Intellections and volitions
Ockham's voluntarism reconsidered
pp. 125-136
in: Jenny Pelletier, Magali Roques (eds), The language of thought in late medieval philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Freedom of will for Ockham consists in the possibility of opposite choices, as Panaccio puts it (Panaccio 2012, 75–93 and 91). Voluntarists such as Ockham commonly argue for the need of positing the possibility of opposite choices as a prerequisite for moral responsibility. An agent can be held morally responsible for his action only if he could have done other than he actually did. This conception, however, gives rise to the worry that it implies the very possibility of acting irrationally, insofar as it implies the possibility of acting for no reason at all. My aim in this paper is to show that Ockham has the means to meet the objection of irrationality, at least if this is the objection that there can be free, yet "random' choices of actions that are carried out for no reason, or for no end and thus, resist any attempt of explanation. As a result, it should become clear that this reading implies that Ockham basically splits up rational and moral action by allowing human agents to set up anything which exists as an end. The challenge for Ockham, then, is to show how rational and moral action can be reconciled on this basis.
