so if the argument per se oversimplifies the character of

mental reality as a field of opinions, such that something goes unacknowledged in addressing the case

2 Strawson, Galen. Mental Reality. (MIT Press, 2009.) pgs 43-106

3 Strawson has even gone so far as to entitle a paper The Unhelpfulness of Indeterminism.

5for moral responsibility.

Explanation of the Argument II: Why Expand on the Other One?

In order to understand the changes Strawson has made, as a second part of the introduction, it is

helpful to understand the more primitive form of the argument and its ambiguities. The first premise is

that nothing can be causa sui. What does this mean? While the argument is taken for granted by many

current philosophers, rightly, it helps to investigate why it is so, at least in the Thomistic tradition from

which this paper arises. Cause, according to Aristotle, has four meanings, efficient, material, formal and

final. The efficient cause Aristotle defines as the primary source of the change or coming to rest; it is

generally what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed. The formal cause

is the statement of the essence, and its genera...and the parts in the definition. (Thus the formal cause

of the human being in Aristotle is that it is a rational animal.) The material cause is that out of which

a thing comes to be and which persists. Lastly, the final cause is the end or 'that for the sake of which'

a thing is done. These are all answers to the question why? wherein one inquires after the cause of a

thing.

Typically in modern discussion only the first of these is engaged, but if Strawson's argument

claims to be applicable to any system, it should be able to accommodate the terms of those systems

which differ from the norm as they play into the argument. To be causa sui, then, could have four

possible meanings. Two of these are most evidently absurd. Either a thing is its own efficient cause, in

which case the change the thing induces is the cause of the capability of effecting the change in the first

place; or it is its own material cause, in which case it is that out of which it comes to be, implying that

it is before the change whereby it comes to be. The other two are more complicated, however, because

there is one example of a being that is its own formality and finality: God, who is of His essence a

6form,4 and who loves Himself primarily and creatures through loving Himself,5 and who by His

simplicity is His essence and existence simply,6 thus being Himself His own formality and finality. As it

happens, these two aspects are the most concerned with knowing and willing, because a thing knows

according to its capacity to possess the intelligible forms of the known things (in the Aristotelian

scheme), and we will according to a first motion of the will given by God.7 Thus, one must proceed

cautiously when generally applying the notion of causa sui, as it becomes nuanced by this parallel

especially in knowing and willing. Despite these philosophical nuances, these are not causes of God,

in that His willing and knowing is uncaused properly speaking; God does not come to be, and is not

actually causa sui as Strawson and the tradition talk about it.8 So while God is not causa sui, he is the

perfection of all caused things, and thus not without the freedom Strawson claims. Furthermore, His

end and form do not precede Him, not even in notion, or He would precede Himself. So even in the

case of formal and final cause, He is not causa sui.

Letting it be understood that the subject of the Basic Argument is not causa sui in the manners

stated above, one recognizes the move being made in the second premise. If one is (commonly

speaking) coerced in doing an action, one is not juridically responsible for one's action. If, for

example, a person is physically coerced by the act of some insane character to pull the trigger of a gun

pointed at the first person's child, that person is hardly guilty of murder according to the courts. In this

4 Aquinas, St. Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. English Dominican Province, 1920.

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ (accessed December 19, 2010). Prima Pars Q3 A2 Resp. Tertio, quia unumquodque

agens agit per suam formam, unde secundum quod aliquid se habet ad suam formam, sic se habet ad hoc quod sit agens.

Quod igitur primum est et per se agens, oportet quod sit primo et per se forma. Deus autem est primum agens, cum sit

prima causa efficiens, ut ostensum est. Est igitur per essentiam suam forma; et non compositus ex materia et forma.

5 Ibid Q19A2 Reply Obj 2. Et sic, sicut alia a se intelligit intelligendo essentiam suam, ita alia a se vult, volendo

bonitatem suam.

6 Ibid Q3 A4

7 Aquinas, St. Thomas. Quaestiones Disputatae De Malo. Corpus Thomisticum.

http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/qdm06.html (accessed May 16, 2011) Q6 Resp.: Relinquitur ergo, sicut concludit

Aristoteles in cap. de bona fortuna, quod id quod primo movet voluntatem et intellectum, sit aliquid supra voluntatem et

intellectum, scilicet Deus; qui cum omnia moveat secundum rationem mobilium, ut levia sursum et gravia deorsum,

etiam voluntatem movet secundum eius conditionem, non ut ex necessitate, sed ut indeterminate se habentem ad multa.

Patet ergo quod si consideretur motus voluntatis ex parte exercitii actus, non movetur ex necessitate.; Ad 1, 3, 4, 21;

Aristotle, Eudaemonian Ethics VII 14 (1248a17-32)

8 Aquinas, ST Prima Pars Q19A5

7sense of responsibility, the external sense (in that it is concerned only with what is seen from

without), the point is certainly taken. And even if the person were found to have some horrible motive

which would give them an interest in pulling the trigger, they did not do so of their own accord, and

thus one could not really attribute guilt to them, on the basis that even if they decided to act otherwise

they could not have failed to pull the trigger owing to the coercion. This is, intuitively, the hook of

the basic argument, the notion of coercion invalidating responsibility.

Added to this in the second premise, though, is the notion of motive as terminating in action. In

the case of the madman and the forced trigger, motive is not really considered, because it is not relevant

to a juridical consideration. But when one starts to introduce moral considerations, motive becomes

practically paramount. Say the person being forced to fire the gun has that horrific motive mentioned

above, and really intends if given a chance to kill their child. While, juridically speaking, they fall into

no sentence, morally speaking, they are no less responsible for the act than the one who made them

pull the trigger. (If this is not so, there is no basis for a juridical condemnation aside from consequential

considerations and a subjective and purely conventional value-judgement. This is not without

testimony in Aquinas; human law, according to St. Thomas, is derived from the natural law,9 and the

natural law itself is a participation in the eternal law.10) That such instances of the moral law per se are

not directly the purview of the courts, but only those wherein which it manifests itself in an external

and jurisprudentially recognizable fashion, does not exempt it from having its own form of

responsibility, although there are widespread and diverse opinions about the principle and meaning of

moral responsibility as such. It is this sort of moral responsibility which seems to be the primary

concern through which the argument seeks to deny the sort of responsibility which it targets, thus to

move back and deny moral responsibility itself.

Yet to say that it is only apparent moral responsibility as such that the argument is targeting is

9 Ibid Prima Secundae Q95 A2

10 Ibid Q91 A2 Resp.

8nevertheless to miss part of the argument. It is not a superfluous addition, so the author of the argument

thinks, to add the word truly to morally responsible. One cannot deny the appearance of moral

responsibility that operates on the mundane level of everyday interaction by people with the world and

with each other. One can, however, attempt to deny the basis for the appearance as real through an

application of the logic by which we talk about that appearance. Thus, taking the analogy from juridical

responsibility, one who is coerced is not responsible. What, then, is the definition of coercion? Initially

one might say as a working definition that it is when something makes some outcome occur through

someone else's agency employed instrumentally such that it could not be otherwise, independent of the

will of the instrument. That definition is subverted, though, in the instance in which the juridical

responsibility does not apply and the moral does. The insane character makes the gun fire by pushing

the fingers of the parent, independent of their will; but the parent nevertheless is morally responsible

for willing it. The definition, then, must be refined; so one tries against the instrument's will or

without a willing participation by the instrument. The person employed as instrument adds nothing to

the action, not even intention, such that it does not matter much for the purposes of the argument.

Either way, there is no moral or juridical responsibility in the act itself.

But what about in that by which the act is done? Let us look at our insane person. The truly

insane person did not choose (presumably) the imbalance which led them into the act. Thus, when

tried, we do not convict them based on the plea of insanity. They lack juridical responsibility. When

they are placed in an institution for the dangerously insane, moreover, they are not thus placed because

of some argument concerning their motive; their motives are in every respect divorced from the

situation, and indeed from reality. Only if they somehow chose the circumstances whereby they were

led into killing would they actually be guilty. A similar reasoning is employed in confessional

assessment with respect to the intoxicated. The drunken college student who makes a mistake, before

both court and priest, is not let off because of the condition of their doing so. The difference is not

9awareness of the crime on the part of the circumstantial actor, but volition whereby the crime was

conditioned to occur in such a way that the agent was not aware, and yet committed the crime. There

are thus circumstances in which the responsibility is removed owing to the supposed criminal not being

the volitional cause of their criminality.

Stepping back even further, though, beyond child, parent and madman, one gets to the common

circumstance of all existing persons. I possess, so it seems, a faculty of knowing and willing; a certain

heredity, which I have both by nature and nurture, neither of which I chose before I obtained them. To

use Sartre's term, these factors constitute my facticity (though perhaps in a broader sense than Sartre

intended, because they have more of a bearing on choice.) These, moreover, play into my every act of

choice in some mysterious or simply complex way; certainly many or all of my choices are in some

way determined because of my facticity. This is the first part of the denial of truly moral

responsibility, the simultaneous recognition that there are determinate factors entering into the acts of

choice the human person makes and the realization that the person does not choose them. In other

words, from the Basic Argument's point of view, one is coerced by virtue of one's facticity; yet one is

not responsible for the effects of coercion (it has to transfer from the act itself) and thus the action

which is the effect of the facticity. Thus, since the person is not the cause of their own facticity as it has

a bearing on the will (what the argument calls crucial mental respects), causa sui in principio

volitionis, they are supposedly not responsible for any of the effects of that facticity.

Explanation of the Argument III: Strawson's Determination

Strawson, in an effort to strengthen the precision of the Basic Argument, determines out some of

the premises and includes the argument against the sort of self-causing which his version considers the

absurd reduction within the greater argument itself. He makes a number of changes in focus to the

argument. These changes do not actually make the argument different in kind, but rather narrow the

conceptions used in order to make the argument sharper and less trite. They are implicitly contained in

10

the primitive Basic Argument, but are not made explicit enough to allow for ease of argument. The

changes to the argument are as follows:

The argument is not speaking of action in general, but action for a reason. The Basic

Argument was concerned with any and all facticity of the choosing being whatsoever, which, while

broad and implicitly containing those things pertaining to the will (especially in the mention of crucial

mental respects, whereby the notion of mental reality as some epiphenomenal nothing is excluded)

nevertheless does not get to the precision Strawson wanted from the argument in dealing with the will.

Thus, he narrows the argument down to action for a reason, action ceteris paribus, wherein there is no

insanity or other obstruction to complicate the issue. He excludes actions from instinct (which he does

not consider volitional) and actions which are, as he says, mindlessly habitual, such as rolling one's

feet or sniffling.

The argument is primarily concerned with the mental dimension of choosing. While both

variations are concerned with being causa sui in certain crucial mental respects, the connection

between responsibility for this action and this mental state and this set of mental circumstances that

precede it is the focus of Strawson's variation. The primitive one was, again, concerned with action in

general and not just action as chosen deliberately.

This mental dimension also narrows the operative notion of causa sui. As Strawson notes above

in the text of the argument, one does not merely need to cause oneself to be a certain way prior to

choosing. This would require no more than a recognition of one's facticity (the way one was prior to

and operative in the current state even as extending prior to the age of reason) as one's own, such that

one's facticity causing one's current state is equivalent to one causing one's own state. Rather, one needs

to have a deliberate, voluntary role in bringing oneself into being thus. One must be an effective

volitional and efficient cause of one's coming-to-be such and such.

Since the mental is prior in being to the choice in Strawson's analysis, his argument operates

11

through an infinite regress. By what was said above, since every volitional and efficient cause is

preceded by some mental situation, one ends up having a mental situation preceding the choice of some

consequent mental situation, and so on and so forth, such that acts of the will with respect to means go

on ad infinitum. Thus, ultimately there is no non-coerced self-determination and there is no moral

responsibility by the reasoning in the primitive Argument. These changes all have the effect of making

a more specific argument against free action in particular.

The lack of responsibility Strawson postulates is more broad, though, than actions which accord

with the direction of the facticity, actions which Valjean performs because it is the sort of person he

is. Valjean, hungry, takes a loaf of bread, because of the determinate factor that is his overwhelming

hunger. That could be expected from his condition. On the other hand, Valjean turns himself in to the

police, despite his facticity-based desire to be free from bondage. This is uncharacteristic of Valjean;

but if it is an attempt to act against his nature, it is an action in response to a prior coercion. Since his

situation (his preferences, values, pro-attitudes, ideals spoken of collectively) was a coercion, Strawson

argues, and the action was a reaction to that situation and thus an effect thereof, the action itself is

coerced by extension. Thus, this extends over action in such a way that Strawson wishes us to regard

moral responsibility as a merely phenomenological reality (since it cannot be true moral

responsibility.) What is important, says Strawson, is the experience of freedom...Because it may be

that the experience of freedom is really all there is, so far as free will is concerned.11

Strawson, moreover, makes the assertion that true moral responsibility of the sort of which he

speaks is at the center of the Western tradition, and that it is natural to suppose that Aristotle

subscribed to it.12 The first thing which has occurred to many of my own Thomistic background to

11 Strawson, Galen. Freedom and Belief. Revised. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2010.) Preface12 Strawson, Impossibility of Moral Responsibility, pgs 8-9. He cites Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics III, 5 as justifying this

point, but the Ethics explicitly states that choice is of means, not of ends, a point which Aquinas will use later to argue

that the first act of the will according to which one possesses the primary end of happiness/beatitude (by which one

avoids the infinite regress in his permutation of the Basic Argument) is not something which man gives himself, but

which is provided by God as both efficient and final cause. It is an argument in the history of Aristotelian studies

12

whom I have shown the argument itself is to ask what constitutes this true moral responsibility,

which supposedly is at the center of their own tradition. Strawson puts it, per exemplum, as

responsibility of such a kind that, if we have it, then it makes sense, at least, to suppose that it could be

just to punish some of us with (eternal) torment in hell and reward others with (eternal) bliss in

heaven.13 He notes also that the use of makes sense is important,14 because there are atheists and

people with varying views of heaven and hell who all supposedly believe in this notion of true moral

responsibility, and the argument is not supposed to be tied down to one or the other; heaven and hell are

a prism through which he introduces the notion. This also carries the notion of moral action as self-

constituted: because of what we are, and not because of what we desire as a consequence of our

actions, we deserve praise, blame, punishment and reward.

Whether or not this notion of autonomous true moral responsibility is central to the tradition is,

I think, a disputed point prior to the time of the nominalist-realist argument, but this is perhaps

peripheral to addressing the argument itself. Nevertheless, it is helpful to examine who seems to

comprise noted examples of the tradition Strawson describes, in his opinion. Strawson mentions E.H.

Carr15 (who claimed that normal adult human beings are morally responsible for their own

personality,) Jean-Paul Sartre, whose radical views of responsibility rooted in autonomy may be found

in many of his works, Kant, whose notion of morality demanded a formation of character not based on

inclination for the principle of action to be truly moral in his definition, and John Patten, the Catholic

British Secretary of State for education from 1992 to 1994, (and according to Strawson, apparently

preoccupied by the idea of sin16,) who stated that it is...self-evident that as we grow up each

whether Aristotle would accept this move, but by no means a resolved one, given the different notions of how Aristotle

conceived of the necessity of the eternity of the cosmos.

13 Ibid pg. 9

14 Ibid

15 Ibid pg. 11

16 Ibid

13

individual chooses whether to be good or bad.17

Whether fairly lumped together or not, these examples supposedly constitute a fair field for

inducing the meaning which Strawson intends. Immediately, my first objection as a Thomist is that

these sources, as Strawson seems to read them, far from constitute a sufficient picture of the Western

view of moral responsibility. Carr, for all one may know from the quote, could be speaking about the

sort of experiential responsibility which Strawson describes as the reason to act morally in the absence

of the responsibility he attempts to disprove. Sartre's view of responsibility (in Existentialism is a

Humanism) requires that one affirm (presuming Sartre's own atheism) there is at least one being

whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any

conception of it.18 That this is in violent metaphysical disagreement with Thomistic-Aristotelian

principles seems to go unnoticed. Aristotle is notorious for his supposed essentialism, and

existential Thomism (the study of Aquinas which asserts either a greater or primary role of Thomas'

notion of esse, the act of being, as opposed to essentia, which Sartre denies and Aristotle champions) is

a distinct latecomer in the tradition, and even now not a unanimous conviction among Thomists.

Notions, moreover, of the manner in which moral responsibility comes about are key to the

discussion of free will, as Strawson himself will note below; such metaphysical considerations are by

no means peripheral. This presents, I believe, a metaphysical blind spot which the Argument will

ultimately be unable to explain away, except by reducing being to something more univocal than it is or

by simply recognizing that the Argument itself does not apply to every case. To understand freedom as

a sort of causal autonomy, I believe, requires a conflation of the four causes in such a way that there is

no other notion of causality than the univocal, primary, same-causes-same notion of causality attributed

in the Thomistic scheme to creatures, and explicitly denied of God as a limit. This will present itself,

with other such probings, later in the paper.

17 Ibid, citing Patten in The Spectator, January 1992

18 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Arlette Elkam-Sartre. Existentialism is a humanism. (Yale University Press, 2007.) pg. 22

14

Objections Already Entertained

To say that the Basic Argument has been variably received would be a great understatement. In

Prof. Strawson's own words:

I have encountered two main reactions to the Basic Argument. On the one hand, it convinces almost all the students with

whom I have discussed the topic of moral responsibility. On the other hand, it often tends to be dismissed, in

contemporary discussion of free will and moral responsibility, as wrong, or irrelevant, or fatuous, or too rapid, or an

expression of metaphysical megalomania.19

Without making extensive comment on the credulity of students in a classroom, a credulity of which I

myself have been guilty such that I find the first type of reaction unconvincing, the other reactions are

more or less what one would expect in response to an argument which professes to prove to all comers

that there is no basis for moral responsibility in ten simple steps, or three prior to unpacking.

Nevertheless, a sneer is not an argument; the case against the Basic Argument forms itself in objections

and not interjections. Some of these apply only to the more determinate Strawson-form argument,

while others profess to object more generally to the grounding of responsibility in a self-causality. As a

number of them have already been addressed, I will recount them here in a brief but (hopefully)

thorough fashion, along with the answer given to them insofar as they have been addressed. I will begin

with arguments addressed by Prof. Strawson himself.

Significance of the argument. Some have objected to the argument as peripheral to questions

of free will. Here I agree with Strawson, who responds that this is an overwhelmingly natural place to

start. Strawson notes that the issue of moral responsibility has historically been the motor of the free

will debate;20 an argument which professes to prove the notion of absolute moral responsibility false

deserves, if not assent, at least a serious hearing-out. Following Aristotle, I would add, we inquire into

faculties such as the will according first to their objects, and then their works, and lastly into the power

that is the faculty itself, and as the notion of moral responsibility is precisely concerned with the

19 Strawson, Impossibility of Moral Responsibility, pg. 8

20 Ibid

15

intersection of will and object in actu, so it will comprise a great part of the first two inquiries. To deny

this is to deny the manner in which we come to know things; and however deep or shallow one may

fancy the argument to be after the fact, that one makes the inquiry is a demand of intellectual honesty in

pursuit of truth. Furthermore, this is where Strawson mentions his understanding of the notion of truly

moral responsibility's Western pedigree, which I spoke of above.

Determinism and Indeterminism. The effect of this answer is, rightfully, to start the discussion,

whereupon the more surface readings of the argument start to show themselves and more nuanced

distinctions begin to form. The first is deterministic guilt by association. Prof. Strawson, in his Mental

Reality, professes to be an agnostic materialist, and materialism is a typical bedfellow of determinism.

Thus, the objection goes, as the argument seems to smell of determinism, so a believer in

indeterminism would not have this problem. This would significantly decrease the universal application

of the argument, and subordinate it into the compatibilist/incompatibilist debate. Strawson

acknowledges that, if determinism is true, this certainly strengthens the argument; he would fall into

the incompatibilist camp. He states I do not think that anyone who reflects, and who has grasped the

heart (if not the whole) of our ordinary understanding of free will and moral responsibility, can really

disagree with this.21 But he adds that if indeterminism is true, that is, if determinism is false, then all

this means is that some or all actions have indeterministic antecedents, which he claims adds nothing to

the possibility of having a responsibility of beatitude and condemnation, praise and blame that makes

sense (which he calls true desert, circularly defined with freedom, as he thinks them codependent

concepts under different notions.) Inderministic antecedents, according to Strawson, either contribute

nothing in the direction of this or that alternative possibility, and are purely grounded on a kind of

unpredictable chance, or they are somehow directed. If they are undirected, they could violate what he

calls the Realism Constraint; if there is some pattern of causal events A, and when it is done once it

21 Strawson, Galen. Consciousness, Free Will, and the Unimportance of Determinism. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Of Philosophy 32. (Oslo: Abingdon, 1989.) pg. 10

16

concludes in some result B, to expect that some causal chain which is individually different but similar

in makeup will conclude in some different result b would be unrealistic. This follows in the

Aristotelian scheme, given Strawson's understanding of uncaused action, from nature being always

or for the most part, and is unremarkable. To point to the increased possibility of b would likewise be

unrealistic, because such a possibility is minute according to observation, if it is at all.

Alternately, the indeterminism could be unrealistic, indeterminism which we do not observe

readily and which is significant in causal events. This, he claims, does not evade the issue above,

because the problem with this sort of indeterminism is that it is undirected; it does not intrinsically

favor b over B or vice versa, and cannot be made to do so. It is, so to speak, general super-

indeterminism which governs all. In the case that such indeterminism affects mental events, Strawson

claims, it would not necessarily provide freedom, merely chaos; there is no reason to think the right

action would come about, and the action would not be voluntary to the degree it was indeterminate, like

the actions of a patient with Tourette's are not voluntary but spontaneous. Even if the indeterminacy,

Strawson claims, were active only in choices of the Campbellian sort, where the choice is between a B

that is desired and a b that is morally normative and undesired by contrast, the will's result is causally

undetermined and thus according to Strawson still exempt from responsibility. (John Searle offers a

criticism, in his Freedom and Neurobiology, of the notion that quantum indeterminacy's seemingly

chaotic nature indicates that indeterminism on a mental level is chaotic. He claims this argument is a

compositional fallacy,22 claiming that predication of complete indeterminism on a lower level does not

necessarily apply on a higher level; this will be borne out in the conclusion, when I re-examine agent

causation.)

There is one last view of indeterminism Strawson entertains wherein the indeterminacy is

22 Searle, John R. Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power. (Columbia University Press, 2008.) pg. 76

17

directed. In explanations where the Self, viewed as separate from the determinate order, has a causal

control over the indeterminacy's direction to this or that choice. He uses the same objections to address

this, that either the Self's decisions are themselves caused or uncaused, and if uncaused, they would be

again a matter of luck. One sees from this explanation that if, indeed, indeterminacy is important and

Self-directed, it is only important insofar as Strawson's conception of the action as purely uncaused is

in error and the conception of the agency as caused in a coercive manner is incorrect. Furthermore,

there is beneath this the need to repair the foundation, if such can be done, of the notion of an

immaterial mind whereby human choices are free from causal determination of the coercive sort. I am

of the opinion that Strawson's argument about determinism negating freedom is valid for a materialistic

framework, but that if it is to be applied in a Thomistic context it runs up against arguments as to the

nature of causality itself which I do not personally think it can answer.

Agent causation. Following the line which I state above as a suspicion about Strawson's

arguments with indeterminism, agent causation theorists postulate that the agent is the primary cause of

the action; not the circumstances, not the result, just the agent. Typically this involves a denial of a

materialist interpretation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, that every action must have a material

behaviorist cause, since the agent cannot be caused insofar as it is causing. The postulation which

replaces the materialist conception is typically some sufficient reason which is part of the agent as

agent which has some causal power over the action and yet is not subject to the determination by its

material circumstances. This is typically attributed to both Aristotle and Epicurus, and usually without

enough qualification since Descartes muddied the waters with dualism. It is key to remember, at least

for Aristotle's hylomorphism, that not every simultaneous postulation of a body and of a soul postulates

them as subsisting entities as such. For Aristotle, the soul is the form of such-and-such a body,

inseparable from that body and not accidental to it. This differs markedly from the dualistic conception

of the Pythagoreans found in Plato's Phaedo, where the soul may transmigrate and acts as a ghost

18

within the machine. To postulate a simple similarity between all agent-causation theories and lump

them under the category of dualism is an injustice, one which Strawson seems to come very close to

committing.23

Whatever the case, it is true that many agent causation theorists argue for the agent as the

principal cause of their actions, both in respect of intention and efficiency. This is not a very developed

view, in my opinion, stated thus. Considered in its most crude form, Strawson is correct to say that

there are problems with this position. From a Thomistic-Aristotelian standpoint, a standpoint which

leads into the developed understanding of the absurdity of the causa sui in the first place, it is

impossible for anything other than an Unmoved Mover to begin the motion whereby agents other than

it move. Insofar as this is denied simply, there is no viability to the position. Sartre only (or so he

thinks) escapes this with the redefinition of the human being as a being whose existence precedes

essence, which brings in a host of other metaphysical considerations, not the subject of this paper as

such. Leaving aside for now the existentialist side of the picture, to which I do not personally subscribe,

the notion of the person as a principal cause in every respect simply does not hold water. Strawson

addresses this through the infinite regress of the will, but a Thomistic metaphysical realist may well

address this through any of the Five Ways of Aquinas. (This will also come up later in the context of

ultimate responsibility.)

The agent-causation theory, then, needs to be narrowed down to be viable at all. In no respect

may agent-causation theorists claim in this context that the agent is the any sort of cause of that

facticity (faculty of intention and faculty of efficiency) wherein the agent has the ability to be the

23 In Consciousness, Free Will, and the Unimportance of Determinism, pg. 16, Strawson states that the idea of an

interventionary Self often goes with dualism, and with the idea that the non-physical Soul or Self can intervene in an

otherwise deterministic physical causal order. He does not discuss the fact that Aristotle, regarded as the father of

agent-causality, has a view which differs from almost all of the provisos. This is more of a methodological quibble of

mine, and does not amount to an accusation of such an injustice; but Strawson's seeming unawareness or

misunderstanding of the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme of the will and the intellect will be a repeated theme in the

responses.

19

efficient cause of other things. The agent does not will itself into existence. It is not causa sui. It does

not exist prior to its existence as agent, except insofar as it exists in the mind of that which brings it into

being. It is necessary, then, to postulate a way whereby the agent is both principal (as having a sort of

primary role in actu) and not principal (as not being the cause of that primary character.) This will also

arise later in my response.

Moving Forward: Thomistic Objections to the Argument

There are a number of assumptions which, upon reading Strawson's argument for the first time,

struck me as incongruous with a representation of Thomistic thought, and which seemed to be overly

reductive. The first is the notion of the basis of moral responsibility in truly moral responsibility or

ultimate responsibility expressed by Strawson; the second, its connection to the qualified

responsibility Strawson claims that we observe according to experience, and which he claims is the sort

of responsibility he would understand to be effective in his own life; the third, his notion of the

causality by which the ultimate responsibility comes to be; the fourth, the notion of coercion that is

attributed to the primary cause by which one escapes the infinite regress, independent of the character

of the sort of causality or agent by which the effect is brought about; and the fifth, the effect of the

seemingly univocal notion of causality Strawson employs. Along with these considerations is the

understanding of the will and what is chosen: does the Aristotelian notion that choice is of means, not

of ends, change the picture in any way? Moreover, what sort of cause is the final cause, such that the

motive may be spoken of as the determinant of an action? Is every sort of determinant coercive, or even

similar in kind? What is the determination that occurs by the formal cause? Is it really the case that

man has no top-down causality whereby he may determine his action from a non-material basis? These,

and other considerations, all seem to be presumed one way or the other in answering the question of

whether there is moral responsibility, and they must be addressed.

Ultimate responsibility, moral responsibility, and self-efficient causation. In the first place, there

20

is no place for (positive) ultimate responsibility, wherein one must bring oneself voluntarily into being,

in the Thomistic schema. The human person does not cause him- or herself. This is understood, and

Strawson agrees, saying that this invalidates truly moral responsibility. Indeed, it is a good question

whether such ultimate responsibility could be; in this respect Strawson is correct, that if ultimate

responsibility is moral responsibility, it is impossible that any agent other than a necessary being, who

simply is, would have moral responsibility. But on what understanding of moral is he operating?

Moral responsibility, for Strawson's argument, is ultimate responsibility; not just to be the voluntary

cause of action A, but all the factors and factors of factors a of action A, ad infinitum. If one were such

a cause, and yet finite, in what sense would it be meaningful to speak of a good? Or, to look at it

another way, if there could be a human agent possessing ultimate responsibility, it could very well exist

without any other being existing, even God. What, then, would be the meaning of good action, or

good at all?

The natural response for a rigid Strawsonian would be to place good either in the self, making

it, not even experiential, but a free creation of the mind, or perhaps some sort of attribute of the One

Single Agent as existing, based on an arbitrary predication, one which would mean essentially nothing

to a Thomist. This is, so it would seem, unimportant (in that Strawson denies ultimate responsibility)

except that it shows a contradiction in the identification of ultimate responsibility with moral

responsibility; that if there were ever a finite, temporal agent that was ultimately responsible, it could

not be meaningfully morally responsible. This is likewise a problem I have with libertarian will-

theorists, who try and claim ultimate responsibility; it seems to me that the entire battleground is

frivolous.

A Thomist claims no such responsibility. I am not responsible for the way I came to be with

respect to my nature as having the faculties I have, not intensively. Rather, God created all things ex

nihilo, and He created them good. This, it seems, is the point of contention, because it is here, in the

21

first creation of the human being having a will and intellect, that the question of the comprehensibility

of moral agency by finite actors comes into play. If there is a causal foundation for moral responsibility,

then, in the Thomistic framework, it is fundamentally historical; it began in our having been created in

time, as we were created; which is to say, it is in the meaning of being created good. The first question,

then, is what constitutes the good? Aquinas claims that the good is not different from being except

notionally.24 That by which good differs from what is is the notion that the good thing is

desirable.25 So in the scheme of Thomistic thought, when it is said that man was created good, it

signifies that man is something desirable. This is through the middle term of what is perfect:26 a thing

is good insofar as it is the perfection of something, and it is desirable for that reason. This, unlike

positivistic notions of the good, grounds the good in the nature of the thing, because only if the thing

has a capacity to be perfect (that is, to be what it is supposed to be in respect of itself) can it desire its

own perfection, or even have perfection.

This is fundamentally different from the autonomous Strawsonian notion of will and

responsibility. Strawson's notion, one shared in principle by many libertarian theorists, points to a

notion of good which is experienced through contrast in the examination of a privation. In other terms,

when one speaks of responsibility of the sort which Strawson describes, it is inevitably in the context,

not of what is perfective of the human person, but of what is a deprivation of even the possibility of

good action according to nature, sin and crime. The notion of heaven and hell are examined in respect

of the choosing itself, and not in respect of the principle of the choosing. For the Basic Argument, the

paradigm of moral responsibility is the self-determination of the agent present in the act. To Thomists

of an Augustinian bent, the proper effect of this sort of self-determination, because of fallen nature, is

the privation of good in the thing; in other words, this sort of moral responsibility only plays a role

24 Aquinas, ST Prima Pars Q5 A1

25 Ibid

26 Ibid

22

insofar as we bring about our own condemnation in the absence of grace: that is, insofar as we are ex

nihilo. Indeed, Thomistic notions of merit unto Strawson's idea of desert, ordination to heaven or

hell, are fundamentally different than Strawson's grasp of the definition of merit. This is explicitly

stated in Aquinas' article on merit in the Summa Theologiae:

Merit and reward refer to the same, for a reward means something given anyone in return for work or toil, as a price for

it. Hence, as it is an act of justice to give a just price for anything received from another, so also is it an act of justice to

make a return for work or toil. Now justice is a kind of equality, as is clear from the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 3), and hence

justice is simply between those that are simply equal; but where there is no absolute equality between them, neither is

there absolute justice, but there may be a certain manner of justice, as when we speak of a father's or a master's right

(Ethic. v, 6), as the Philosopher says. And hence where there is justice simply, there is the character of merit and reward

simply. But where there is no simple right, but only relative, there is no character of merit simply, but only relatively, in

so far as the character of justice is found there, since the child merits something from his father and the slave from his

lord...Now it is clear that between God and man there is the greatest inequality: for they are infinitely apart, and all

man's good is from God. Hence there can be no justice of absolute equality between man and God, but only of a certain

proportion, inasmuch as both operate after their own manner. Now the manner and measure of human virtue is in man

from God. Hence man's merit with God only exists on the presupposition of the Divine ordination, so that man obtains

from God, as a reward of his operation, what God gave him the power of operation for, even as natural things by their

proper movements and operations obtain that to which they were ordained by God; differently, indeed, since the rational

creature moves itself to act by its free-will, hence its action has the character of merit, which is not so in other

creatures.27

As a merit is a type of reward, it implies a certain subordination to the one whereby Strawson's notion

of desert comes to be. Strawson examines heaven and hell according to the act alone, as though they

were metaphysical necessities from the exercise of free will. I do this, and I end up here or there,

therefore it must be that my doing and my doing alone as I experience it, sans mystical knowledge, is

sufficient to explain my ending up here or there. This is not the case for Aquinas. Hell naturally comes

into play in the notion of Divine justice, from which natural justice is taken; but beatitude, the super-

ordination of human beings to heavenly union with God beyond their natural happiness, only shows

itself as a result of Divine mercy. Merit, as he notes in the quote-section above beginning Now it is

clear that between God and man there is the greatest inequality, is not something which is a function

of our natural ability. It is a function of our supernatural ability, which is not ultimately principally

ours, but something given to us by grace from God, as a vineyard-keeper might issue the hired help

pruning-shears. Hence, the Christian paradigm of moral goodness unto salvation is not the pagan

27 Aquinas, ST Prima Secundae Q114 A1 Resp.

23

prideful virtuous man, but the good and faithful servant, who merits precisely by doing as his master

desires him to do with the talent his master gave him. It is only on the presupposition of the Divine

ordination28 that we obtain beatitude.

This illustrates a greater picture, of which the Basic Argument captures only a part of a part. The

human being, under its own power, can only choose in such a way as would, at best, obtain natural

happiness in life according to finite and fallen nature, not heaven. Moreover, adding the notion of

original sin into the mix, the consequence of this is that all who choose in the scheme put forward by

Strawson are actually ultimately responsible for one and only one aspect of the act, which could not

have originated in God as an infinite and essential-existential Good/Goodness, and must have done so

in them as finite creatures, created ex nihilo: the privation of the good in the act. Thus, human beings

are ultimately responsible, insofar as they are ultimately responsible for anything, for only one

thing, which is no thing, a privation: sin. Genuinely meritorious action eludes Strawson's notion of

merit, which is incompatible with a Christian view of grace-nature interaction.

Qualified responsibility. But what of Strawson's experiential responsibility? The short answer is

that if there is ultimate responsibility of the kind described above, by which men sin, then responsibility

is, while depressing, more than merely experiential. All men are justly condemned for their finite

perversion of the principle of action in themselves, by extension in original sin and by intention in

original sin. The longer answer is that responsibility of an experiential sort is a silly concept anyway,

and can be rebutted on its own terms. In the first place, as noted above, the human and positive

jurisprudential law is founded upon the universally recognized foundational natural law, which is a

participation in the divine law. The divine law itself, though, in a scheme where there is no ultimate

responsibility, at least as Strawson seems to consider it, would be simply the dictates of the human

whim. Those dictates are founded upon the human being having a certain facticity, and only obtain any

28 Ibid Q114 A1 Ad 3

24

sort of meaning insofar as that facticity has an intrinsic finality. Without a perfection, a good having

some real character, there is no finality; without finality, all that is left is appearance, upon which

Strawson founds his notion of effective responsibility. But appearance is fundamentally subjective, and

without a common morality, there is nothing to ground this responsibility in appearance; it becomes I

obey my own moral law which I have set down because I obey it, a tautology or a language game.

This is not a responsibility; it is an attempt to step outside oneself and act as one's own moral lawgiver,

despite having no end for which one legislates. If there is no end, responsibility becomes merely

positive.

To ground this in a practical setting: while the one attesting against moral responsibility claims

that there is some useful notion whereby life is somehow better requires a notion of the good.

Whence the good? The good has been expelled from consideration. One is forced to use language of

better without a notion of the good; this is a self-contradiction, though, so one stops using it. Yet to

claim even a phenomenological responsibility is to claim some good in the phenomenon; and this good

becomes a cipher, a convenient self-delusion one obeys for no actual reason. When asked why the

argument against objective responsibility does not lead one to commit foul acts in public, or do other

things associated with the amoral or immoral, one might offer a sneer or a half-hearted explanation, or

perhaps a perfectly earnest one, but one is only really attempting to produce a picture whereby they

convince themselves at the same time. There is no basis to explaining why one ought to act morally if

ought-statements in general have no objective enforcement. One must act as one's own God, judge, jury

and bailiff. This is not to have a notion of moral responsibility at all, only a notion of self-determination

based on no final cause. One becomes, in effect, either a solipsist or Buridan's Ass.

Causality and essential being; primary and secondary causality. The Strawsonian objector

responds, though, that I have not considered how human beings are even said to be responsible for sin.

If, as I note, sin comes about from our being created, then is not our very facticity and faculty of the

25

will in our genesis a coercion? Are we not condemned to existence? I respond to this that it would only

be a coercion if it were not for the unique character of creation as a cause ex nihilo. Were God acting on

some pre-existing matter to bring Creation into being, then it would be a problem to say that God

created man, since man would already in some way exist. There would be a violation of the order of

causality in Creation, one that could really be called coercive. Moreover, this is a major issue in many

discussions of Divine Action. Miracles are treated as violations of the natural physical laws. Grace

moving free will is seen as a coercion from within.

However, these sorts of positions all arise from confusing the character of being as received

with the notion of being as extrinsic. When I, by the agency of my fingers, put words on an electronic

page, I am adding something accidental to the paper that was not there before, on the level of a moving

cause. The motion of my fingers moves the keys, which push various buttons, which send various

electrical signals to the hardware, which sends commands to the software, which produce this word

here as I move it to do so. This is all on one order of causality, the causal nexus which we observe in

creation. But this causal nexus itself is created. The order of causality according to motion and finite

material substance, which we observe, is not the same as the order by which any motion came to be in

the first place. And while in the order of secondary, finite causality it is necessary for one finite agent to

act physically upon another finite agent in a manner that is compulsory, it is stretching the definition of

acting upon, another and compulsory to say that in creating us out of nothing God is acting upon

another human being in a manner which compels a certain outcome against our will. For one thing,

prior to existing, we do not have a will. In the second place, there is nothing to compel, literally. In the

third place, there is no another to act upon, but by acting in this way, God creates that another

that it might act. Thus, in the first place, creation is not coercion, as there is nothing to coerce.

Secondly, the being created is not a being of the same sort as God; nor does it have the same act

of existence or essence as God, since then it would be God. It has its own, finite, essential and

26

existential being. This is the principle whereby there is an I whereby someone is said to act, an

individual act of being according to a certain essence. To use a phenomenological approach, coercion

requires both an own-being and an other-being which has power over the own-being; but God does not

have the sort of other-being which can only affect things finitely; His power is such that he can bring

them to be such ex nihilo or even through the natural direction of the own-being itself. Strawson

acknowledges no metaphysical distinction between the way in which God is and the way in which we

are, despite the entirely different, solely analogous primary metaphysical character of God. In essence,

his argument is to pick a fight with the notion of creation as other than coercion. As this is not

metaphysically in line with Thomism, it does not fit the scheme. Only if God were a created being

would His activity in creating be a coercion; and if it were, it could not be creation, for something

would have to exist to be coerced.

Objections. There are, of course, objections to the objections. For example, a proponent of

Strawson's argument might object that received being is, by its nature as unchosen, a coercion, and that

I am missing the point. The difficulty here is that the received being is co-created with the will, and

existence is a good which in the Thomistic scheme none can truly will against. If it is asked how

suicide is thus justified in this scheme, one need only answer that suicide is the choice of a negation of

the evil that is suffering, viewed as a good. In this sense, though the decision is wrongheaded, it is still

accounted for in the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme. This is echoed in Augustine, who claims that no

man needs an injunction to love himself or his own body.29 In this sense, received being, when it is the

essential being of a willing creature, is automatically naturally chosen; and as it is by nature that we

have free will, this is a most volitional choice, even if not a conscious one, the choice whereby we have

the faculty of choosing other things.

29 Schaff, Philip. Nicene & Post-Nicene Series 1 Vol 2: The City of God, Christian Doctrine (Nicene Fathers). Vol. 2. 14

vols. Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers 1. (T. & T. Clark Publishers, 1980.) Bk 1, Chs. 23-25

27

Then, there is the question of whether the distinction between primary and secondary causality

really matters, since ultimately the secondary cause is the result of some choice first made by the

primary cause and the nature by which the secondary cause chooses itself is part of that choice of the

primary agent. This distinction, I would say, is utterly crucial, and only would seem not to be so if one

had already accepted that the only foundation for merit unto salvation was ultimate responsibility. This

would be a petitio principii; which, I believe, is the basis of the Basic Argument. The major premise is

fine enough, but the causal connection whereby it is made a metaphysical argument, that responsibility

as we see operative in moral reasoning arises from some sort of logical necessity not grounded in a

natural or supernatural theology and notion of the Good, is presumed unfittingly. God is the basis of the

moral law, not logic, except insofar as it is the logic of a Theocentric ontology, or at the least the logic

of an ontology reflecting some moral Intelligence. One may agree or disagree as to whether God exists,

but that is an issue better explained by Fyodor Dostoevsky than Strawson's Argument.

Rehabilitating The Other Arguments

Before I conclude the paper, there are two things I cannot leave off without addressing. When

we earlier left the theory of top-down causal indeterminism, Strawson had argued that that theory had

the same problem as other indeterministic theories: if there is an intervening Self or Will of some sort

which is not bound by causal determinism, either it is caused or uncaused; if caused, it is not causa sui,

and if uncaused, it is chance. After all the other spilt ink, I am not about to admit that it is causa sui.

Nor will I say it is chance; but this selection is not the whole. In creating, God gives the Intervening-

Will (IW) its first act, the direction to happiness/beatitude. Thus, at some point, the act of this IW is

caused. According to Strawson, this makes it determined and coerced; but there are two problems with

this. The first is that it is not coerced in the act of creation, by the reasons above. The second is that it is

only determined in end, not in means; and the entire exercise of the free will consists in choosing

means to that end. At each step the will is making the choice after the choice of the end. This end,

28

however, does not determine a choice specifically, but generally, which is not the sort of determination

Strawson's Argument requires to work in its strongest sense. I have a limited range of choices for the

sake of any more proximate end; but every proximate end is a means with respect to the ultimate end of

happiness, and my choices are infinite in that sense. This is not the infinite choice of ultimate

responsibility, but then there would be no morality to have responsibility for if that were so. Morality

arises from ontological subordination to a better end and the possibility of choosing it. That possibility

cannot automatically be actual, or there is no free choice in any sense. One cannot be moved

necessarily to choose some means, and that is Thomistic Will-Indeterminacy.

Agent causation, moreover, cannot postulate itself, the reader will remember, as a principal

agent in the act, but with this understanding of will-indeterminacy founded upon God's giving it the

first act, it may be a principal agent in a qualified sense, insofar as volition is really the principle of an

action, although only God is the principal agent simply. In other words, in the Thomistic scheme, God

created the human being such that in its action the will would have a causal role, and He created the

will as having an innate indeterminism, albeit one founded in a dependent manner upon His act of

creation. In this sense, agent-causation may be refined to fit Thomism. In the process, though, it must

abandon the denial of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which in any case was extraneous to the

theory in the first place, an addition to provide for an ultimate responsibility the will does not need.

While there are certainly positions which I think Strawson's argument proves utterly inadequate (will-

libertarianism which presumes ultimate responsibility in perfect action, and nave conceptions of agent

causality) I do not think it invalidates the Thomistic scheme as a system.

29

Bibliography

Aquinas, St. Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. English Dominican Province,

1920. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ (accessed December 19, 2010).

. S. Thomas de Aquino, Opera omnia. Corpus Thomisticum.

http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html (accessed May 18, 2011).

Aristotle. Aristotle's Metaphysics, a Revised Text. Oxford: The Clarendon press, 1958.

Beld, A. van den. Moral Responsibility and Ontology. 1st ed. Springer, 2000.

Fischer, John Martin. The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control. Blackwell Pub, 1994.

Fischer, John Martin, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas. Four Views on Free Will.

Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.

French, Peter A., Howard Wettstein, and John Martin Fischer. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Free Will

and Moral Responsibility. Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.

Glannon, Walter. The Mental Basis of Responsibility. Ashgate Publishing, 2002.

Inwagen, Peter van. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford University Press, USA, 1986.

. The Problem of Evil: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St. Andrews in 2003.

Oxford University Press, USA, 2006.

Kane, Robert. Free Will. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

. The Significance of Free Will. Oxford University Press, USA, 1998.

Moore, Michael S. Causation and Responsibility. Oxford University Press, USA, 2009.

Moya, Carlos J. Moral Responsibility: The Ways of Scepticism. Routledge, 2006.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Arlette Elkam-Sartre. Existentialism is a humanism. Yale University Press,

2007.

Schaff, Philip. Nicene & Post-Nicene Series 1 Vol 2: The City of God, Christian Doctrine (Nicene

Fathers). Vol. 2. 14 vols. Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers 1. T. & T. Clark Publishers, 1980.

Searle, John R. Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power.

Columbia University Press, 2008.

Spaemann, Robert. Persons: The Difference between `Someone' and `Something'. Oxford University

Press, USA, 2007.

Strawson, Galen. Consciousness, Free Will, and the Unimportance of Determinism. Inquiry An

Interdisciplinary Journal Of Philosophy 32 (n.d.).

. Freedom and Belief. Revised. Oxford University Press, USA, 2010.

. Mental reality. MIT Press, 2009.

. Real Materialism: and Other Essays. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.

. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, USA, 2009.

. The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal

for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 75, no. 1/2 (1994): 5-24.

30

. The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume. Oxford University Press, USA,

1992.

. The Self? Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Strawson, Galen, Peter Carruthers, Frank Jackson, William G. Lycan, Colin McGinn, David Papineau,

Georges Rey, J.J.C. Smart, et al. Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism

Entail Panpsychism? Imprint Academic, 2006.

Vollmer, F. Agent Causality. Springer, 2010.

Widerker, David, and Michael McKenna. Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on

the Importance of Alternative Possibilities. Ashgate Pub Co, 2006.