Having and Being an Ideal-Self: An Essay at Understanding Un-Iffy Freedom

Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1987)
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Abstract

While discussing pure-libertarianism, hard-determinism, and soft-determinism, the author adopts the latter, not only because he thinks this characterization of freedom accounts best for various common intuitions about freedom, but because this view of freedom is compatible with the determinism that he assumes to be true. ;In chapter two a variety of cases are discussed to reach the following conclusion: the soft-deterministic conception of freedom does not capture what we mean when we say that someone has a free will. This "other freedom" is named "un-iffy freedom,"and three accounts of it are discussed in the remainder of the chapter. The claims made are that all three accounts are "good descriptions" of something that can be described well in various ways, and that each philosopher discussed has failed to say enough about what it means for a person to "identify with" a desire, motive, etc. ;In chapter three the notion of an "Ideal-Self" is introduced, explained, and refined. An Ideal-Self is a person's "honestly articulated Conception of how they would really/most prefer to be/become." The central claims of the essay are that "having an Ideal-Self is a necessary condition of being un-iffy free," and that "being one's Ideal-Self is a sufficient condition of being un-iffy free." ;In chapter four it is argued that the notion of an Ideal-Self can be employed to explain better what it means for an agent to have "identified with" a desire, motive, etc. Moreover, it is argued that this notion also allows one to explain the "full-blown-un-iffy freedom" of the person who lives a life ordered by a plan of their own conscious construction. In these terms, it is then argued, not only that the un-iffy unfree are legion, but that actions per se are usually irrelevant when "true freedom" is at issue. ;In the final chapter an answer is suggested to the following question: How we can actually be/become un-iffy freer than we are?

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