In the article, The Problem of Free Will, one of the first issues addressed is Walter Stace’s opinion with the problem of free will. First off, the Free Will Thesis states that some of the actions that humans perform are free actions. An action is only a free action if the agent could have done otherwise than perform the action. That is, being able to do otherwise is a requirement for a free action. Stace says that if there is no free will, there can be no morality. He continues to say, “Morality is concerned with what men ought and ought not to do. But if a man has no freedom to choose what he will do, if whatever he does is under compulsion, then it does not make sense to tell him that he ought not to have done what he did and that he ought to do something different”.
Stace tries to reconcile the Free Will Thesis with determinism. Determinism says that every event is fixed by previous events and the laws of nature. The determinist
claims that every event is fixed in this way by previous events and the laws of nature. Stace says that the problem with free will was created by the fact that “learned men”, especially philosophers, have assumed an incorrect definition of free will, and then finding that there is nothing in the world which answers to their definition, have denied its existence. The philosophers who denied free will and by those who defended it say that determinism is inconsistent with free will.
Ayer’s soft determinism says that both determinism and the Free Will Thesis are true and incompatibilism is false. Stace’s definition of soft determinism differs from Ayer’s in saying that acts that are done are those whose immediate causes are psychological states in the agent. Acts not freely done are those whose immediate causes are states of affairs external to the agent.
A libertarian says that humans are entirely free and are first cause for all the
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