Reid’s Conception of Human Freedom

The Monist 70 (4):430-441 (1987)
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Abstract

During the 19th-century controversy over human freedom, a controversy involving such figures as Locke, Collins, Clarke, Leibniz, Price, and Reid, two different conceptions of freedom were at the center of the dispute. The first of these, of which John Locke is a major advocate, I will call Lockean freedom, the other conception, of which Thomas Reid is the leading advocate, I will call Reidian freedom. The history of this controversy is fundamentally a dispute over which of these two concepts of freedom is more adequate to our common-sense beliefs about freedom and our general metaphysical and scientific principles. To evaluate the merits of each side in this dispute we must, as a start, have a clear understanding of these two conceptions of freedom. Lockean freedom is fairly well understood, Reidian freedom much less so, perhaps even misunderstood. My aim in this paper is to show that the standard account of Reidian freedom is incorrect, to provide a correct interpretation of Reid’s conception of freedom, and to show its importance to the question of the connection between moral responsibility and freedom.

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