Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

64 J.J.C. Smart
sent to prison. If our actions were not determined by our desires attempts
at deterrence would be futile.
It is sometimes said that we can act from a sense of duty against our
strongest desire or combination of desires. 105 Such an objector forgets that
sense of duty is itself a desire (to do one’s duty). This is a desire that parents,
teachers, friends, clergy and commanding officers are keen to inculcate.
(Immanuel Kant distinguished ‘willing’ from ‘desiring’ but this was to make
a metaphysical mystery of something that can be naturalistically explained.)
Another thing that has commonly been said is that libertarian free will
is acting from reasons, not from causes. This does not help. In one sense
a reason is a cause. ‘What was your reason for asking for coffee?’ ‘I just
wanted coffee rather than tea.’ Here the desire for coffee was greater than
that for tea and the desire caused the action. On another occasion asking for
a reason may be asking for a justification. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘I promised
my wife that I’d do it.’ Here there is implicit reference to a rule of promise
keeping. The rule (or ‘reason’ in this sense) is not something that acts on us.
The upshot is that acting from reasons is not something different from and
possibly in conflict with acting from causes. The justificatory story is perfectly
compatible with the causal story.
Because free will is compatible with determinism God could have set up
the universe so that we always acted rightly, and so for this reason alone the
free will defence does not work. I do have some sympathy with the view that
the compatibilist account of free will does not quite capture the ordinary
person’s concept of free will. This, however, is because the ordinary person’s
concept of free will, if one gets him or her arguing in a pub, say, is inconsistent.
The ordinary person wants the action to be determined, not merely
random, but undetermined too. The compatibilist can say that if this is the
concept of free will we clearly do not have free will, just as I don’t have a
round square table in my study. Once more the free will defence fails.
I hold, therefore, that the free will defence does not hold even for moral
evils, evils due to the misuse of free will. In any case natural evils provide the
biggest difficulty for the theist. Unconvincing replies are sometimes brought
up. If people starve in a drought they are blamed for lack of foresight. This is
a cruel reply and anyway presupposes a retributionist God. Moreover what
wrong choice has been made by a child dying of cancer? As to the reply that
natural evils are due to immoral choices by fallen angels, the reply seems to be
quite fanciful. Furthermore, if my remarks about free will are correct God
could have arranged it that angels acted freely and never fell. Waiving all
these points also, one wonders how an omnipotent God would allow the
fallen angels to get away with it. A benevolent government with sufficient
power would arrest, imprison, or even execute a very devilish criminal who
otherwise would kill millions.